School Choice, My Ass

They’ll smile and tell you it’s about freedom. About parents. About choice. About fairness. About kids.

But the new “school choice” laws sweeping across the United States in places like Texas are none of the above. They’re a slow-motion robbery of public funds, masterminded by sociopathic billionaires in boardrooms and sold like snake oil to the very people they’re screwing over.

The issues in this country aren’t left versus right anymore; they boil down to this: The extremely, stupidly rich versus the rest of us.

And the extremely, stupidly rich are winning, because the only way a person gets extremely stupidly rich is if they learn how to lie prettier than the truth, and love it.

Let’s start spreading the truth.

If Bullshit Were a Curriculum, Texas Just Made the Honor Roll

My new adopted home state just passed “school choice” legislation. This means Texas families can use public education funds to pay for their kids to go to private schools. The scumbags who’ve been pushing for this legislation are calling it a victory for values, freedom, and the children.

Horsecrap.

This isn’t about children. It isn’t about choice. And it damn sure isn’t about freedom.

This is a heist, plain and simple, dressed in a blue Sunday bonnet.

The Best Con Money Can Buy

Here’s how you know it’s a con: The richest people in Texas are the ones clapping the loudest. Oil barons, tech bros, hedge fund creeps, megachurch CEOs—folks whose kids wouldn’t be caught dead in a public school.

School vouchers sound like a gift. Who doesn’t love vouchers? Who doesn’t love choice, and freedom? But they’re a Trojan horse. They take public tax dollars meant for public schools and funnel them into private ones—most of which still charge more than the voucher covers. That means only families who already have money can afford to use them. Poor and rural families, who can’t cover the gap or access distant schools, are left behind with underfunded public schools and no real “choice” at all. As public schools lose funding and support, private—often religious—companies swoop in to “help,” bringing strings-attached curricula and agendas, a trend already unfolding in Texas.

These oligarchs dare to call what they’re doing “education reform,” but that’s just PR slop cooked up in a think tank where the water is artisanal and the interns speak three languages and went to Yale. It’s education destruction. Let’s be real.

These people spent $9.5 million in the last Texas GOP primaries alone to prop up school voucher candidates. You don’t drop that kind of cash unless there’s something to be gained; and it ain’t better schools.

If “school choice” were actually good for the people of Texas or any other patch of earth, it wouldn’t need a $10-million marketing budget and a focus group-tested slogan designed by Harvard marketing majors in Thomas Pink shirts.

Spin, Lies, and Misnomers

Let’s call “School Choice” what it is: brand manipulation by deliberate misnomer.

This movement isn’t grassroots. It’s Astroturf—rolled out by billionaires who hire marketing firms to dress up predatory policies in words like “freedom” and “family.” They do this shit on purpose, to win the battle before it’s even been waged. Leaving more kids behind? Call it No Child Left Behind. Putting Americans last? Call it America First. Hate innocent people who don’t look like you? Call them Criminals with nothing to back that up. Afraid of poor people with critical thinking skills? Kill their schools and call it School Choice.

It’s the same trick they use on grocery store labels: “All natural” doesn’t mean healthy. “Heart healthy” doesn’t mean safe. America has a special sort of genius for obfuscation marketing.

And “school choice” does not mean choices for the vast majority of us and it sure as hell doesn’t mean fair.

These people don’t want you or your kids informed and capable of critical thought. They want you indoctrinated, and they’re paying handsomely to make it happen.

Jesus in the Textbook—Whether You Want Him or Not

Now here’s where it gets truly nauseating. After decades of deliberately, hatefully underfunding public schools—especially and specifically in poor communities—the extremely, stupidly rich fuckwits of Texas are offering “help” in the form of jamming Evangelical Christian curricula down your kids’ throats.

In Texas, schools that adopt the Bluebonnet Learning Christian program get an extra $60 per student per year. For a district that can barely afford copy paper, that’s blood money with a gold leaf finish.

But imagine if that money were tied to a fundamentalist Muslim curriculum. Or forced atheism. Or—brace yourself—a Satanic worldview. You’d see a media meltdown faster than you can say “Fox & Friends.”

But white supremacist Christian nationalism? That gets a government subsidy.

This is forced religion, funded with tax dollars, passed off as freedom of choice for kids who have no choice, and no voice, at all.

Who Gets Screwed?

Let’s not sugarcoat it. The same kids always get hit hardest: Kids who are poor, disabled, traumatized, too hungry to fight for themselves—anyone who doesn't fit the country club private school mold. For the record? That’s most public school kids in Texas.

The extremely, stupidly rich are not failing Texas kids and families by accident. They’re failing them on purpose, through deliberate deception and barely-masked contempt. They’ve been slowly destroying the public schools for decades through creeping privatization in the form of charter schools and forced religious curriculums, and now they blame the failure of the schools they destroyed on their ever having been public at all. This is like grabbing someone’s wrists, hard, and forcing them to hit themselves in the face, while saying “Quit hitting yourself.” These fuckers have been playing the long game, and the goal was always an Ebenzeer Scrooge goal: to keep your kids just educated enough to work low-wage (or, one fine day, no-wage) jobs, but not educated enough to question why their lives are so difficult.

We the People, or We the Product?

Public schools were the last truly public thing we had left in Texas. Parks are privatized. Water is bottled. Even air is now measured in asthma rates.

But the school down the road? That’s still supposed to belong to all of us.

And that’s exactly why they want it gone.

They don’t want schools; they want franchises. They don’t want citizens; they want customers and servants—docile, obedient, profitable.

So What Do We Do?

We fight. We show up. We organize. We raise our voices in PTA meetings and school board elections and at the damn state capitol.

We tell the truth—louder, funnier, and more human than any billionaire’s marketing team ever could. (Why do you think I moved my big mouth to Texas, y’all?)

We remind our neighbors that the “choice” being dangled in front of them is a false one; like choosing between drowning in a pond or drowning in a golden pool of Fiji water.

Real freedom means strong, inclusive, fully funded public schools for every child. Not just the ones with rich parents and Uber accounts.

Because when the public school goes, democracy goes with it.

And those of us who still give a damn?

We’re not going down without a fight.

💬 Tell Me What You See

Is “school choice” creeping into your town?
Have your public schools already felt the squeeze?

Drop a comment below—I want to hear your story.