Every Texan’s director of Economic Opportunity Jaime Puente was interviewed for The Washington Post on The Texas Education Agency’s proposed curriculum to pay school districts to teach elementary language arts lessons that critics say disproportionately focus on Christianity.
Read an excerpt below:
Despite the rise of inflation, Texas legislators have not given teachers a significant raise in about five years, said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity with the nonpartisan tax policy group Every Texan. The new curriculum gives a chance for some districts to replace their books that could be five or 10 years old with new materials at a defrayed cost.
“It’s not like there’s much of a choice,” he said.
Many view the new curriculum as part of a ploy by Republican state leaders to hollow public schools and eventually privatize education.
Religious conservatives, validated by victories in the Supreme Court and state legislatures, have eroded what were once constitutional prohibitions against spending tax money directly on religious education, The Post has reported.
Experts said the fact that billions in taxpayer dollars subsidize religious school tuition throughout the country via state voucher programs shows that the line between church and state is deteriorating. The vast majority of vouchers are used at religious schools, according to a Washington Post examination of the nation’s largest voucher programs, and are most popular in GOP-led states.
The largest conservative state without a voucher program? Texas.
But that may change. After failing to do so in 2023, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said he had the votes to pass his voucher program.
“The Governor thinks he has the cards to win that hand,” Puente said.