With school choice figuring heavily into this election cycle’s Republican primary, Texas House incumbents who moved to kill school choice last year are having to account for their votes.
Texas House District 33 incumbent Rep. Justin Holland (R-Rockwall), who has represented the district since 2017, is currently campaigning against Republican challengers Katrina Pierson and Dennis London.
Holland has been vocal about his objection to school choice, which was demonstrated by his decision to vote for the removal of education savings accounts from an education funding bill during the 88th legislative session.
He said in November that he had “heartburn over the education savings accounts and vouchers.”
“As constitutional conservatives, one of the main questions I ask myself, is it conservative to have a general revenue expansion of government to the tune of $500 million to a billion dollars over the next few years for just a few students in the State of Texas to take advantage of?” he said, per CBS News Texas.
Rather than establishing school choice through the use of taxpayer money, which families would be able to use to help defray the costs of private school or homeschooling, Holland said he would prefer to institute “teacher pay raises and accountability for testing reforms.”
“We support our public schools. We support public education. Having a new entitlement program worth millions of dollars is not sustainable,” he claimed, per SpectrumNews 1.
Both of Holland’s challengers have said that they would support enacting school choice legislation in Texas.
Pierson, a graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas who served as a spokesperson for former President Donald Trump, has advocated for school choice on her campaign website, noting that one of her top priorities, if elected, would be to “empower parents.”
“There are [low-income] families that are desperate to get their kids into a school that focuses on reading, writing, and arithmetic,” she said earlier this month at a candidate forum, according to The Texan.
Pierson has also taken shots at some other Republican lawmakers, claiming that there exists a “small group of liberal Republicans like Justin Holland” who water down “conservative” legislation.
“Justin Holland voted to put radical Democrats in charge of key committees so they could kill conservative bills. Holland even helped put a radical Obama administration lawyer in charge of House proceedings,” she added, per the Texas Scorecard.
Similarly, London has also said he would support school choice in Texas, arguing that it “creates competition for these school districts because competition breeds excellence.”
“So, if you tell schools that they’re going to lose the money from this child because this child will be taken and moved over to a new school, wouldn’t that incentivize them to try to do better to keep those kids?” he explained in an interview with The Texas Horn.
London also criticized Holland on his campaign website, stating that the incumbent showed “indifference to the legislative priorities of the Republican Party of Texas” by voting against school choice last year “despite 84% of his primary voters being FOR it.”
Despite the seeming popularity among Texas voters, some school district functionaries in Texas House District 33 have spoken out against the proposal.
Plano ISD’s board of trustees, for instance, sent a letter to legislators in February 2023 claiming that the enactment of school choice legislation “would create a costly, duplicative system of education.”
“A system that uses any mechanism to fund private education will not guarantee a competitive, educated workforce to meet the demands of employers in Texas. We respectfully ask you to stand with your public schools and the students we serve and oppose any and all efforts to defund public education through the use of vouchers. Public funds need public accountability,” the school board members claimed.