A fierce debate ensued at The Dallas Express School Choice Forum on February 24 at Milo Butterfingers.
School choice evangelist Corey A. DeAngelis, PhD, and anti-school choice campaigner Lynn Davenport clashed in their first joint debate appearance alongside State Rep. Nate Schatzline (R-FW), Lieutenant Colonel (Ret) Allen West, and social activist Russell Fish.
“We agree on the problem but not the solution,” Davenport rebuffed to DeAngelis. This was a common theme throughout the evening. Each debater agreed education was too woke and cost too much, but what to do about it was a different question.
School choice evangelist Corey A. DeAngelis, PhD, and anti-school choice campaigner Lynn Davenport, 02/24/25, Image by Heather Ridgway/DX
DeAngelis explained that his vision mirrored that of American economist and statistician Milton Friedman. He wanted to fund “students, not systems” by tagging education funds to students and letting parents decide which institution, public or private, most deserved their taxpayer dollars.
He saw this as a best-of-both-worlds scenario that improved public and private institutions. He explained that when parents can make the final funding decision, “public schools have the incentive to listen to [a parent] as a partner.”
Davenport’s vision was skeptical of taxpayer dollars flowing into private education.
She warned that it would effectively socialize private and home schools, adding that standardized tests, spending restrictions, bureaucracy, and other “strings” would impose government control on once-separate institutions. She depicted school choice as a “banking scheme” that merely “laundered” taxpayer dollars to private educational vendors.
She asked why we would “run [tax dollars] through the same government that broke the system,” condemning the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the federal Department of Education. Davenport explained that her vision would eliminate these institutions and leave education decisions to local school districts.
Fish saw almost any educational system as preferable to what Texas has now. He focused on Open Records Project files, reported on by DX, that appear to show child abuse as widespread across public education, with the names of alleged offenders mysteriously obliterated from school records and many suspected perpetrators not added to the “Do Not Hire” registry.
Schatzline told the audience that he knew what Fish was talking about, adding that he had introduced a bill to remove the “or” from a law that required teacher sexual abuse to be reported to the TEA or law enforcement and replace it with a clause that read any sexual abuse perpetrated by a teacher must be reported to “the TEA and law enforcement.”
Davenport countered that there are “pedophiles in churches and summer camps” as well and reasoned such concerns were not sufficient to justify blowing up the entire public education rather than reforming it.
Fish relied heavily on his experience setting up schools in the Kenyan Bush. He noted that Kenyan kids physically look similar to kids in South Dallas, yet they far outperform the Dallas students “who can barely load their 9mm.”
He later added that almost everything used in modern public education is unnecessarily expensive. Fish explained that students do not need high-tech or the latest high-priced educational trends to learn.
“It doesn’t even take a building to teach kids to read,” Fish said, so long as they have the educational fundamentals such as the time-tested textbooks that were standard 100 years ago.
After considerable back-and-forth sparring between the panelists, West joked, “I was enjoying watching the white people fight.” The panel and audience laughed at his quip.
While the debate focused on the merits of the two most common types of school choice, vouchers or education savings accounts, alternatives were also discussed.
West suggested a third system rarely considered in the media discourse over school choice. This system involves letting parents keep part of their tax dollars that would normally go to public schools and spend it directly on either public or private institutions. He explained his concern that “now we have an educational-industrial” complex, like the military-industrial complex, that gives too much power to bureaucrats.
“I get so sick and tired of having a right, freedom, and liberty, and then we have to go beg someone else to give it to us,” West said. He suggested a wide array of policies, such as state constitutional amendments that could ensure parents have as many choices for their child’s education as possible.
One policy he did not endorse was SB 2, a universal school choice bill that passed the Texas Senate in 2025. He said he found the bill overly restrictive and would, in effect, make Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar “the new headmaster of students” at every private school.
Schatzline’s remarks focused heavily on proposed legislation that the Texas House of Representatives will consider this session. One bill he appeared keen on was HB 3. He said this law would protect the rights of religious parents from government coercion in a school choice system.
Davenport rebutted that “this legislature can not bind any future legislature,” highlighting the possibility that even if HB 3 passes, a later legislature could use a school choice system to dictate to religious parents using tax dollars for their child’s education what their child can or cannot learn. Both Schatzline and DeAngelis agreed that this was a theoretical possibility but that there is always a danger a future legislature could do something they would disagree with.
One moment of unity in the evening came when the representative discussed HB 2657, a bill to abolish the TEA. Each panel member appeared excited, or at least not upset, to see the agency go.
While every Texas school choice bill has failed in the past, the issue was a major player in the 2024 Republican primary election and November general election. Although passage of any legislation is never guaranteed, panelists such as DeAngelis appeared confident that some form of the legislation would pass this year.