Professor: Voters backed school choice because they 'don't know how to read' complex proposal

AUSTIN, TEXAS (TND) — A professor at Stephen F. Austin State University said Thursday that Texas Republicans only voted in support of school choice because they don’t understand the “convoluted language” of a state ballot proposition on the issue.

The remark came after school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis commented on a tweet by The Texas Tribune that insisted Beto O’Rourke was “hammering” Greg Abbott “over school vouchers on the campaign trail in rural Texas.”

Abbott, a Republican, supports school choice initiatives, while O’Rourke, a Democrat, does not.

“88% of Texas Republican primary voters support school choice,” DeAngelis commented on the Tribune’s tweet after it was posted. DeAngelis attached a screenshot of election results from a March Republican primary election showing 87.5% of GOP voters cast their ballot in favor of a school choice proposition.

The ballot questionread as follows: “Texas parents and guardians should have the right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.”

But according to Amber Wagnon, an education professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, that language is too complicated for GOP voters to understand the implications of their support.

“That’s just because 80% of people don’t know how to read the convoluted language that those propositions are written in,” Wagnon tweeted in response to DeAngelis. “Public schools are the heart of rural Texas communities.”

As the Tribune article chronicles, Democrats have argued proposals for school choice vouchers split Republican voters who fear it could defund Texas’s rural public schools.

“For our rural communities, where there’s only one school district and only one option of public school, [Abbott] wants to defund that through vouchers, take your tax dollars out of your classroom and send it to a private school in Dallas, or Austin or somewhere else at your expense,” O’Rourke can be heard saying to a rural audience during a campaign ad released last month.

In May, Abbott insisted to supporters during a campaign event that public schools could remain fully funded “while also giving parents a choice about which school is right for their child,” according to The Tribune.