March 8th, 2023 – Public opinion & the renewed GOP offensive on “school choice” in Texas

[00:00:00] Jim Henson: Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin.

[00:00:05] Jim Henson: The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. Sir, I tell people on a regular basis there is still a land of opportunity in America.

[00:00:16] Jim Henson: It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution, they have become the norm.

[00:00:24] Jim Henson: At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be re. Over the male colleagues in the room,

[00:00:34] Jim Henson: and welcome back to the second Reading podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Happy to be joined again today by my collaborator, co-conspirator, and research director of the Texas Politics Project. Not in that order, of course, Joshua Blank.

[00:00:50] Jim Henson: Josh, good morning. Good morning. So on, on last week’s podcast, Josh and I were joined by the illustrious professor, Daron Shaw. Mm-hmm. . I used all of his titles last time. Yeah. I will not do that this time. I got

[00:01:02] Josh Blank: the title treatment this

[00:01:03] Jim Henson: time. You got the title treatment, uh, with, in the absence of, uh, professor Shawah.

[00:01:08] Jim Henson: Yeah. I only heard conspirator. But , so last week Daron was here so we could do a rollout podcast peg to the release of our latest UT Texas Politics project poll, which we conducted in mid to late February. You know, that last conversation, you know, and this happens when we have Darren and it’s on Pur, you know, it’s reasonably on purpose.

[00:01:25] Jim Henson: You know, we sort of migrated a lot into national politics. Mm-hmm. or kind of electoral politics to some degree. Yeah. And that of course is uh, uh, professor Shaw’s bread and butter. How bet he doesn’t eat a lot of bread and butter, though. No, he’s pretty. He’s fit. Yeah. Um, this week we wanna drill down into one subject that we touched on towards the end last week.

[00:01:48] Jim Henson: And it came up in a couple of small points, but we we’re definitely saving it for later, and that that subject would be public education Now. Like I said, we plumbed that a little bit last week and, and we’ve been talking about it. But the other thing that was interesting about public education in terms of the approach and the poll was that, you know, as I think we said, we talked about a little bit last week, but it’s worth reiterating, is people look at the data.

[00:02:14] Jim Henson: You know, we didn’t want to get ahead of where the conversation was in a lot of these subject areas, right. I mean, there were a lot of bills floating around out there, most of which are not going to move right. Public education a little bit different than that. I mean, we still don’t know as we’ll get into today, is that what’s gonna happen by a long shot.

[00:02:31] Jim Henson: But because public education is such a perennial issue because it’s so big. Yep. You know, we know we have a little bit more of an idea what’s out there and that’s reflected in the instruments on the instrument. We gave people a list of what about 10 sub possible subjects. I think that’s right. I think that’s right Of, of policy or you know, and it wasn’t even just subjects of policy.

[00:02:50] Jim Henson: It was also. , you know, there was a little bit of perspective. Some of it was a little bit of a, a kind of a subject check in terms like, you know, we had parental rights on the list. Yeah. Now parental rights is not a specific topic area, but it’s certainly an area that has some sal to certainly players in the system and also out in, in, in the world, in the public as we saw.

[00:03:11] Jim Henson: And so we did do a little bit more on public ed. This. Right. So let’s start with the general assessment. So we know that, you know, public education comes up a lot, right? It’s a perennial subject. It’s big, it’s a big budget item, it’s salent. But you’ve been looking back at some of the data on this, you know, in the long term of the poll and have, have some nuance in terms of when it’s come, uh, how it’s come up, how it’s not, et cetera.

[00:03:36] Jim Henson: Right?

[00:03:36] Josh Blank: Right. I’m trying to, well, I’m trying to develop some nuance and Sure. This is the beginning of some of that part. This is the pre nuance. This is the pre, pre nuance meeting, right. Okay, so I mean, you know, that’s right. I mean, public education, probably one thing you didn’t mention in terms of just sort of why it’s kind of always on the agenda is also, you know, somebody’s always talking about it and it may be somebody in the position to put it directly on the agenda, or it may be dissidents in either party or you know, even the opposition party or whatever.

[00:04:01] Josh Blank: Just saying, Hey look, it’s certainly the interest group community. The interest group community is always Blooms very large. Yeah. Always activated. I mean, you know, there are, there are some pretty large educational interest institutions with very close proximity to the capital. So ultimately it’s always an agenda item, uh, but you know, the prominence of it, it changes over time.

[00:04:20] Josh Blank: And we’ll kind of get around to this, I think, at the end in some way because, you know, it’s salience changes over time. There’s always a core group of you. In some ways education is kinda like healthcare. Healthcare always comes up in, in the p in a poll as one of the most important problems facing the country, facing the state.

[00:04:34] Josh Blank: There’s a core group of, of, of voters who are always gonna say healthcare is a major issue. I’m not saying they’re the same voters every time.

[00:04:40] Jim Henson: and the size and that, you know, it’s perennial but not consistent. And it’s, yeah. In the magnitude of that

[00:04:45] Josh Blank: interest. Well, I’ll say it, it’s, it’s not, uh, I mean, yeah, the magnitude of that interest doesn’t, doesn’t vary a lot though in the sense that it’s usually less than 10% of voters, and that’s generally pretty true with education.

[00:04:55] Josh Blank: Also, usually less than 10% of voters are gonna prioritize education is a major issue unless there’s a reason for it to prioritize. For example, the 2011 education cuts, right? The big cuts to education after that financial crisis and you know, some misestimating about state revenue, et cetera, et cetera,

[00:05:11] Jim Henson: mis underestimation, est.

[00:05:13] Jim Henson: I think it’s the definitional moment of mis underestimation by the con controller at

[00:05:17] Josh Blank: that time. Well, it’s a funny thing, you know, going back through the point, it’s surprising how often we asked people whether they knew who the controller was back in that period. Right. But again, it was sort of, it was a.

[00:05:26] Josh Blank: So at that point in time, you know, education, we would ask sort of in a list of priorities, right? When we’re talking about, you know, what should the legislature focus on? And again, at the beginning of each session, we essentially ask a priority question. In the past we’ve done something kind of close ended that reflects what the conversation was.

[00:05:40] Josh Blank: More recently, we’ve gone to open-ended questions to let people tell us what they think the legislature should focus on.

[00:05:45] Jim Henson: Although not that we wanna stop doing that. I, you know, as long as we’re Yeah. Rangy in our podcast. Yeah, I know. It is interesting that. , those open-ended are not too far off of what the closed-ended lists yield us.

[00:05:57] Jim Henson: No, I mean, I mean, I mean when, if you compare it to like the M I P or you know, yeah. I mean it’s not exactly the same and it’s worth doing, but it is

[00:06:05] Josh Blank: kind of interesting. Well, you, I mean, look, I’ll just say there’s some validity in it and like, you know, When you look back in time, you see a lot, a much greater prominence among Republicans for like limiting spending, worry, concerned about the debt.

[00:06:15] Josh Blank: And then you kind of see that over time kind of fall aside. And I mean like, and that’s been reflected in the conversations like, and I just

[00:06:21] Jim Henson: think, you know, and the composition and tone of the

[00:06:22] Josh Blank: party, right? So, you know, What we al but the main point is we always see public education as, as one of the main priorities that people think the legislature should take on.

[00:06:30] Josh Blank: And, and the tone and the, and the context of that changes. So in, you know, sort of 20, you know, after 20 11, 20 13, 20 15, we’re talking about restoring the cuts to education. Then there’s sort of the question 2015, well is it, is it enough just to restore the cuts? Do you have to put in more money than you had in before?

[00:06:45] Josh Blank: And, and generally this led to, and again, like this, you imagine the politics of this, this led to a discussion that was like, well, wait a minute. Is this really about money? Right? Yeah. And so then, you know, we get a much, uh, more attention to public ed financing in 2017 leading into the 2019 session in which they really take on public ed financing, coupled with property tax reduction, a very comfortable space to be in.

[00:07:08] Josh Blank: But then after that, you’d say it kind of drops off the main agenda to some extent in 2021, you’ve got Covid, you’ve got the grid collapse, you’ve got election legislation, uh, after sort of all this action was taken in in 2019. Right? So all of this takes place, right? This is sort of the, the arc we’re kind of going on getting to this point.

[00:07:24] Josh Blank: It takes place in, you know, really generally lukewarm at best overall evaluations of the quality of the public education system, which I think is a public opinion person is interested in all this, right? You know, what we should focus on kind of shifts over time. Kind of shifts around. We’ll talk about why maybe, you know, some of these financing things are maybe more salient than some of these other things.

[00:07:41] Josh Blank: But then when we say, well, hey, how would you rate the public ed system? You know, we’ve asked this, I think, you know, it looks like at least, you know, 10 or 12 times since 2013, uh, and at no point has more than one in 10 voters said that the system’s excellent. Right? And generally it looks more like one in 20, you know, the plurality response is that it’s.

[00:07:59] Josh Blank: Right. But there’s more people who say it’s not very good or terrible than usually say that it’s good. And so, you know, it’s, it’s sort of this interesting kind of overall dynamic of, and they don’t move.

[00:08:10] Jim Henson: And those numbers just don’t move very much over

[00:08:12] Josh Blank: time. No, they don’t move very much over time. Now, I, I should say this, there is something that’s important to, to establish here, which is that this is, we’re asking about assessments of the system as a whole.

[00:08:22] Josh Blank: When we ask parents specifically about their kids’ schools, the evaluations almost always go up significantly. So if I say, and that’s this again, even if I say to a parent, how do you think the public school system in Texas is? Again, very few are gonna say it’s excellent. How is your kids’ school? Oh, it’s excellent.

[00:08:39] Josh Blank: Teachers are great. We love it, right? For the most part. Now look, there’s some data that indicates that that’s. , you know, changing potentially a little bit over time, but not a ton.

[00:08:49] Jim Henson: Yeah. So, well, I mean, I think that, you know, just AST stray comment on the overall kind of Yeah. You know, the fat part of that distribution, and again, we would expect this.

[00:08:59] Jim Henson: Yeah. You know, uh, we asked that question. We say, is it excellent, good, not very good, terrible. Right, right. And, , you know, the numbers for good and not very or not very good are remarkably stable in account for, you know, three quarter, you know? Yeah. About three quarters consistently. Yeah. Throughout this time series.

[00:09:17] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. between seven and eight of 10, um, . But I, you know, as I’m sitting here, it’s, it reminds me of, and, and I, I think her thinking has changed on this and I don’t wanna hold her to this. And yeah, if she hears this, she can call me and come on the show. But Erica Greeter’s book. Uh, red, hot and Sheep. No, no, it’s, isn’t that

[00:09:38] Josh Blank: right?

[00:09:38] Josh Blank: Yeah. Now I think that’s about, it’s, I think right is in the title too. Yeah, maybe so. And Right. It’s Inright, right?

[00:09:44] Jim Henson: Because, um, I, well, I don’t, don’t write, I think it’s just red, hot and sheep, but we’ll look it up during the, during the break. Hey, Rick. Okay. At any rate . Erica’s book on Texas, I mean, in some ways she made the, the argument.

[00:09:56] Jim Henson: Yeah, the Texas schools were not terrible. They weren’t great. And that’s probably about where the median point was for where the, that the public was fairly satisfied with that. These numbers sort of, sort of weigh that argument out. I mean, they’re the ways I might, you know, one might, you know, quibble with that argument, but it’s kind of there.

[00:10:12] Jim Henson: So what is that book? I wanna, yeah,

[00:10:13] Josh Blank: it’s big, hot, cheap, and Right. What America Can Learn From The Strange Unions of Texas. I’m sure you can get it in any of your favorite book sellers. Yes. Barnes and Noble, Amazon had a red cover anywhere, had a red cover, . Okay. Wasn’t, I knew the right, the Wright did two

[00:10:25] Jim Henson: things on that.

[00:10:26] Jim Henson: Good, real good real time fact checking on, on Erica Greeter’s book, and Erica’s now a columnist for the Houston Chronicle. If you wanna, uh, look, look Erica’s stuff up. Um, and so I think, you know, that’s an interesting piece of this. So let’s, let’s then talk about spending since that’s kind of underlying this.

[00:10:40] Jim Henson: And so in this last poll we asked a, a battery of questions where we, we asked people to evaluate whether the, the. Was spending too much, too little or about the right amount on, I think on this thing it was about a dozen issue areas and. So we have two results from that cuz we have everybody assess it individually and then we have a top, do we have a top priority?

[00:11:05] Jim Henson: No, we don’t have a top priority on this one. So we, so yeah, that’s why this, that’s why it was so hard to present this graphically. So we have all these comparative kind of standards of how much people should spend and the spending results on, on education Were. I, I think revealing to some degree. Yeah. I mean, I think, and this was K through 12 public education was the wording.

[00:11:25] Jim Henson: Right?

[00:11:25] Josh Blank: And the idea with a question like this is not because we think people have, you know, some sense of like the, you know, the distribution of the last budget cycle or anything like that. That’s not the idea.

[00:11:34] Jim Henson: Well, in fact, it’s because we assume

[00:11:35] Josh Blank: they don’t. Yeah, we assume they don’t. And, but the idea here is, is this is really about, you know, your perception of state investment in the areas.

[00:11:41] Josh Blank: Are they doing enough? Are they not doing. Right. Yeah. And that’s, or are they doing the right amount? And that’s the idea here. And so, and again, this is sort of, you know, this is a reasonable way to ask people about budgetary priorities, right. To get these perceptions.

[00:11:54] Jim Henson: Yeah. They respects the fact that peop large numbers don’t really mean anything to people.

[00:11:58] Josh Blank: Right. And so that’s just the question of this perception. And again, this is important cuz we’re talking about politics. Yeah. Right. So perceptions matter. So overall, when we ask this question, only 12% of taxes think that we’re spending too much on K through 12 public education. Almost half, 48% say we’re spending too little with about a third saying about the right amount.

[00:12:15] Josh Blank: And 12% saying, yeah, I’d have no idea. Right? But the main point is about half say we’re spending too little on public ed. Now, not surprisingly, it’s driven to some extent though, not entirely by Democrats. So 71% of Democrats, they were spending too little on educa on education compared to 27% of Republicans.

[00:12:32] Josh Blank: It’s not as though Republicans overall think we’re spending too much on public education. Only 17% do most the plurality, 42% say, think we’re spending about the right amount, which is, as you say, pretty common Republican response to the spending items. It’s a, it’s a pretty safe place to be if you’re basically happy with the direction of government, the distribution of resources, you say, yeah, this is about right.

[00:12:51] Josh Blank: Then when we look at it compared to everything else, what we basically find is K through 12 public education in the middle of the. Uh, of those 12 items, you know, in terms of where Texans think we’re spending too little. So the thing that, you know, what topped the list? Mental health services and this is consistent, this is bipartisan.

[00:13:08] Josh Blank: Right, right. Not surprising. It, it attaches to a lot of different issues actually. Yeah. Electric infrastructure was next. Again, that’s mostly driven by Democrats, but actually that a lot of Republicans who are, you know, I think not uninterested. Yeah.

[00:13:20] Jim Henson: Yeah. A little more conscious of keeping the lights on than they might’ve been five years ago.

[00:13:23] Jim Henson: Yeah. And I

[00:13:24] Josh Blank: should say, you know, to the made the. There’s a, there’s an an extent to which the two little responses are going to be driven by Democrats who overwhelmingly see the state is spending too little on most of these issues, so it’s gonna reflect democratic priorities, right? Healthcare comes next, for example, but then water infrastructure, then children in the state’s care, which is a pretty, you know, big issue area if you’ve been following it.

[00:13:43] Josh Blank: And it’s good that at least, you know, there’s a fair number of people who kind of see that. And then k12, public education comes in the middle. It’s only higher than the environment. Uh, you know, transportation. I’m gonna put a pin in border security for a second. Yeah. Higher ed broadband access, which is interesting.

[00:13:57] Josh Blank: I’ll say, you know, there’s a, a, a, you know, I think a, a bill release the other day talking, you know, and. Yeah. Talk of a lot of significant expense, uh, investments in broadband access and broadband access. Well, actually

[00:14:05] Jim Henson: there’s a broadband and a water bill dropped this week. Right.

[00:14:08] Josh Blank: And, and broadband access is, is kind of down, down the list on the

[00:14:11] Jim Henson: house, you know, on the house side we

[00:14:12] Josh Blank: should say.

[00:14:13] Josh Blank: Right. And at the very bottom is prisons. So I mean, K through 12 public education, kind of in the middle. Definitely driven mostly by Democrats, but not something that people are necessarily, and I. The Republicans are necessarily saying, oh, you need to put money to the system right now. Right?

[00:14:26] Jim Henson: Yeah. I mean, not to, and not to over-interpret the data, which we’re always advising people not to do.

[00:14:30] Jim Henson: But I mean that I, you know, I find that 42% of Republicans saying we’re spending about the right amount, pretty significant. I mean, as we have this multifaceted, you know, to broaden the discussion, where we’re kind of heading today is we have this multifaceted conversation about public education. To the extent that spending is a part of that, given the money that is out there available given mm-hmm.

[00:14:53] Jim Henson: the budget surplus, um, you know, you’re just not gonna find a lot of takers among Republicans for the argument that, okay, we also need to, you know, increase spending on, on public ed. And this, you know, this is not news. I mean, there’s a common conservative argument that, you know, public school problems in part.

[00:15:14] Jim Henson: and this is more traditional. We’re in a kind of a new twist Yes. That we’ll talk about in a minute, but, but the, you know, traditionally there has been an argument that, that the problems in public schools are not about the amount of money, it’s about how it’s spent. Right. You know, you can, you know, for those of you on Twitter, I mean, it is a common trope for particularly just to be fair public school funding out, you know, Voucher type advocates or you know, critics of the public schools, you know, to remind people that there are overpaid superintendents and you know, too many facilities and administrators, you know, too many, you know, yeah.

[00:15:49] Jim Henson: You know, thumb twiddling, administrators, et cetera, et cetera. So this is not, it’s not surprising, but I think it is worth noting that there is a receptive public audience for those arguments. Again, we get into the, you know, chicken egg issue here,

[00:16:04] Josh Blank: but, well, and you know what, and the thing is, it’s out there well, and there’s a, there’s a better avenue, which is, you know, which is property tax reduction.

[00:16:10] Josh Blank: So if you are, you know, a Republican legislator and you want to put more money into the public education system, you know, in some ways you get. You get a twofer if you go and actually lower property taxes. Right? And then basically, you know, at the very least, commit to making that up in the overall funding formulas on on the state side.

[00:16:26] Josh Blank: Right? And then you get to say, not only did I lower property taxes, but I increased funding to your public school system, which again, Not really gonna hurt you in most cases. Right. But, but to your point, I mean, we’ve asked about this before and I mean, you know, the share of Democrats who see increasing funding in the system as being an effective way to improve the system is significantly higher than the share of Republicans who agree with that.

[00:16:45] Josh Blank: And so that’s kind of important to address. Especially in the context of kind of some of the, the big issues. And I guess we move to that next, which is sort of, you know, what, what, what’s important? And the two things that top the list are sort of, you know, most important in terms of for the legislature to address in K through two public education, where it’s number one, school safety, number two, teacher pay and retention.

[00:17:03] Josh Blank: And so it’s interesting because on the one hand you’ve got teacher pay and retention pretty high up the list, pretty down, you know, far down the list is public school financing at this point, which again, used to be, if we were, if it were 20 15, 20 16, That might be a lot higher. Right. But now we’re talking about this, but it’s weird to kind of decouple those things.

[00:17:19] Jim Henson: Right? Right, exactly. And you, you know, and, and just to flesh out that list. Yeah. You know, to get where we’re going. I mean, to set up the, before we break it down into party will give, you know, kind of spoiler alert. So, you know, the first, the top item, as you said was school safety at 29%. Second was teacher pay, teacher retention at 21%.

[00:17:37] Jim Henson: Third was. Something that we explained to the respondent says curriculum content, that is what students are taught. And then ninth is I. Sort of foreshadowed was the fourth with 9% was parental rights. Right? Right. And then given the conversation, we should say, then the fifth response was, uh, voucher vouchers, educational savings accounts, or other school choice legislation.

[00:18:02] Jim Henson: And we phrased it that way at 8%. Mm-hmm. . , and then you break that up and the partisan structure looks very familiar to what we’re seeing right now.

[00:18:11] Josh Blank: Right? Right. We’re basically, you know, about two thirds of Democrats would prioritize school safety or teacher pay almost e you know, pretty much equal even proportions.

[00:18:20] Josh Blank: Uh, and so that, that generates, you know, most of the democratic response with curriculum content coming in, uh, closer. Now, again, what Democrats. Curriculum content. I think what republicans mean by curriculum content likely means different things. Right. Um, but you would say the, the fat part of, you know, the Democratic party on this is on school safety and teacher pay.

[00:18:38] Josh Blank: And I would say school safety weren’t so salient right now because of, of Uvalde. Right. Uh, you know, teacher pay would be dominating that list.

[00:18:45] Jim Henson: Right. And, and I think, you know, it’s interesting to step back for a second, I mean, to go back to. You know, you sort of, I think you, you flagged this to come back to Yeah.

[00:18:54] Jim Henson: And we should just come back to it now, which is, if you look at the priority of school safety among, partisan among both Democrats and Republicans mm-hmm. , you look at the priority on mental health. Right. And not that mental health is driven entirely by. , the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting. But you know, all our polling or, or the, you know, the, the extensive polling that we’ve done on gun safety and particularly on school shootings Right.

[00:19:19] Jim Henson: Suggest that, you know, a lot of Texans of both parties think that mental health is a big part of the explanation mm-hmm. for those kinds of events. And it is, you know, interesting to. , how much of that is rippling through, right. These preferences without, you know, without us saying, Hey, in the context of the school shooting, what do you think?

[00:19:42] Jim Henson: Right. We didn’t contextualize either of the questions that we got these responses on. They were more general questions, and it is interesting to see that diffusion. Of the impact of the shooting that is consistent with some of the immediate polling we did that saw these as, you know, areas where there was bipartisan sup, you know, some bipartisan interests or the attitudes were not night and day like they are on another.

[00:20:06] Jim Henson: you know, to my mind, equally obvious part of the explanation, which is gun safety. Right. You know,

[00:20:11] Josh Blank: and this is why we did this the way we did it. Right? I mean, to your point, you know, you’ve gone through the list of how we kinda laid out these priorities, and the point is, you know, I, I say this, this is like, you know, the, the term of the day, I guess, you know, think about levels of conceptualization.

[00:20:24] Josh Blank: We’re talking about broad issue areas that might be important, right? We’re not saying a law that would do x a law that would do Y because ultimately, There are no laws right now, . Yeah, and to your point, you said something earlier, you know, there may. There, there are probably, you know, dozens, if not many dozens of bills that are filed right now.

[00:20:45] Josh Blank: Meant to address school safety in different ways. Yeah. And only a couple of them are really gonna move forward in any significant way.

[00:20:52] Jim Henson: Right. And so I, I think as you look at this, um, So,

[00:20:55] Josh Blank: go ahead, go ahead. Well, I was gonna say, I mean, we, I mean if, if we’re done with the gun piece of this, I mean we can, let’s go back to the politics of this, right?

[00:21:01] Josh Blank: So just to go back and then move forward, right. So for Democrats, the vast majority are focused on school safety and teacher pay. I a hundred percent agree with you. I mean, I think the way that school safety and mental health and what we know about violence attitudes like. . That is a, a really solid cluster, again, especially for Republican leadership to, to operate in, because you’re gonna be solving the problem as viewed mostly by Republican voters, but by a large number of independents.

[00:21:23] Josh Blank: And even, you know, a significant number of Democrats in the mental health space. We look at Republicans, you know, one four say school safety should be the top priority, but so on the one hand you say, okay, but there’s a big butt here, right? In equal shares, say curriculum content, right? And if we take curriculum content and add to that, the share who say parental rights, Which I think we can talk about whether that makes sense or not.

[00:21:45] Josh Blank: We get to 43%, I’m sorry, 42%. Yeah. If we add the people who say vouchers, , right now we’re at 56% and now, now this is sort of the question. Does that make sense? Right. Should you bundle all the things together? I think you can From a, from a politics standpoint, yeah. From a policy standpoint, it’s gonna be more challenging.

[00:22:07] Josh Blank: And I mean, this kind of comes down to this sort of the ultimate question. I think, you know, that kind of, that this, these results bring up to me, which is, you know, what’s going to be enough for the Republican legislature to accomplish. In public ed and what kinds of things will be enough, right, to be able to say some effective mission accomplished or we move the ball forward significantly.

[00:22:26] Josh Blank: And there’s a challenge here. I mean, I think in all way, you know, curriculum content as discussed by Republicans, parental rights and vouchers and school choice are really kind of about in general, dissatisfaction with the way the public education system is going. The problem is that the former two are about parents who have their kids in the schools right now.

[00:22:45] Josh Blank: Right. And the, and the latter is about, uh, parents who do not and don’t intend to Right. Or don’t want to. And those are like, and just from policy standpoint, those are, those are different things. Yeah.

[00:22:55] Jim Henson: I mean, I, I think the big question is, you know, how, or one of the big questions for, for how the legislature moves forward on this and how the, the politics play.

[00:23:05] Jim Henson: Is how coherently those things can be stitched together. Right, right. Does it look, you know, does it, you know, I, I, I think to Democrats it looks a little bit more like you’re building a Frankenstein’s monster to Republicans. You have a little bit more potential for building this line of argument that we’ve been talking about.

[00:23:25] Jim Henson: Right. And we’ll come back and I, I’m not forgetting about the, the parents’, non-parents thing, right. The kids in the school. But I mean, I think. You know, the, they did. You know, the argument here to me is how, you know, in, in, in stark political terms from the legislative perspective is how successful can you be?

[00:23:45] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. at turning what has been marketed for the most part as an argument about quote unquote school choice, which, you know, we’re not. You know, we’re, we’re not supposed to say vouchers anymore from the perspective of advocates, but school choice is still very much, you know, a term of the term of choice.

[00:24:05] Jim Henson: Even if it is a term of art here. Mm-hmm. , um, how much can you move that discussion, which has not been able to gain a Republican majority in the House of Representatives to. as concrete about it as possible. Can you take that argument, expand it with what we’re seeing in these numbers? Yeah. By coding, recoding education, if you will, for Republicans as about parental rights, as about not the effectiveness of the public schools, but.

[00:24:37] Jim Henson: their role, their ideological role, and their cultural role in Texas right now. And will that create enough pressure on here to four reluctant legislators? Mm-hmm. ? Um, I th you know, to me that’s the question in this space right now. Right. You know, I know you wanna flush that out with this, but I mean, I think, you know, so the, you know, the argument that then comes up is, well, you know, I mean, the argument that legislators are making.

[00:25:05] Jim Henson: I, you know, this is a little bit of a diversion here, but you know, I think rural legislators, if you look back at the rural numbers on public funds for, for private schools mm-hmm. , small numbers, they’re small, but you know, generally it’s not like, , the pattern in the legislature replicates itself in public opinion.

[00:25:27] Jim Henson: And what I mean by that is, you know, having gone back and looked at a few more, a few of these, you know, it’s never as clearly cut that rural voters are saying, oh yeah, we don’t have any choices here, so we can’t, you know? Right. And so, you know, so you can see where we’re going, where I’m going with this.

[00:25:43] Jim Henson: but nonetheless, the legislators have not been persuaded by that. And this is an area where, you know, it goes back to kind of the classic formulation of representative government. Do you want me to like represent exactly what you think you want, or do you want me to use my judgment to represent your interests?

[00:25:58] Jim Henson: And in many ways it’s like the classic, you know, Edmund Burke dilemma here. In a lot of ways, rural legislators have been acting as trustees rather than delegates. Strictly speaking, if you look at. At Republican public opinion near as I’ve been able to, near as I recall it, in looking at those rural numbers.

[00:26:15] Jim Henson: I mean, I think I’ve always been a little surprised, like, oh, let’s see what the rural number’s on choice. Well, yeah. You know, there’s not like real mem, you know, rural voters are not going in moss. Hey, We don’t have choices here. You know, some are saying, yeah, that we should be able to do that, others are not.

[00:26:30] Jim Henson: And part of that is probably age in what’s going on in, in these rural areas. But the, the pregnant question to me here is, does this recoding? I mean, I think, you know, governor Abbott keeps saying, you know, this, this should be about, you know, education not indoctrination in the public schools. You know, I’ve kind of been thinking about that in a slightly pivoted way, which is, , you know, we’re moving from a discussion that has been keyed re relatively unsuccessfully for advocates.

[00:27:00] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. to we want to give you school choice to now we want to give you ideological and cultural choice. Right. Will that get them over?

[00:27:10] Josh Blank: Yeah. And I mean, the thing about this, you know, to your point, yeah. I mean, I just in a response to sort of the, your, your read of, uh, the voucher support numbers, you know, and it’s one of those things, Uh, you know, education.

[00:27:23] Josh Blank: I’m, I’m, this is sort of interesting thing cuz we, you know, a lot of ways we can go with this. Yeah. But education doesn’t translate super well into, into public opinion cuz Yes, I agree. I think there’s a, there’s a lot more ambivalence about vouchers out there in the data. Yeah. Than I think, you know, the lead than, than.

[00:27:38] Josh Blank: then the legislature reflects in the way that discussion goes, right? Yeah. But this is where he kind of has to ask about like, you know, salience and intensity of these opinions, right? And centrality is the other thing. Right? Right. Not only like how much are you thinking about it, how intensely do you feel about it, but also like how like, How central is it to your political identity?

[00:27:56] Josh Blank: Right. In some kind of ways, and I’ll say this, if you are a, you know, if you work in a public school system in a rural county, it’s probably a pretty big part of your identity. It might be kind of a part of the town’s identity in some ways, you know? Yeah. And so for the people who care about this issue on either side, they care intensely.

[00:28:15] Josh Blank: Right? So you’re talking about the employees who have a direct sa, you have public school parents who are ideologically committed to the system, and then you’ve got, you know, again, a large community of homeschool and alternatives going. People wanna just send their kids to different schools. Right. But nonetheless, Texas is

[00:28:30] Jim Henson: huge.

[00:28:31] Jim Henson: Right. Well, and you also have another group that we have to mention, which. , you don’t have a, you know, you’re, you’re not directly interested. You neither. You either work for a school system, your livelihood, it’s not connected or Yeah, that’s my, but that’s everybody

[00:28:43] Josh Blank: else. Yeah, that’s everyone else, right? So I mean, like I can have a kid in the public school system in our survey, you know, when we ask, you know, do you have a kid in the public school system?

[00:28:49] Josh Blank: It’s about 20% of the registered voters we survey. So about one in five say they have a kid in the public school, some in, you know, infinite small group of people, you know, work in the public school systems in terms of Texas, numerical numerically, And even smaller numerical number of people homeschool their kids or take, you know, probably take, take advantage of school choice options, right?

[00:29:09] Josh Blank: That already exist. , but those people care a lot, but they’re very small. And so what ends up, you end up having is you remember having survey results, let’s say, on vouchers. Where I would say, you know, and again, I’m really, I really am so reluctant to, to dismiss a survey result to say, well, these people don’t like, yeah, they say this, but they don’t, you know, I mean, they feel strongly about it.

[00:29:25] Josh Blank: But in public education, I think we have, we have precedent for this. We go back to the public education cuts of 2011. Repeatedly about perceptions of, you know, quality in the system, whether there were changed, whether the funding, ch changes, mattered, all these things. And we talk, I think we wrote an, you know, we wrote a blog post way back in the day about the dog that, you know, didn’t bark.

[00:29:43] Josh Blank: Right? Right. In the sense, you know, everyone was saying, oh, you’re gonna hear about this, about all these public education cuts. And then ultimately people may do, they moved on. And most ki people don’t, most people, and especially most voters don’t have kids in the public school system. They’re not interfacing with it in any direct way.

[00:29:56] Josh Blank: Uh, and. There is just a limit in some of this, but,

[00:29:59] Jim Henson: well, I mean, I, I guess I think about it a little bit. Di well finish the

[00:30:02] Josh Blank: thought. Well, and I was just gonna, well, I, I don’t wanna, you know, I’ll, I’ll say where I was gonna go and then you can decide if you wanted to go that way or not. I was gonna, you know, so, I mean, I think it’s important to think about people’s interface with the system in a really fundamental way and kinda understanding what’s going on here.

[00:30:13] Josh Blank: Right. You know, I think we’ve talked about this before, the nature of like the size of house districts versus the size of state senate. You know, those kinds of things. We’ve gone over this on the podcast, but if we look at voters now, you know, we can look at sort of, you know, voters who may have, you know, more of an interface with the system and voters who don’t, we just by looking at age groups, right?

[00:30:29] Josh Blank: Yeah. So should I go into this or you think or Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, let’s do that. So, you know, if we look at that at prior, you know, the education priority, uh, by parties, we look among Republicans, let’s say first, and we look at voters under 44 and those who are over 45 plus. If we look first of all at all at Republican voters over the age of 45, curriculum content is the number one.

[00:30:47] Josh Blank: Issue 28%, so almost one in three. Then school safety, then parental rights, then vouchers. If we look at the Republican voters under the age of 44, the top issue is school safety, 35%, then parental rights, then curriculum content. And so, you know, I mean it’s, again, it’s a rearrangement of the thing and it’s kind of their minor, minor pieces of this.

[00:31:09] Josh Blank: But you say, okay, you know, that makes sense. Right? And it’s the first thing, right? Like what? What is my, you know, what do I want? Well, I want the kids to be safe cuz I have kids in the school. And again, I’m not saying that older voters don’t want the kids to be safe. Yeah. But you can have a more abstract attachment.

[00:31:23] Josh Blank: To what we’re talking about here. Now, if we say, you know, if we look just at people who actually have kids in the public schools, the first thing they say is, again, school safety, and then teacher. And that’s 55% right there of public school parents. Yeah. Who are voters in Texas again, direct interface. Do they have teachers?

[00:31:40] Josh Blank: Are they safe? Next curriculum, content, next parental rights, which together add up to 20%.

[00:31:45] Jim Henson: Right. So I mean, to me, I mean, and you know, we’ve got, and we won’t go into all the numbers, but we’ve also got numbers where you broke it down by, you know, 44 and under and 45 and over, and it shows a similar pattern.

[00:31:56] Jim Henson: Right. That makes the point. And I guess you know where I was, what I was gonna say, and it’s good to have the date in front of us. . You know, the way I kind of think about this in my own kind of macro level way of thinking about these things, right? Which one could say is, you know, whatever, loosey goosey, but, or maybe, well anyway, we won’t use the other adjectives.

[00:32:15] Jim Henson: I’m not sure I may allowed to use those words in a public institution anymore, but, um, , you know, if you’ve got this direct investment in the way that you were laying out or this direct experiential connection mm-hmm. with the public school system or children, or you know, the education, right? Education is a process, right?

[00:32:36] Jim Henson: You’re gonna have. a different affect and a different set of priorities. A different, you know, however you attitudinal response than if it’s more abstract. And there are other things filling it in. And what I was gonna jump in and say is like, so if you don’t have that direct connection, then the question is, what else fills in that attitudinal space when somebody says, Hey, what do you think about this?

[00:32:59] Jim Henson: Yeah. Right. And if you’re not thinking that, and I think this really illustrates that and. the population, you know, uh, if Republicans now have a lot of other material that has been, well ar, you know, well, you know, that has been directly articulated by opinion leaders and elected officials. Mm-hmm. and, you know, partisan media, frankly, right.

[00:33:23] Jim Henson: That says, Hey, here’s a bunch of information, or here’s a bunch of ways of framing public education. makes sense to them. And that’s why we’re seeing that, you know, curriculum, content, parental rights, right. You know, these, you know, and then, you know, once again, once you put those two things in the hopper mm-hmm.

[00:33:46] Jim Henson: maybe what comes out of that is, you know, maybe we do need alternatives to these institutions. And to me, what’s a little bit ironic in the big historical intellectual sense is, you know, this is kind of like, oh, you know, You know, institutions have a real impact on socializing people. Turns out, you know, and, and you know, there aren’t these, you know, we need to pay attention to institutions as battlegrounds.

[00:34:14] Jim Henson: And, you know, this is no big insight and we’ve seen, but it’s. It’s part of a larger, to my mind kind of realization or, or uh, uh, uh, kind of the putting into action politically an intellectual point about the role of institutions and the use of institutions to political ends that is very interesting and a little bit different than what we think of as classic conservative thought.

[00:34:42] Josh Blank: Yeah, and I mean, and I think, you know, and, and I think what you said there really just lays out in some ways, you know, I mean, in some ways why this issue has changed. I mean, I mean, again, vouchers is moving into this. That’s sort of what’s so interesting to me about this discussion is the way that, you know, in some ways, as you’ve been laid out, you know, parental rights and this idea about curriculum, you know, again, they connect with vouchers in an interesting way, but nonetheless, you know how you mobilize this issue politically.

[00:35:05] Josh Blank: You know, is, I think is a pretty big challenge. Well, I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s, and for, and for both sides. Yeah. No, I think that’s right. Right. I mean, you laid out, I mean, you laid out sort of the, you know, we’re talking about like, you know, basically in some ways, Uh, you know, playing to conservative voters, and when I say conservative, I just mean, you know, generally conservative.

[00:35:23] Josh Blank: I’m not even talking about like ideologies here, but, but playing to conservative voters sensibilities about, you know, let’s say the primacy of, you know, whatever the. American exceptionalism. Let’s put that out there as one thing, you know, and well,

[00:35:37] Jim Henson: heteronormativity,

[00:35:38] Josh Blank: heteronormativity, we can go down the list general, you know, but, but again, like, you know, but about this sort of, just shoot me now.

[00:35:45] Josh Blank: But a commitment, but let’s just say a, a commitment to an ideological worldview and, and about, you know, the role that education is playing and the continuation of it. Look, that is pretty abstract. And for Democrats too, I mean, just to be fair here, you know, you’re sitting here saying, no, no, no. Listen, our democratic voters, they’re very committed to the public education system.

[00:36:02] Josh Blank: Yeah. They do not want money going to, uh, you know, let’s say to a parochial institution. And it’s like, and you say, what’s parochial mean? I guess like, whoa.

[00:36:10] Jim Henson: You know? And so there’s, I guess that’s what’s interesting to me about That’s the point. I mean, the way you’re getting at the point I was getting at it in a, in a different way, which is that, you know, I guess what I’m, what I’m marveling at here a little bit Yeah.

[00:36:21] Jim Henson: Is the very concrete operationalization of. , the realization that public education institutions. Take a deep breath are basically the means of ideological reproduction, uh, uh, . So, you know, I mean like, you know, these things are big fights and you know, and so we’re either gonna, you know, I mean, it’s a two front battle now, you know, I mean, if you want to be fair on both sides, right?

[00:36:46] Jim Henson: In which what is taught in the public schools the norm, and not just the content of curriculum, but the cultural norms mm-hmm. are worth fighting over. And the two front battle right now, particularly among. , you know, conservatives and, and, and a lot of conservatives is, we’re either gonna, at the same time, we’re gonna try to change what’s going on inside the public schools, but we’re also going to weaken the institutions and create alternatives to that.

[00:37:12] Jim Henson: Right. And you know, that’s, that’s, to me, that’s the game that’s afoot right now. And I’m not, it’s a rational strategy from that point of view, at least in the short run. But I think that is the stakes of what we’re looking at right now. Well,

[00:37:25] Josh Blank: yeah, and then I would say, you know, take a step back and kinda like sum up, you know, sum of that.

[00:37:30] Josh Blank: You know, and put it, you know, this into the full context here, right? So if you’re gonna kind, we’re kinda get to the end here, say, you know, so while school safety and like, you know, the shortage of teachers are gonna continue to receive a, a bunch of attention and, and, you know, this teacher shortage retention thing could push itself onto the agenda by force at some point, depending on what happens with that.

[00:37:47] Josh Blank: Right? But like, these kind of Well, I just mean like, you know, I mean like, and this was going on. I mean, you know, you can imagine like, if schools can’t like operate, you know, there’s, there’s problems, right? Yeah. But you know, these sort of. Educational campaign issues of the kind of, of 2022, I think they’re gonna get higher billing.

[00:38:03] Josh Blank: And there’s two reasons for that. Again, one again, where the center of Republican attitudes are on this. Yeah. Which is, you know, not with putting more money in the system or tinkering with the financing, but really in these sort of culture war issues. Right, right. And, and just generally, you know, in some ways, again, acknowledging the indoctrinating effects of the institutions.

[00:38:20] Josh Blank: Right. Um, but in some, They can probably get a, I mean, you know, I would say you could, one could probably get away with just addressing those things and not addressing, you know, I would say teacher pay or financing the system and maybe even not school safety in a terribly extensive way because of all the things we’re talking about.

[00:38:39] Josh Blank: Because the things that people who really care about it. Yeah, care, those are the things, and for everybody else, it’s kind of abstract, right? So that’s not, you know, is it gonna, is it gonna supplant border? For Republicans is the top issue. Yeah, no. Yeah, not a chance. You know, and ultimately, unless you know, the, the bills that the legislature eventually passed is having to do with public education, just fundamentally offend the vast majority of Democrats, which they will on their face, but also do so in an intense way, which I think seems unlikely.

[00:39:07] Josh Blank: Right. Then there’s still gonna be the same range of issues that Democrats are interested in, including education, but also gun safety and also healthcare,

[00:39:14] Jim Henson: and also the crime. Well, I mean, I, I think what’s, yeah, I mean is, is we’re talking about this, I mean, I think what’s interesting, or one of the things that’s interesting about this is that, you know, that’s at the intersection of, you know, the internal process and politics of the legislature and public opinion is the context of that.

[00:39:30] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. and, you know, public opinion sort of filtering in, in some ways is that it’s easy to conceptualize this. In the public education space in the way that we’ve been talking about to some degree. But then there are these other external things that, you know, are bound to enter into it because of the way the legislative process works and the messiness and lack of, you know, sharpness, if you will, in public attitudes, which is we were just gonna have this fight and it was gonna be just,

[00:39:59] Jim Henson: The kind of way I’ve been reducing it about like, okay, what are we doing in the public schools, right? What is the role of the public school? Who controls the institutions, right? Who controls like how you know what they’re doing and their core functions? But there are these other elements that are. That are entering into it.

[00:40:17] Jim Henson: Yeah. Right. The deflection of, or you know, the, the desire to demonstrate action on school violence without talking about guns. Right. So all of a sudden, you know, we’re talking about increased funding conceivably for school safety and facilities in all of this. Um, other elements that are part of the larger conversation that are also buffeting.

[00:40:38] Jim Henson: This, you know, I mean, obviously property taxes. Yeah, sure. Um, and so I think it does bring out the way that they’re connected in the way. , you know, this is, you know, even if we were just gonna look at, think about, okay, we can, we’re just gonna silo this. This is gonna be, I mean, this is completely hypothetical, non-realistic, stylized example, but okay.

[00:40:58] Jim Henson: This is gonna be the session where, you know, what our main, we’re gonna the main priority, no matter what is gonna be public education. Mm-hmm. , we are going to sit here and we are gonna have a serious focused conversation that is fact based and evidence based and blah, blah, blah, where everybody’s time is going to be spent on this.

[00:41:14] Jim Henson: it’s a stylized example. Cause all these other things would still be connected. Well, and then you’d say

[00:41:18] Josh Blank: to do what? Yeah. Right, right. And that’s a big thing.

[00:41:20] Jim Henson: But that, that would be, but that would be the big question. But that would also clarify, you know, that that would be the clarifying effect of that stylized, non-realistic exam.

[00:41:30] Jim Henson: But it’s also why we’re not gonna have it. No,

[00:41:32] Josh Blank: but you know, it’s great. But I think that, but I think that stylized, non-realistic example is probably a pretty good way to think about what’s gonna happen. Yeah. Because when you get to that end point and say, well, okay, we’re meeting to have this conversation to do what, and we say like, is it to fix the way we finance the system?

[00:41:46] Josh Blank: Is it to make it the best system of any of the states, you know, in the country? Is it to deal with the fact, you know, again, that the, we’ve, you know that there’s a feeling out there that’s pretty widespread, that the schools are indoctrinating the students in the wrong kind of way. Right. . Well, you know what?

[00:42:03] Josh Blank: I think that’s gonna be the winner. Yeah. Right. If that, yeah. Right. I mean, and, and, and, but I mean, but that’s the point there. If that’s the winner, well then that kind of tells you where we should expect, you know, things to go. And so, I mean, one of the things is, you know, I don’t like to make predictions, which is terrible.

[00:42:16] Josh Blank: But, you know, there is sort, if you think about, what do you expect to have happen here? I mean, I think there’s, you know, if we go down the session, say, you know, where is. Public education, spending, its time and resources and energy. I expect a lot of time and resources and energy to be spent in

[00:42:27] Jim Henson: this space.

[00:42:28] Jim Henson: Yeah. Whether they succeed, whether it succeeds or not, certainly it’s

[00:42:31] Josh Blank: gonna be there. You know what’s interesting, I just wanna add one thing about the polling, just to go, you know, in the, the, the arc of it. But, you know, you mentioned, uh, this idea of, you know, the institution is sort of the indoctrinate and all that kind of stuff.

[00:42:40] Josh Blank: And, and it’s funny because, you know, right now

[00:42:42] Jim Henson: we’re, there’s a story we can say agent of socialization. If we want to be more social sciencey, I guess do

[00:42:46] Josh Blank: what you want to do, but. But you know, it’s interesting, and we’re at a point now where basically the question is, you know, what kind of standards, limits, guardrails is the state going to put on, you know, the, the ISDs, the many, many ISDs in the schools across the state, right as it go, as it relates to, you know, how students are taught about, you know, especially sensitive topics.

[00:43:05] Josh Blank: What’s interesting is when you go back in the polling, you know, in sort of the last decade and think about this discussion, you look at the priorities, people, you know, uh, ascribe to education. And what used to be a popular priority for Republican voters was letting the local school districts make basically curriculum decisions.

[00:43:19] Josh Blank: That was a big discussion that was going on for a while about, you know, this happened to do with graduation requirements. They tried to localize a lot of graduation requirement, you know, issues. But this was, you know, this ongoing idea of like, you know, and again, I mean, local control always pops its head up in these weird ways.

[00:43:32] Josh Blank: And again, you. You know, again, we’ll caveat and put aside the discussion of race and all this for, you know, three other podcasts some other time. But you know, that was where the discussion was in some ways with, well, maybe we should give the districts more control so that they can, you know, deal with their parents and their, you know, norms and that kind of thing.

[00:43:49] Josh Blank: That didn’t really go anywhere. But it’s interesting now that, you know, a few years later you come back and say, no, we should tell everybody. Exactly. Yeah. What the rules of the road are.

[00:43:57] Jim Henson: Well, you know, and I would argue, yeah, that’s the, that’s a sign of, uh, An embrace of, you know, managing institutional control to some degree.

[00:44:05] Jim Henson: But I, you know, I, I think, you know, the other thing, I mean, it’s funny as you say that, I mean, it kind of underlines the point of just how, you know, abstract it is. Yeah. You know, to isolate these things. The other thing I was gonna throw in there was, Yeah. Something else in the poll that I think, you know, maybe this is putting a pin for the, you know, one of the upcoming podcasts is that the state’s growth is not a trivial consideration here, because when you talk about spending, you know, we may be spending the right amount, but if we’re spending the right amount per pupil, Even then we need to

[00:44:38] Josh Blank: increase spending.

[00:44:39] Josh Blank: Yeah. I mean, I have a note in here that I’ll just say it out loud. You know, it’s, it’s really easy to spend a lot on public education without spending enough. Yeah, right. Depending, depending on what your goals are,

[00:44:47] Jim Henson: because you have to spend a lot just to keep up with where the state is right now. And that is another, but you know, you, as soon as you bring that in, Ooh, it, it, and it raises a bunch of these questions, you know, the questions about race that you raised, the equity about, you know, the questions about control, the, you know, all of these kinds of things.

[00:45:05] Jim Henson: Also, you can’t really keep out a bunch of these other contextual, well, that’s

[00:45:08] Josh Blank: a great place to have this podcast in some ways, right? Because on the one hand, you’ve got a, a push by, you know, really in many ways, you know, uh, an ideological, an ideological drive to, uh, that’s really being driven by, in many ways, older, whiter voters and a public education system.

[00:45:24] Josh Blank: Dominated by non-white, young Texans. Yeah. Yeah. And so to the extent that this is, you know, in a lot of ways about woke ideology, you know, and you think about, again, you know, gender identity differences by age group and things like that. I mean, you’re just talking, this is why, you know, yeah, this can happen this session, but you know what, it’s not.

[00:45:41] Josh Blank: We’re gonna come back to this and again and again and again because the system and you know, sort of these things are in. A clear collision course with each other. I mean, if not already colliding, right?

[00:45:50] Jim Henson: Yeah. You don’t have to scratch very hard at the construct of woke ideology to get to that point.

[00:45:54] Jim Henson: Right. Uncomfortable fact of the, of the situation. I think for some people with that , thanks again to our excellent production team in the dev studio in the College of Liberal Arts here at the University of Texas at Austin. The data we talked about and. And the blog post archive you can find@texaspolitics.tex.edu.

[00:46:17] Jim Henson: Thanks to Josh for being here, uh, in all his work on this. Thank you for listening, and we will be back soon with another second reading podcast. The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.