Weird “Right Wing” Welfare Scheme “School Choice” Picks Up Steam

School choice? Best thing since sliced bread.

School choice is the best thing since sliced bread.

That’s what the politicians said when they discovered a new way to spend billions of dollars on a vague agenda without a standard definition, or a coherent objective.

Speaker Dade Phelan said the following in 2023:

Around the same time, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick was saying school choice would save the children from the “woke culture” in public schools. (16 seconds, sound way up for full enjoyment)

We all really want to believe there is a plan here. I want to believe this is a secretly-based and redpilled reorganization of the public school model. However, no such explanation has been given. Instead, the message of school choice is often handcrafted on-the-spot to transform into whatever the audience wants to hear.

“We need school choice so we can [ blank ]”

*give ‘believe me’ look*

They tried to lay a rational and academic foundation within the grassroots about why they should support school choice.

For some reason it didn’t work.

Now this new government program is inches away from being finalized and sent to Governor Abbott’s desk.

“School choice” is a welfare program that proponents say will promote competition. Do you need me to lay it out any further?

To try and silence critics of this nonsensical scheme, the school choice pushers also dumped many additional billions into public school spending. This will be new billions on top of the school choice bureaucracy’s billions.

What needs to be addressed is why the Texas government has been covering up the performance of public schools since 2019.

In the last 5 years, the Texas government has only released ratings for 1 year—2022. That was the year when it was clear something was amiss, as the rating criteria was revamped to include a novel new concept — nobody fails.

It’s an A-C rating system!

This is where the article becomes purely speculative, that means the juicy parts.

I believe that state lawmakers are incapable of creating a framework to grade public schools in Texas in 2025 that is based on any objective standard that does not spit out graphs showing an incredible disparity amongst the racial groups in school performance.

A complex grading system that makes a small “woke adjustment” to the current school rating [which they are not doing] exists. The document is the plan and method the state will use to “close the gap” between the races. It is 58 pages long, and I’m not going to be unreasonable and trash it just because it’s woke. I wouldn’t agree to it, but it’s clear that the people who made this put a lot of thought into crafting this woke calculator. But looking closer, it’s not actually very woke, and on the surface it tries to genuinely help everyone the same and raise performance from all groups, organizing the data to perform advanced data analysis.

On page 18 of the document, they unveil the latest race-based academic performance goals. It shows different goals for different racial groups.

If you actually cared about helping everyone, I think tracking and even setting goals for this is a great idea. How you make adjustments to shift the results is where public policy gets weird, and Republicans have never had a coherent alternative to the Democrat playbook of making corrections based on critical race theory. Instead of proposing an alternate idea, Republicans usually promote a lighter form of CRT.

Here is why they can’t do the A-F ratings going forward, or possibly rate at all.

There is no amount of statistical manipulation that can bring every racial group into parity with one another around every aspect of life. The stunning changes in school demographic data across every campus in the state can be searched at schooldigger.com.

Our state was invaded, and there are now millions of unwelcome guests benefiting from the public schools for which we paid. There is no way to cover up for this disaster while applying a standard method to analyze school performance with racial demographics.

It’s possible this “school choice” fiasco is a project meant to fail., and what comes next is much worse. It could also be an even larger attempt to cover up the educational “gap” they are tracking so closely. The most likely explanation is, of course, duh, everyone promoting school choice is being paid to do so.

We may never know.