Tag Archives: Texas Governor Greg Abbott

Billionaires Are Undermining Public Education in America

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In a series of articles dubbed “Billionaire Nation,” the Washington Post confirms what we have all sensed as we watch the operation not only of the Trump administration but also the massive investment by our richest citizens in the candidates and policy of our state legislatures.

In How Billionaires Took Over American Politics, the Post recounts the political story of our new Gilded Age: “In an era defined by major political divisions and massive wealth accumulation for the richest Americans, billionaires are spending unprecedented amounts on U.S. politics… Since 2000, political giving by the wealthiest 100 Americans to federal elections has gone up almost 140 times… In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections… By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared… (R)oughly 1 in every 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people… America’s 902 billionaires are collectively worth more than $6.7 trillion, the most wealth ever amassed by the nation’s ultra-rich… A little more than a decade ago, there were half as many billionaires in the U.S….”

Our current politics reflect the rise of the billionaire class as well as the erasure of necessary regulation: “Economists say wealth is now more concentrated at the very top than at any time since the Gilded Age. The tech and market revolutions of recent decades have created riches on an unprecedented scale. Changing norms on executive compensation and lower-tax policies under Republican and Democratic administrations have helped insulate those fortunes. And in three landmark decisions, starting with 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, federal courts gutted post-Watergate campaign finance restrictions, clearing the way for donors to contribute unlimited money to elections.”

Clearly all this has shaped the second Trump administration. “Last year, many tech barons threw their support behind the GOP, which they saw as more aligned with their often-libertarian ideals and their companies’ economic interests… Musk is the starkest example of the shift. He accounted for a sizable portion of the uptick in political spending in 2024, doling out $294 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans… The president installed about a dozen billionaires in his current administration… Trump’s Cabinet is the wealthiest in U.S. history, with a combined net worth of $7.5 billion… At the same time, Trump has championed a deregulation and tax cut agenda that is bringing huge benefits to wealthy Americans.”

Economist Joseph Stiglitz published a warning in the summer of 2024 in his book, The Road to Freedom: “There are two distinct aspects to the situation in the U.S.  The power dynamics are exacerbated by a political system in which money matters more than in most democracies. American elections are very expensive, and donors who make more campaign contributions (more rightly thought of as ‘political investments’) inevitably have more influence. Lobbying has also become a major business.” (p. 232) “To put it bluntly, ordinary citizens around the world have been sold a bill of goods. When there’s a problem, they’ve been told to ‘leave it to the market.’  They’ve even been told that the market can solve problems of externalities, coordination, and public goods. That’s wishful thinking. A well-functioning society needs rules, regulations, public institutions, and public expenditures financed by taxes.” (pp. 278-279)

While we have all been watching the operation of big money driving the power dynamics in Washington, D.C., just last week in its “Billionaire Nation” series, the Washington Post explored the role of big money in the legislative chambers across the states.  . In “Meet the Billionaire Pushing Taxpayer-Funded School Vouchers,” Laura Meckler, Beth Reinhard, and Clara Ence Morse profile the role of Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass investing in the promotion of his favorite ideology as he helps purchase state legislation for universal school vouchers. It is not as though Jeff Yass has had much recent experience with public schools; he educated his sons at “the Haverford School, a private school for boys on Philadelpia’s Main Line, where yearly high school tuition today costs nearly $48,000.” And he and some friends opened their own classical charter school.  But sixty-seven-year-old Yass formulated a commitment to his favorite ideology even before he made enough money to become “the 27th-richest  person in the world” through the “Susquehanna International Group, the behemoth trading firm.” “Yass’s political instincts began to form in his 20s, when he read economist Milton Friedman’s seminal work, ‘Capitalism and Freedom.’ He came away convinced of the value of free markets and idolizing Friedman himself.” Yass once personally asked Friedman for advice: “If you had a lot of philanthropic money, how would you spend it? His answer: ‘school choice.’ ”

According to Meckler, Reinhard and Morse, Yass regularly distorts the results of recent studies showing that private schools accepting vouchers are definitely not more academically effective than their public school counterparts: “But he also says he doesn’t really care what the studies say….  He takes the libertarian point of view that all parents should be empowered to choose the school—public or private—that they want for their children., no matter what.” “He argues that public schools are failing millions of children, and says those students deserve the chance to attend the school of their choice—private, religious, charter or traditional public—with taxpayer dollars.”

Yass has definitely been investing in school choice via universal vouchers, which he calls “his philanthropy,” even though he has not yet successfully been able to buy enough legislative power to produce universal voucher plans in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Colorado, and Nebraska, where voucher legislation he supported ultimately proved unsuccessful. However, he hasn’t give up.  He has already supported Vivek Ramaswamy, a supporter of Ohio school voucher expansion, in Ramaswamy’s 2026 gubernatorial run in Ohio with a check for $10 million, for example.

Yass’s money did enable Texas Governor Greg Abbott to pass a universal voucher plan last April, 2025.  Abbott’s original 2023 drive for school vouchers failed in a state where vouchers would not be relevant in many rural districts lacking private schools where vouchers could be used. After 21 rural Republicans in the Texas House voted with Democrats to block the vouchers, Abbott tried a new strategy: backing pro-voucher Republicans to challenge the incumbents. “Yass gave $6 million to a political fund controlled by the governor, which Abbott’s campaign called the largest contribution in Texas history. He later gave $6 million more… Yass also donated $5.7 million that year to the Texas AFC Victory Fund, the political arm of the American Federation for Children… that spent $8 million working to defeat the anti-voucher Republicans… Most of the anti-voucher Republicans were defeated, and in April, the newly voucher-friendly Texas legislature approved a $1 billion program.”

In The Road to Freedom, economist Stiglitz discusses a term students learn about in Economics 101:  “Key questions of economic policy entail managing externalities—discouraging activities where there are harmful (negative) externalities and encouraging activities where there are positive externalities.” (p. 46)  Yass’s huge donations helped replace one set of state politicians with others who share his libertarian ideology without public conversation about the negative externalities of universal school voucher policies—their diversion of tax dollars away from the public schools that serve the majority of children—their failure to protect students’ civil rights—their exclusionary admissions policies—their failure to ensure teachers are qualified—their failure to protect the separation of religion and public life.

Jeff Yass epitomizes the power of the world’s 27th richest person to use his money to help politicians undermine the kind of public oversight that protects the majority of U.S. families who depend the provision of well funded public schools in rural, urban and suburban areas and the kind of public oversight that protects all students’ civil rights.  Here is the late political theorist Benjamin Barber speaking to the consequences for all of us of the growing power of money in our unequal society as billionaires increasingly dominate our politics:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

New Coalition Will Advocate to Protect Undocumented Immigrant Students’ Right to Free Public Education

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A new and important coalition has joined together to protect undocumented immigrant students from a  Heritage Foundation plan to deny their right to free public schooling in the United States. That right was protected in 1982 by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe.

Chalkbeat‘s Kalyn Belsha reports: “A new coalition is on high alert for violations of a landmark Supreme Court ruling that guarantees children the right to a free public education regardless of their immigration status.  Known as Education for All, the campaign is working to counteract anti-immigrant rhetoric and conservative policy proposals seeking to limit the education rights of undocumented children, which are protected by the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe.

Belsha continues: “The campaign, which launched in May comes as The Heritage Foundation, a think tank with ties to former President Donald Trump, is pushing states to charge undocumented children tuition to attend public schools.  Supporters of the idea say the costs of educating undocumented children have grown too high and that migrant students are drawing resources from U.S. citizens.”

The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) leads the new coalition. Belsha quotes Will Dempster, vice president for strategic communications for NILC: “We want to take everything seriously. They’re testing the boundaries of what’s possible.”

Dempster is referring to a  Fact Sheet released on February 28, 2024, in which the Heritage Foundation laid out the following  strategy: “Require school districts to collect enrollment data by immigration status…. Make this anonymized data available to the public so that accurate cost analyses can be done…. Pass legislation that requires public schools to charge tuition for unaccompanied migrant children as well as children who are in the U.S. with their illegal-alien parents. Such legislation would draw a lawsuit from the Left, which would likely lead the Supreme Court to reconsider its ill-considered Plyler v. Doe decision that had no basis in law.”

In the 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, the U.S, Supreme Court overturned a Texas law passed in the mid 1970s that permitted public school districts to charge tuition to immigrant families when their children attended public schools.  In April for Chalkbeat, Belsha explained the history of the case: “(T}he Tyler Independent School District, started charging undocumented children $1.000 a year to attend school—a sum district officials knew would be unaffordable for the area’s immigrant families who often worked in Tyler’s famous rose industry, along with meat-packing plants and farms.”

In his majority decision in Plyler v. Doe, Justice William Brennan’s declared: “A Texas statute which withholds from local school districts any state funds for the education of children who were not ‘legally admitted’ into the United States, and which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment… (T)he Texas statute imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents’ conduct nor their own undocumented status. The deprivation of public education is not like the deprivation of some other governmental benefit. Public education has a pivotal role in maintaining the fabric of our society and in sustaining our political and cultural heritage: the deprivation of education takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and poses an obstacle to individual achievement.”

The president of the National Immigration Law Center, Kica Matos describes the purpose of the new coalition: “In launching this campaign, we are sending a clear message that we will meet any attack on the right of all children, no matter their immigration status, to access K-12 public schools with fierce resistance… Efforts to prevent kids from being able to attend school are part of a broader assault on public education and ultimately our democracy. School helps instill the norms, values, and skills that children need to thrive and fully participate in our communities. It is in our collective best interest to protect access to schools for all, and to categorically reject extremists’ attempts to weaken public education.”

The National Immigration Law Center announced that three dozen organizations have joined the new coalition.  They range from national immigrant rights organizations like Americans for Immigrant Justice, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, National Newcomer Network, and United We Dream; to immigrant organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Haitian Bridge Alliance; to statewide immigrant rights organizations from Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Tennessee, and Texas; to the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association; to children’s and civil rights organizations including the Center for Law and Social Policy, First Focus Campaign for Children, the National Women’s Law Center, and the Century Foundation.  A number of these organizations are themselves coalitions. Belsha explains: “Tessa Petit… of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said her organization is urging its 80 member organizations to ‘be alert’ for potential Plyler violations.”

While Governor Greg Abbott has supported Heritage’s efforts, claiming “the expenses are extraordinary” to serve undocumented children, Belsha quotes the leader of one organization that is part of the new coalition: “Newly arrived students’ needs aren’t unique. Many U.S.-born children also need language support, trauma-informed counseling, or help catching up after interrupted schooling… These are not kids that are throwing our education system into turmoil.”

Belsha continues: “The national coalition is also looking for states or communities that would be willing to pass policies that support the educational rights of immigrant children. One example is a recent Connecticut law that ensures immigrant families know their kids are entitled to a public education and that they should receive certain translation services.”

It is encouraging to see see a prominent new coalition gather to fight for the values that U.S. public schooling is designed to embody. In his decision in Plyler v. Doe, Justice Brennan identified the defining principles of our nation’s education system: guaranteeing free public schooling to prepare every child to achieve and  to prepare all children to contribute socially, economically, intellectually and politically as part of our democracy.  That the Heritage Foundation has declared a strategy to threaten these rights for immigrant children confirms the abyss toward which many of us fear the far right is driving our society.

Texas Governor Outrageously Proposes Denying Undocumented Immigrant Children the Right to K-12 Public Education

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In September of 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a Texas statute denying children brought to the United States by their undocumented parents the right to public education.  In Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court protected the right of all children living in the United States to a free K-12 public education. The Court also defined the public purpose of our system of public schools, accessible to all children.

In the majority decision, Justice William Brennan wrote these powerful words: “A Texas statute which withholds from local school districts any state funds for the education of children who were not “legally admitted” into the United States, and which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment… (T)he Texas statute imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents’ conduct nor their own undocumented status. The deprivation of public education is not like the deprivation of some other governmental benefit. Public education has a pivotal role in maintaining the fabric of our society and in sustaining our political and cultural heritage: the deprivation of education takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and poses an obstacle to individual achievement.”

Brennan continues, quoting from the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: “Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship.”

Brennan is careful not to contradict the precedent in San Antonio v Rodriguez that public education, never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, is not protected as a federal fundamental right, but he comes as close as possible when he declares that for children brought into the United States by undocumented immigrants: “(W)hen the State provides an education to some and denies it to others, it immediately and inevitably creates class distinctions of a type fundamentally inconsistent with those purposes, mentioned above, of the Equal Protection Clause. Children denied an education are placed at a permanent and insurmountable competitive disadvantage, for an uneducated child is denied even the opportunity to achieve. And when those children are members of an identifiable group, that group—through the State’s action—will have been converted into a discrete underclass.”

Now, when it looks as though today’s U.S. Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he hopes the Court will overturn other precedents. When he was interviewed on a radio talk show, Governor Abbott suggested that Texas may consider challenging Plyler v. Doe: “The challenges put on our public systems is extraordinary… Texas already long ago sued the federal government about having to incur the costs of the education program, in a case called Plyler versus Doe.  And the Supreme Court ruled against us on the issue about denying, or let’s say Texas having to bear that burden. I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again, because the expenses are extraordinary….”

The Dallas Morning News‘ Robert T. Garrett quotes Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF): “First, Abbott needs some remedial education on Plyler itself… This was a case brought against Texas, not by Texas, as Abbott asserted. The case was filed by MALDEF on behalf of students threatened by a Texas statute allowing schools to exclude undocumented students from public school.”  Garrett adds, “In the four-decade-old ruling, The Supreme Court split 5-4 on declaring the Texas law unconstitutional. But even the four dissenters agreed with the majority that Texas was unwise to pass the law, Saenz noted. ‘All of the justices, including then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, agreed that the Texas law seeking to exclude undocumented children from school was bad public policy,’ he said.”

Reporting for the NY Times, J. David Goodman explains that: “Attitudes about immigration have shifted in Texas, where former Republican governors like George W. Bush and Rick Perry adopted relatively moderate tones. Mr. Perry, during his term, signed a law allowing undocumented college students access to in-state tuition and financial aid at public universities in Texas. But taking a hard stance on immigration has been a politically comfortable place for Mr. Abbott.”

Goodman reports: “Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for many public benefits. And Texas offers fewer than most states. Edna Yang of American Gateways, an immigration legal services provider in Texas, said that undocumented immigrants in the state qualified for only a small number of benefits, including emergency medical services, food aid for children and public education.”  But, Abbott is protesting the cost of educating English language learners: “The governor’s office has said that the cost of each additional student enrolled in Texas pubic schools is about $6,100 per year, not including the cost of providing bilingual and special education services, which add more than $2,000 in additional spending.”

Goodman adds: “(I)t is against federal law to record the immigration status of students in school, (and) the number of students in question is not precisely known.  An overwhelming majority of children of undocumented migrants were born in the United States and are citizens. Researchers have estimated there are about one million undocumented young people in the country.”

Goodman quotes Justin Driver, author of an extremely significant book on public education and the U.S. Supreme Court: “I view Plyler v. Doe as among the most significant constitutional decisions in the Supreme Court’s history… That is because the decision succeeded in interring this sort of legislation (like the state law Plyer overturned in Texas) and keeping it from spreading all around the country.”

Governor Greg Abbott is, according to Goodman, a former attorney general in Texas. I am shocked that a public official schooled in the role of federal law so flagrantly suggests overturning a Supreme Court decision that protects students’ rights. Many of the children Abbot seeks to exclude from Texas public schools hope someday to become citizens of the United States. Governor Abbott’s entire purpose is to slash Texas’ investment in its public schools, which the Texas constitution defines as a primary responsibility of the state. Abbott’s priority is cutting out teachers and programs designed to serve English language learners, whatever the impact on children’s lives and their preparation for participating in our democracy. For Governor Abbott, the public purpose of public schooling, so eloquently defined and defended in Plyler v. Doe by Justice William Brennan, matters not at all.