Gov. is starting to make good on his threat to politically target fellow Republicans who oppose school vouchers, issuing his first endorsement of a primary challenger to a House member who has helped thwart his top legislative priority of the year.

Abbott on Tuesday backed Hillary Hickland, an activist mother who is running against Rep. , R-Temple. Shine was one of 21 Republicans who voted earlier this month to strip a voucher provision out of an education bill, delivering the most decisive blow yet to the governor’s agenda.

“Hillary Hickland is the kind of new conservative leader we need in Austin to deliver results in the Texas House,” Abbott said in a statement. “This past year, she worked relentlessly to empower parents by traveling to Austin to advocate for Texas families and students.”

Abbott’s endorsement of Hickland is the first time he has backed a primary opponent to a House Republican since May 2022, when he backed Stan Kitzman, the successful opponent to Rep. Phil Stephenson, R-Wharton. Before that, Abbott endorsed three primary challengers to House Republicans in 2018 and one prevailed.

Abbott has already endorsed for reelection all the House Republicans who voted against the amendment that removed the voucher program from the education legislation. And on Monday, Abbott quickly endorsed a candidate to succeed a voucher opponent, Rep. Kyle Kacal, R-College Station, after he announced his retirement.

Shine and Abbott have a more personal history on the issue. When Abbott was touring the state earlier this year to build public support for his voucher proposal, Shine appeared with the governor at a private school in his district.

Shine, who announced his reelection campaign late last month, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since 2017, Shine has represented House District 55, a Republican-leaning district in Bell County. He previously served in the House from 1986-1991.

Hickland is a mother of four from Belton who took her three school-aged children out of public schools in recent years. In addition to advocating for vouchers, Hickland has also been outspoken about sexually explicit books in school libraries.

Hickland describes herself as a “strong supporter of school choice in the form of Education Savings Accounts,” the voucher initiative that Abbott supports.

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Facing some of the highest property taxes in the nation, Texas voters could sign off on a in the Nov. 7 .

Early voting is under way for the slew of proposed amendments. Proposition 4 would allow the state to spend $18 billion on property tax cuts for homeowners and businesses, cut school districts’ tax rates and enact other tax changes.

Whether Texas can afford those tax cuts in the long term remains unanswered. Lawmakers tapped a record $33 billion surplus this year, fueled by the state’s robust economic growth and federal COVID-19 relief money, to cover an increase in the state’s contribution to public schools, a shared cost between the state and school districts.

Republican tax-cut warriors have heralded the tax-cut package, which gained bipartisan support in both chambers of the Texas Legislature, as unprecedented tax relief for homeowners and business owners. Public education advocates, meanwhile, warn that the proposal could imperil public school funding and lead to future school budget cuts. And renters would see no direct tax relief should the constitutional amendment pass.

The entire property tax-cut package is $18 billion altogether, but it includes $5.3 billion in cuts lawmakers approved in prior years. If voters approve the constitutional amendment, the state would send $12.7 billion to school districts so they could pay for new cuts to their property tax collections, which make up the bulk of landowners’ property tax bills. Of that, $5.6 billion will go toward more than doubling Texas’ main tax break for homeowners — the state’s homestead exemption on school district taxes, or the chunk of a home’s value that can’t be taxed to pay for public schools. The constitutional amendment would raise the exemption from $40,000 to $100,000.

The rest of that money — some $7.1 billion — will go toward paying school districts to lower their tax rates by replacing local property tax dollars with state sales tax revenue, a tax-cut method lawmakers refer to as “compression.” Doing that would lower the tax rate school districts use to pay for operating costs, like teacher salaries, by 10.7 cents per every $100 of property value.

Together, those measures will translate to major tax savings for Texas homeowners, proponents argue.

Had the ballot measure been in place last year, the owner of a home appraised at the state’s median sales price — $340,000 — paying the average school tax rate would have spent about $940 less on their property tax bill, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. That comes out to a little less than $80 a month.

State Sen. , a Houston-area Republican and Lt. Gov. ’s chief lieutenant on property taxes, said homeowners can expect bigger savings in the next few years. The typical Texas homeowner could see more than $2,500 in tax savings the first two years, according to figures provided by his office.

“It’s their money coming back to them,” Bettencourt said. “That’s what should happen when the government has a surplus.”

Cutting Texans’ property taxes was a top priority this year for Republican lawmakers, who pledged to use a record state surplus to deliver relief to taxpayers. After months of GOP infighting over how to achieve those cuts, state lawmakers sent Gov. a $12.7 billion tax-cut proposal in July. Abbott signed the proposal into law, but voters have the final say in whether to cut their own taxes.

Public education advocates worry that, in the event of an economic downturn, sales tax dollars would dry up — leading to budget cuts at the state level and leaving school districts in the lurch.

“That’s going to put our schools on a pogo stick that’s going to jump up and down with the economy and have no stability,” said Chandra Villanueva, director of policy and advocacy at the left-leaning Every Texan.

Republican lawmakers are betting that the state’s massive economic growth will allow them to maintain the cuts for the time being. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar recently projected that Texas would avoid a recession and have an $18 billion surplus when lawmakers return to Austin in January 2025.

“I’m quite confident that for the foreseeable future, we’ll be fine,” Bettencourt said.

But Bettencourt acknowledged that lawmakers would have to revisit the cuts if the Texas economy takes a turn for the worse — though the boost in the homestead exemption would have to remain, given that it would be written into the state’s constitution.

Beyond explicit tax cuts, the package includes other tax reforms.

For the first time, some businesses will see a limit on how much their appraised property values, a key factor in the equation of how property tax bills get calculated, can grow each year. Homeowners already benefit from a 10% cap on how much their taxable home value can grow each year. But businesses currently don’t have such a cap.

The new cap would apply to commercial, mineral and residential properties that don’t receive a homestead exemption — like rental homes and apartment buildings — that are appraised at less than $5 million. Should voters greenlight the proposition, appraisal districts could not raise the taxable value of those properties by more than 20% each year for the next three years. The cap would expire in 2026 unless lawmakers and voters decide to extend it.

Tax policy experts have doubted the effectiveness of such a cap. Property values surged in 2022 amid the state’s exploding population and job growth, according to figures provided by the comptroller’s office. But outside of 2022, that kind of value growth wasn’t typical for most types of properties, even as Texas boomed over the past decade. Owners of commercial properties in 2022 saw the market value of their holdings grow by 15% on average — short of the 20% cap.

If those property owners saw their values hit the 20% limit each year, local governments and school districts could just raise their tax rate to make up for revenue lost to lower property appraisals, said Lynn Krebs, a research economist at the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University — resulting in higher tax rates for all property owners.

“We tend to look at it just on face value and say, ‘Hey, we’re not going to make you pay tax on more than a 20% increase, isn’t that wonderful?’” Krebs said. “What does that mean in reality for everybody else? It means that they’re going to have to pay more to make up for that loss in revenue. The revenue is going to come from somewhere.”

The proposition would also exempt more businesses from having to pay the state’s franchise tax. If approved, the amendment would also allow voters to handpick three members to serve on their local appraisal district’s board of directors. Currently, people are appointed to those posts.

The tax-cut package before Texas voters notably leaves out a key class of Texas taxpayers: renters.

Renters make up more than one-third of the state’s households and pay one-quarter of the state’s school property taxes through their monthly rent, according to the comptroller’s office. With high rents across the state, tenants spend significantly more of their household income on keeping a roof over their heads than homeowners. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have tax-cut programs aimed at providing property tax relief to renters, particularly seniors and low-income tenants.

But GOP lawmakers ultimately excluded any direct relief for renters when crafting the tax-cut package before Texas voters. Tax-cut proponents have occasionally argued that renters benefit from tax rate compression because their landlords won’t charge as much in rent if their taxes aren’t as high. Though property taxes make up about 20% of the rent bill, they’re not the only factor in determining rents — which are ultimately determined by the market.

“Legislators, at this point, don’t feel enough pressure yet to provide solutions for renters,” said Ben Martin, research director for Texas Housers, a housing advocacy group for low-income Texans. “Until legislators feel that pressure heat up to provide solutions for renters, it’s not surprising that they’re not going to do anything. But the data is really clear: That’s where the need is.”

Disclosure: Every Texan and Texas A&M University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

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Speaking to reporters at a campaign event in Houston on Thursday, Abbott expanded on comments he made late Wednesday during

During the broadcast, Abbott said he would revisit the landmark 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe, which struck down a Texas law that denied state funding to educate noncitizens.

In that case, four immigrant families had sued the Tyler Independent School District for expelling their children when they could not provide birth certificates.

Abbott said that states need to be able to enforce their own immigration policies or the federal government should cover the cost of educating undocumented children in public schools.

“The Supreme Court has ruled states have no authority themselves to stop illegal immigration into the states,” he said. “However, after the Plyler decision they say, ‘Nevertheless, states have to come out of pocket to pay for the federal government’s failure to secure the border.’ So one or both of those decisions will have to go.”

Abbott, who has sent thousands of National Guard members to the to shore up what he has insisted is soft immigration enforcement by the Biden administration, is also a vocal opponent to the lifting of the policy known as Title 42, which turned immigrants away at the United States’ border with Mexico because of the pandemic. That order is expected to be lifted later this month.

Abbott pointed to the Plyler decision, as well as a 2012 Supreme Court decision that found that Arizona could not pass immigration laws that undermine federal immigration policy, striking down most of a state immigration law there.

The governor said those two decisions together violate the U.S. Constitution, which says the federal government can’t commandeer a state employee or a budget to enact federal policy.

Last month, a Texas Education Agency lawyer testified before the House Public Education Committee that federal guidance indicates that denying enrollment or attendance based on citizenship status would violate Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Texas does not track the citizenship status of students. Therefore, it is unclear how many undocumented students are enrolled or what the financial impact on Texas public schools is. Texas spends a minimum of $6,160 per student, which lags behind the .

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund sued Tyler ISD Superintendent James Plyler on behalf of four families in the district after the state passed a law allowing schools to charge tuition to undocumented students. In a statement Thursday, the legal organization slammed Abbott’s suggestion to relitigate Plyler.

“[W]hile the Supreme Court split on the constitutionality of the Texas statute challenged in Plyler, all of the justices, including then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, agreed that the Texas law seeking to exclude undocumented children from school was bad public policy,” said Thomas Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel. “All justices recognized the folly in excluding certain kids from school; ubiquitous truancy laws embody this well-supported notion. Abbott now seeks to inflict by intention the harms that nine justices agreed should be avoided 40 years ago.”

Abbott also told reporters Thursday that immigration is “different” today than it was 40 years ago when Plyler was decided.

“The only language barrier initially was Spanish. Now we have people coming from more than 105 different countries across the globe,” he said. “Who has that level of expertise where we can find the teachers who know all these multitude of different languages to where we would be able to educate kids and think how much that would cost?”

Kate McGee covers higher education at , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. This article  at TexasTribune.org.

At a meeting Friday, the Texas State Board of Education officially refused to recommend three health textbooks, including two books mentioned in this report. Board members voted along party lines to reject the middle school textbooks from LessonBee, Inc. and Human Kinetics that include sex education, with opposition citing content about masturbation and abortion, insufficient attention to abstinence or a lack of constituent support. A third health textbook for elementary school failed on a 6-6 tie. 

The culture wars keep coming in Texas, and the latest one involves sex, textbooks, and the LGBTQ experience. 

On Tuesday the State Board of Education will decide whether proposed textbooks that include content on gender identity and sexual orientation will make their way into the backpacks and laptops of children in Texas and across the country. 

Both sides are gearing up, the latest in a series of polarizing fights in Texas schools, which recently included school mask mandates, teaching about systemic racism and library books with sexual content. Just last week, Governor Greg Abbott wanted against educators offering “pornographic” books to students after pointing out two .

Now, after last year’s approval of new state standards for health classes, the board must approve new textbooks—and that’s where the new battlefront is.    

“Gay people can get married today; you can’t fire LGBTQ people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” said Dan Quinn, a spokesman for Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning social justice group. 

While much has changed in the last few decades, he fears, “textbook adoptions in Texas have not.”

Conservative activists and parents have issues with all five of the health textbooks the board must approve, but are particularly focused on two for middle schoolers, saying they go too far by “normalizing” sexual activity, questioning gender identity and going beyond the new state standards. 

State law now requires parents to opt-in their children to lessons on sex education. Parents groups, like the Tarrant County Chapter of Moms for Liberty, a right-leaning organization focused on preserving parental rights, argue they want to be the ones instilling morals about sex to their children. They say the new textbooks would rob them of that right. 

“The attitude of devaluing family and oversexualizing education is detrimental to children, even adults, as well as harmful to society,” said Mary Lowe, Moms for Liberty Tarrant County chair.

This base has been galvanized. Loud groups of parents are fuming about what their children are being taught about systemic racism and, using that frustration as a road map, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race by making critical race theory and schools key issues in his campaign.  

Red meat topics like inappropriate sexual content in schools are ripe for conservative Texas Republican politics ahead of the crowded March 1 GOP primary elections, said Rice University political science professor Mark Jones. 

In addition, political attacks like Abbott’s fit the narrative that liberal school boards are dropping the ball when it comes to educating the country, he added. And those are the people Abbott wants to show up at the primary election, he said.  

“It’s not what do average Texans think. It’s what does the average Republican primary voter think,” said Jones. When it comes to teaching about sex, he said, it’s “that nothing should be taught or the bare minimum.” 

Textbooks and Standards

Up until last year, the state’s teaching standards for health and sex ed hadn’t changed since 1997. After more than a year of public hearings and panels, the State Board of Education updated the standards in 2020, with the most significant change requiring seventh and eighth-grade students , including condoms and other forms of contraception. The new standards go into effect in August 2022. 

Progressive advocates urged board members to add topics like abortion, consent, gender identity and sexual orientation to the mandatory curriculum, but the heavily conservative 15-member board declined.

When it comes to high school, sex education is optional. Many schools don’t offer sex ed at all. State law requires those that do teach sex ed present abstinence as the preferred choice to all sexual activity, encouraging abstinence until marriage. 

A teacher can go further and offer an “abstinence plus” curriculum, but must devote more attention to abstinence from sexual activity than any other behavior.  

On Tuesday, the elected board will take an initial vote to recommend textbooks school districts could buy that cover the new standards. A final vote is expected Friday. 

How the final vote will play out is unclear. Several conservative members of the board who voted on the standards in 2020 have since left the policy-making body, replaced by Republicans who skew toward the center. Advocates for comprehensive sex education hope the shift will mean the two textbooks that teach beyond the standards will be approved as is.

Textbook publishers are not bound to those standards and will try to provide content they believe makes their books attractive to school districts in Texas and across the country. While waning, with more than five million students in Texas public schools, the lone star state makes up a giant share of the national textbook market and continues to have outsize influence on content. 

But parents like Lowe and advocates like Mary Elizabeth Castle believe the books violate the standards.

“The fact that so much public input and agreement among the board went into the standards, it would be transparent and the right thing to do to have the books aligned with the standards,” said Castle, senior policy advisor for Texas Values, an organization dedicated to preserving conservative family values.

While parents can yank their students out of sex ed instruction, groups like Texas Values last year convinced the board to keep LGBTQ content out of the standards and is frustrated it’s still showing up in textbooks.

In the textbook by Human Kinetics, Castle said the text uses two students engaging in sexual activity as an example in a lesson, and in another case has students question whether their gender identity is similar to the one they are assigned at birth. The other textbook, by LessonBee, Inc., includes a text message conversation about ejaculation and arousal.

Advocates for stronger sex ed say the textbooks are needed because students want medically accurate and age-appropriate information about sex.

“We want young people to be able to engage in sexual activity if and when they feel comfortable to do so, when they feel they have all the information they need to make that decision for themselves and for their future,” said Gabrielle Doyle, state partnership coordinator for Sex Ed for Social Change, a group in favor of the textbooks.

Texas Leads in Repeated Teen Births 

What to teach students in school, particularly when it comes to sex, is a touchy subject in Texas. The state has some of the highest . A baby is born to a teen mother every 23 minutes in Texas, according to Jen Biundo, director of policy and data at the Texas Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. And Texas is the top state in the country for repeated teen births. 

Texas has historically opted to promote abstinence among teenagers to reduce teen pregnancies. 

Despite whether more in-depth teaching about sex ed could be beneficial, Jones, the political science professor, said Republicans have little political incentive to encourage it. 

As a Republican, said Jones, “you’re not going to win any votes in an election by pushing a more progressive agenda on sex ed.”