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Texas public schools need at least $40 billion this biennium to reach the national per-student funding average. Texas has this money sitting in our treasury. Yet, rather than investing that in our students, Governor Abbott is focused on a taxpayer-funded voucher plan that would divert money from public schools and send it to unaccountable private schools that select choice students.

In this guest article, Republican former State Board of Education Vice Chair Thomas Ratliff points out that the first version of a voucher proposal in Texas was a response to Brown v. Board of Education. At the time, vouchers were proposed to allow parents who opposed integration to send their children to segregated private schools