Gilbert Garcia: Under Abbott’s parental-choice plan, you get to choose your poison

There’s a political paradox at the heart of Greg Abbott’s current push for school vouchers. The Texas governor made his school-choice case during a Monday event on the South Side at PicaPica Plaza. He reiterated that case two days later during an interview with Lubbock radio host Chad Hasty. As part of Abbott’s proposed Parental Bill of Rights, he wants to divert our tax revenues from public schools to private education. We all know that this reliably Republican state has been doing some political shape-shifting over the past few election cycles. Big cities and suburban areas are increasingly gravitating to Democrats, while the GOP maintains a firm grip on rural areas. The paradox behind Abbott’s voucher plan is that the rural communities where his party’s support is concentrated generally are the regions that most value public education. They are blue-collar communities and many of them don’t have private-school options available to them.

Abbott seemed to acknowledge this reality when Hasty asked him about the voucher plan. “One argument in the rural regions against this is they don’t have as many options to send students to and hence it kind of is irrelevant to the rural regions,” Abbott said. “But what that means is it doesn’t change anything at all in the rural regions of the state of Texas. So there’s neither an upside nor a downside for the public schools in rural Texas. They lose absolutely nothing.” Think about this for a second. The governor wants you, the parent, to have all the power. Unless you live in a rural community, in which case, you should just forget the whole thing. It’s “irrelevant” to you. State Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, mocked the governor’s position with a tweet pointing out that Republicans often accuse Democrats of being “urban elitists,” but Abbott’s parental-empowerment proposal is geared to serve big-city private schools. Abbott offered another revealing nugget during the Hasty interview, when he talked about private-school admissions policies. “If a parent wants to take their child to private school X and private school X doesn’t want any part of it, that child will probably not be admitted into that school,” Abbott said.