Lynn Davenport spoke to The Dallas Express to make what she calls the “conservative case against school choice” as the Texas state legislature is widely believed to be well on the path to passing school choice legislation after Governor Abbott made it a legacy policy issue and successfully campaigned against Republican incumbents who opposed school choice legislation in the last legislative session.

Texas has lagged behind much of the rest of the country as 29 other states have some form of school choice program.

Davenport, a Dallas native, is a pro-public education activist and host of the Social Impact Podcast on the OffBeat Business Media Network.

In addressing school choice, Davenport stated that these “counterfeit solutions” increase costs to the benefit of private-sector state vendors while failing to help Texas public school kids.

She then turned her aim toward perceived bureaucratic bloat. “The Texas Education Agency under [Gov. Greg] Abbott’s control, Abbott’s appointment of the commissioner, a technocrat, Mike Morath, we have grown government up to… 1,200 something employees.”

 

Davenport believes that the so-called reform efforts will send more taxpayer dollars flowing to state vendors than students.

“Reform sounds good, but I’ve learned that when you see the word reform, look for dollar signs,” Davenport said.

She later recalled a series of contracts to bring expensive tech into the classroom despite her claim that this action would not improve student educational outcomes.

Some pro-school choice advocates point to Arizona as a model for a successful program. Corey DeAngelis previously pointed to Arizona’s Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), a form of school choice where the state dispenses a certain amount of taxpayer dollars to families seeking to educate their child in the state and parents can use it at their choice of public or private institutions, as a program that expanded choice while minimizing fraud.

“In Arizona, for example, they have some of the most free-market school choice initiatives in the country where you don’t have the testing mandates, you don’t have all these curriculum mandates. What they do is they have an annual random audit just to make sure that the funding is being spent on a broad sense of education expenditures,” DeAngelis said.

He followed up by adding that the fiscal freedom Arizona afforded its citizens did not result in widespread instances of abuse. “Their fraud rate was like far less than 1%, like 0.0001%, which if you compare it to even the National School Lunch Program, that dwarfs in comparison to the fraud that we see in other government programs,” he added.

Davenport sees Arizona’s model as an expensive operation that is not advisable for Texas.

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“If you look to other states… like Arizona, for example, is heralded as a successful model… I believe [the program cost] was 900 million [and] the state is going bankrupt…. They’ve gone from 59,000 students to 97,000, I believe, who’ve taken advantage of their voucher plan,” she noted before adding, “If we do that in Texas, so there’s a lot of talk about the surplus. We had a $33 billion surplus… [but] I don’t believe that’s the way [to fund a program like this] because [surplus is] just another term for over taxation.”

Davenport also fears that government funding of private schools will corrupt their independence, and she says this is already happening in other southern states.

“They successfully implemented school choice and vouchers [in Tennessee]. And they required the private schools to test the children through the state assessment. So that’s very dangerous because the very thing that we’re trying to flee this, this invalid accountability system that we have, the STAAR test, in our public schools would then be forced onto our private schools,” Davenport explained.

She has read the various school choice bills proposed in the past and states they have “strings” that will introduce a “slow creep of government” into private and home schools.

Davenport also raised concerns that school choice legislation would open private schools to more than just state government influence. “The overarching goal from globalism and that perspective is that we are moving towards the dreaded one-world government, the one-world currency, and one education system.”

Davenport described Governor Abbott, now the leading school choice leader in Texas, as a “globalist” aligned with the World Economic Forum.

Abbott has previously appeared at the Forum and frequently tweets in support of school choice. “School choice puts moms and dads back in charge of their child’s education. Every parent in Texas deserves that freedom,” he posted on X as he called a special session on the matter in 2023.

“Choice is one tool to engulf and fold all children under this system. And the best way to access the children who are not in the system, whether they’re in private or homeschool, is to dangle the money carrot. The money carrot is very effective, especially when our property values are so high… [our] property taxes are so high,” she said.

Globalist indoctrination being embedded into proposed educational reforms is something Davenport has previously debated with pro-school choice advocates. During a Grapevine Republicans meeting in the summer of 2024, Davenport objected to a proposed curriculum from the State Board of Education because it used language from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

Aaron Harris, a pro-school choice figure who was speaking in favor of the public school curriculum, responded that just because UNESCO used a phrase in a conference does not mean that the international group is in charge of the curriculum.

UNESCO has become a lightning rod lately because of a public perception in some circles that the global organization wants to influence American children’s education and because of the organization’s support for contentious equity initiatives in education.

Davenport went to college to be a teacher. She attended public schools in Texas and sent her three children to them, as well. During this time, she developed an opposing view of change in Texas’s public education system.

Her vision for education does not focus on privatizing public education but on eliminating the large bureaucracies that act upon school districts.

On this point, she and DeAngelis agree. Shortly after the presidential election, DeAngelis held an X Spaces with other school choice advocates where they made the affirmative case for abolishing the federal Department of Education.

“Go for the mothership,” she said. “We need to eliminate the Texas Education Agency and all the fraud, waste and abuse and contracts that are funneled through that agency. And then you take out the 20 Regional Education Service Centers.”

At the very least, Davenport would like to see the process of picking Texas’s top education official democratized.

Currently, the governor appoints the Texas commissioner of education. Davenport wants this office elected on a popular ballot, like senators, governors, or railroad commissioners.

She supports getting rid of the federal Department of Education and having the Texas legislature hold an “un-session” where they primarily repeal bad education bills.
Davenport acknowledged that not everyone trusts their community’s public school districts. She attributes part of this to losses amongst a competent generation of teachers.

She sees much of this as attributable to bad Republican-authored state bills such as then-Gov. George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and bad local school administration by “liberal Democrats” who control scoreboards.

Davenport depicts debates of “choice” as bad marketing that distracts from what parents really want. “I think most parents really want a classical education, you know, rooted in knowledge and facts and truths, and they want their children to have that classical model because they know that they can go on to do anything they want to do. So we need to be saying what we really want,” she said.

Later she added that if Texas shed the Federal and state education bureaucrats and the attendant vendors to each agency, teachers would be allowed to return to a classical model of education, and there would be more money for “the basics: books, paper, pencils.”

The former Republican party precinct chair’s full interview can be seen at the Cowtown Caller on Substack here.

Her other work can be seen on the Tick-Ed podcast she hosts and her X account.

The case for school choice, with Corey DeAngelis, can be read in The Dallas Express’s previous reporting.