Publish Date: August 19, 2025 11:11 am Author: Texas AFT
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Friday, August 15, 2025
The Grift Is On
If you read this newsletter regularly, you know that the education landscape is changing, and not necessarily for the better. Over the next year, Texas will prepare to implement Gov. Greg Abbott’s long-sought private school voucher program.
Just this week, we received a preview of one of the many issues to come from funneling taxpayer dollars to private schools.
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have published the results of their investigation of our state’s private school landscape, in which reporters found “more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest among 27 private schools that likely would have violated state laws had the schools been public.”
We encourage all Texas parents, educators, and taxpayers to read the full story. We also encourage you to contribute to the future of education reporting in Texas by submitting the issues you think need greater oversight through ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s news tip form.
“If I were a taxpayer in Texas, I’d be asking, who’s going to be looking out for me?”
– Mark Weber, a public school finance lecturer at Rutgers University,
Educators know our public schools should be safe spaces for every Texas child, regardless of their race, socioeconomic background, gender identity, or religious upbringing. That’s why our members made the right to freedom of religion in schools a plank in ourEducator’s Bill of Rights.
Increasingly, state leaders are blurring the lines between church and state, and that includes inside our public school classrooms. This past legislative session resulted in an unprecedented amount of legislation that infringes on students’ and educators’ right to be free of religion in our public schools.
Whether it’s through a voucher push that would funnel taxpayer dollars to religious private schools, many of which engage in nepotism and self-dealing, or new state-created curriculum that’s chock full of biblical material, we are enduring an unprecedented, big-money assault on religious freedom in Texas.
The fourth and final week of Texas’s special legislative session remained mired in a stalemate as Sine Die, the final day of this session came and went without a quorum. More than 50 Texas House Democrats fled the state in July to block a redistricting proposal backed by President Donald Trump and designed to net Republicans up to five additional U.S. House seats by diminishing representation for voters of color in cities like Dallas and Houston.
Already, Gov. Greg Abbott has vowed to call for an immediate second special session with an identical agenda. This past Thursday, House Democrats outlined conditions for their return, demanding two critical conditions: “the legislature’s adjournment Sine Die on Friday [Aug. 15]; and the introduction of California’s redistricting maps that would neutralize the Trump-Abbott voter suppression effort.”
See you at SXSW Edu 2026? Vote by Aug. 24!Texas AFT has joined forces with Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) to pitch a panel for SXSW Edu: “Vouchers and the Future of Texas Public Education.” Panelists would include:
Texas AFT President Zeph Capo
State Rep. James Talarico
Megan Vasquez, an Education Austin executive board member who has been named Elementary Teacher of the Year for Austin ISD and Region 13
Ayaan Moledina, a Texas student and the federal policy director for SEAT
We need our public education community to vote for it online before Aug. 24. Just head to the SXSW PanelPicker website, create your free account, and press the heart icon next to our session.
Recommended Reading
Education news from around the state and nation that’s worth your time.
📖 ‘Whiplash’: Adult ed is back at AISD after feds drop funding freeze. It’s been a head-spinning summer for Abilene ISD. While the late-June loss of federal funding shut down the district-managed West Central Texas Adult Education program, a sudden reversal by the U.S. Department of Education last week unexpectedly restored it. (Abilene Reporter-News, Aug. 11)
📖 Right-Wing Crackdowns Drive Academics Away From UT and the U.S. Heather Houser is the kind of professor UT tries to recruit and hopes to keep. She never stops working. She wins awards. She brings justification to UT’s claim that it is a university of the first class. But in 2019, Houser began having doubts about UT. (Austin Chronicle, July 25)
📖 The Lege’s ‘Big Government Intrusion’ into University Academics. Expanding on last session’s anti-DEI campus crackdown, some Republicans in the Legislature are now going after gender and ethnic studies programs and faculty independence. (Texas Observer, April 24)
🎧 The Shocking Billionaire Plot to Dismantle Public Education. Texas is on the verge of passing a law that could defund public education. Vouchers send public taxpayer dollars to private schools. It could cost taxpayers $10 billion by 2030. And it could destroy Friday Night Lights. (More Perfect Union, April 22)
This Education Department Official Lost His Job. Here’s What He Says Is at Risk. Fewer teachers. Incomplete data. Delays in addressing problems and getting financial aid information. Those are just some of the impacts Jason Cottrell, who worked as a data collector at the Department of Education for nine and a half years before being laid off along with more than a thousand other agency employees, warns the Trump Administration’s massive cuts to the department’s funding and workforce could have on the country’s education system. (Time, July 18)
This Education Department Official Lost His Job. Here’s What He Says Is at Risk. Fewer teachers. Incomplete data. Delays in addressing problems and getting financial aid information. Those are just some of the impacts Jason Cottrell, who worked as a data collector at the Department of Education for nine and a half years before being laid off along with more than a thousand other agency employees, warns the Trump Administration’s massive cuts to the department’s funding and workforce could have on the country’s education system. (Time, July 18)
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