TX: More Anti-School Choice From The Choice Crowd

Once again, it turns out that school choice supporters are not actually in favor of school choice. This time it's in Texas.

Kelly Hancock was in the chemicals business when he decided to step up his political career from school board member to House of Representatives in 2006. After three terms in the House, he moved up to the Senate. His undistinguished career included his award from Texas Monthly for being one of the worst legislators in Texas in 2017. The 2021 gerrymander still gave him a safer district.

Then in June 2025, he resigned the Senate so he could be appointed the acting Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts by Governor Greg Abbott. He's planning to run for the office for realsies next year.

One of the major points for his campaign? Hancock and his crew will be setting up the taxpayer-funded school voucher program (named the "Education Freedom Accounts Program" because nobody who supports school vouchers ever wants to say the word "voucher"). Hancock has been traveling around the state promoting the taxpayer-funded vouchers and the opportunity for choice.

Only it turns out that choice is not actually okay. The Texas Tribune reports that Hancock asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton if maybe certain choices shouldn't be allowed. Like schools with alleged connections to a U.S. Muslim advocacy group or the awful Chinese. Hancock asked if schools could be excluded if the were linked to a “foreign terrorist organization” or a “foreign adversary.” Hancock is targeting any school hosted the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that Abbott just labeled a foreign terrorist group because they want to impose Sharia law. Hancock also claims there are "credible concerns" that one school in the state is owned or controlled by a group of people connected to a person who is allegedly an advisor for the Chinese government.

CAIR issued a statement about the events it hosts, “Know Your Rights” events designed to inform students about state and federal civil rights and protections.

“Hosting civil rights education for students is lawful. So is teaching students about their rights under the U.S. and Texas Constitutions,” a spokesperson with CAIR Texas said. “Any attempt to penalize schools for learning about their civil rights from an organization Greg Abbott happens to dislike would raise serious First Amendment concerns.”

Well, yes it does. It also, once again, illustrates that many school choice fans don't actually want school choice. We see this pattern repeated. "There should be school choice and religious freedom for all," they proclaim loudly. "Oh, but not for you guys," they add when Certain People try to take them at their word. For these folks, school choice is not about choice-- it's about funneling tax dollars to private religious institutions, but only the correct ones.

This is why religious folks ought to be the biggest defenders of the First Amendment. Because the next step, as we see in Texas and Florida and Oklahoma and elsewhere, is for the state to step in to settle debates about which religious institutions are "legitimate" and which religions really deserve the freedoms (and tax dollars) that are being offered. And once a religion needs state approval to exist, we have some huge problems. Somebody who is upset about the imagined threat of Sharia law ought not to be comfortable using the power of the state to force students to look at the Ten Commandments every day. 

Is everyone who promotes school choice actually opposed to school choice? No-- there are serious real choicers out there, and I have a different set of disagreements with them. But those true ought to be keeping a closer eye on some of their allies who are absolutely anti-choice. It's the anti-diversity, anti-democracy, anti-freedom crowd that is bad for all Americans. And Texans.