Rogers: the think tank who thinks it can outsmart Texas schools

Every April, Texans celebrate the Battle of San Jacinto and our hard-fought freedom. The Texas Declaration of Independence, signed just a month before that battle in 1836, listed the failure of the Mexican government "to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources" among the Texians’ reasons for severing political ties with Mexico. Since the 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas, all five Texas Constitutions, including our current 1876 document, emphasize the importance of public education and the responsibility of the state to support it financially.

Despite that history and tradition, public education is under attack in Texas. Over the last few decades, the movement to privatize or destroy public schools has gained momentum. During the COVID pandemic, public school disruptions created increased opportunities for well-funded, anti-public school activists to sow discontent and outright chaos.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is among them. TPPF was founded in 1989 by Dr. James R. Leininger and Fritz S. Steiger with one of its primary aims the privatization of public education through voucher subsidies paid by taxpayers. TPPF functions like the Heritage Foundation of Texas. In fact, current Heritage Foundation CEO Kevin Roberts once led TPPF. 

The TPPF not only promotes the expansion of vouchers, but works to thwart public school representation and often works to defeat public school bond elections. 

School vouchers have a long history, beginning shortly after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1956. Then, vouchers were an effort to continue school segregation. 

Today, with new alliances, the lengthy battle for vouchers in Texas was finally won last year following a scorched earth primary attack on anti-voucher rural Republican representatives like me. That campaign was fueled by millions of dollars from Pennsylvania TikTok investor Jeff Yass and a whole host of well-funded voucher lobbyists, many from out-of-state. 

A TPPF fundraising letter sent prior to the 88th legislative session pointed to the timely vulnerability of public education. “Public education is GROUND ZERO in the fight for freedom,” it read. “The policy team and board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) believe it is now or never.” This signaled the start of an all-out onslaught on non-compliant legislators, and was strongly backed by Gov. Greg Abbott. 

Another long-term campaign to derail public school representation is the effort to enact a ban on so-called taxpayer funded lobbying. Organizations that represent public education, such as the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), have been under constant attack from groups that support such a ban. State Senator and Attorney General candidate Mayes Middleton, who now identifies as “MAGA Mayes,” has been beating this drum for years. 

Organizations funded by Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, such as Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Texas Scorecard, Defend Texas Liberty, Texans United for a Conservative Majority or whatever new PAC name pops up in the next few days, and a much longer list of allied dark organizations have championed the ban. While purporting to protect citizens, an implemented ban would effectively serve to silence local governments such as elected school boards, and create a lobbying monopoly for the theo-oligarchs like Dunn and Wilks who control Texas politics. 

The root of the problems facing schools and local governments is not taxpayer funded lobbying. The real issue is megadonors who function as de facto lobbyists and exert unfettered control over their compliant elected puppets. Representative government hangs by a thread in Texas due to oligarchal control. 

While taxpayer funded organizations exerting influence on legislative action need monitoring, silencing these entities through a ban would result in a much darker scenario: a few uberwealthy megadonors functioning as a lobby monopoly.

Every state representative, senator and other elected official is obligated to support a system of free public schools that has been ingrained in Texas since the days of the Republic. If state elected officials followed the mandate found in Article 7, Section 1 of the Texas Constitution, school lobbyists would not be necessary. 

Groups deemed as extremist by critically thinking Texans, several already mentioned above, have been mostly dismissed as crazy, but irrelevant. However, Texas Public Policy Foundation, under a veneer of respectability, has been a driving force for several decades behind the attempted takedown of public education.

A TPPF report entitled “The Education Cartel” was released on April 8. The blatant bias against our public school system was clearly on display as the report described a network of consultants, vendors and taxpayer-funded lobbyists who profit from ever-expanding school bond debt and bureaucratic growth, which TPPF branded “the Education Cartel.”

No mention is made of the explosive bureaucratic growth of the Texas Education Agency under the direction of Abbott-appointed Commissioner Mike Morath. Morath has been in charge of that bureaucracy for a whopping 10 years, making him the second longest serving education commissioner in Texas history.

In February 2025, Rep. Giovanni Capriglione was appointed as chair of a House DOGE committee focused on eliminating government waste. I sent that committee several requests on specific items related to TEA expenses, no-bid contracts, online STAAR issues, charter school expansion and retroactive A-F ratings. It became evident that the DOGE committee was exclusively on a witch hunt to demonize TASB, while leaving the weaponized TEA untouched.

In the world of illegal narcotics, cartels exert control through almost unlimited access to cash, and they skirt rules or twist them in such a way that they apply “to thee but not to me.” TPPF functions the same way. Its staff members operate as taxpayer funded lobbyists even while calling out groups like TASB as a cartel.  

In TPPF’s case, taxpayer funding comes in the form of tax exemption. TPPF is housed on prime real estate with opulent decor two blocks from the capitol in Austin. After an unsuccessful attempt at tax exempt status, TPPF pursued an identity as a scientific research organization, even though most of its efforts are advocacy, not research. That failed too. In January 2015, one month after his swearing in, TPPF-aligned Comptroller Glenn Hegar, granted the agency a property tax exemption, saving TPPF hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in property taxes.

In efforts that contradict traditional conservatism, TPPF seeks to collapse the public school system in favor of a new government system of entitlements for private school and home school families. Entitlements are not conservative. Departing from the Texas Constitution is not conservative. Bloated bureaucracies are not conservative. It is time for our conservative elected officials to re-evaluate their relationship with the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

“This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News where Glenn Rogers is a contributing columnist.”