The debate in Texas over providing vouchers for private schools is a perfect encapsulation of how we continue to apathetically fail our children. Instead of pushing funding into our schools, increasing our teacher wages, providing the materials they need, and most importantly, lowering the teacher:student ratio, Texas is spending taxpayer money on sending more children to private school. Of course this only benefits those children who live near private schools, and predominately the families already sending their children to private schools anyways i.e. another tax break for upper-middle class and up.

The solution isn’t to abandon our public school system, it is to begin caring for it. I advocate for a massive investment in our nation’s public schools, so that if a family chooses private school for their children it is because of religious or spiritual reasons (~70% of private schools are religious institutions), not because private schools have a ratio of 11:1 and the local school has a ratio of 19:1.

Regarding the invasion of personal religion into public schools, it has nothing to do with our shared history. Neither the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers are on the walls of Mrs. Smith’s kindergarten class. This is a repetition of the ignorant hate which forced indigenous People into Christian boarding schools and conversion camps. If a school or classroom has a mandate to post any Judeo-Christian works, it must then also provide excerpts from the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada, the Vedas, Upanishads, and Popol Vuh. America has no singular religion, nor will it.

Thomas Jefferson’s grave reads "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, & Father of the University of Virginia." Notably leaving out his accomplishment as the second President of the United States, Jefferson showed through word and action, time and time again, that education and religion were the two most important things to him, yet they should always remain separate, or religious freedom cannot exist.

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