The Red Folder

Archived June 17, 2024.

Key stories for the week, brought to you by Lindsey Zhao and the Red Folder team.

Reading for the sake of reading sucks. Telling yourself to read to win a round is nice but ineffective. This condensed news brief helps you understand current domestic and international issues, analyze the news, and gives you opportunities to read more.

Publishing since January 2024.

Domestic Stories

4 key domestic stories for the week:

1) Abbott’s March Toward School Vouchers Charlie Hui

In the heart of Texas, speech and debate programs are crumbling. Schools across Austin have become a husk of their former selves. Round Rock HS Speech and Debate, a program that has run for more than two decades, no longer has a single member. Lake Travis and LCAnderson have lost their long-term coaches, and schools like McNeil no longer have a coach at all.

These empty spots will not be filled.

In the 2023-2024 fiscal year, Round Rock Independent School District is in over 23 million dollars of debt. This has forced RRISD to freeze hiring on all staff, meaning that Speech and Debate Programs without a coach like McNeil are left to fend for themselves. That means there’s no coach to offer prep or judging, no funding to pay for tournaments and travel, and no class or club to facilitate community. Unfortunately, stories like that of RRISD are spreading across the state.

To understand how RRISD’s debt managed to bloom, we first need to go back to the roots.

The Robinhood Program was created in 1993 as a way of redistributing school funding from wealthy districts to poorer ones based on the property taxes of the families that lived in that area. Good on paper, deadly in practice.

The early years of the program did just that, it created greater equity for school districts across the state as the excess earnings of wealthy areas of Texas, like urban Austin, delivered money to the state which was then redistributed to more rural areas. But as white flight and a mass exodus by the wealthy left Austin for the suburbs, the tax base that supported Austin’s school districts disappeared, leaving those less fortunate to go to schools that found themselves without funds.

Yet as downtown Austin becomes filled with gentrification and high rises, property values continue to soar, so even despite the fact that 38.4% of the current students qualify for free and reduced lunches, half of AISD’s funding is still being siphoned off to get redistributed instead of being kept within a community that needs the resources now more than ever.

Governor Greg Abbot’s school voucher program is adding salt to the wound. To begin with, the state legislature has a notorious track record of using Robinhood money that should be going to impoverished districts to balance the Texas budget. Financial incompetence is costing students their education. Yet in a year like 2024, where there has been a 32.7 billion dollar surplus, teachers have been the only federal employees of Texas to not receive a raise. That is because House Bill 100, which was set to provide over 4.5 billion dollars of funding to schools, had school vouchers shoehorned in and with it, was struck dead. A demise of Abbot’s own creation.

School vouchers start off as a concept that just like Robinhood, sounds good, if not excellent on paper. For students who feel like public schools aren’t for them, they can leave and attend a private school, and their tax dollars would subsidize their private school tuition. It sounds so perfect that one almost forgets to ask what happens to the public schools in the process.

They die.

When the wealthiest of the public school populations leave to go to private schools, public schools take a hit that can cause them to collapse. It would be a second coming of the Robinhood program. Urban areas will be hit hard, as their dwindling tax bases become near nonexistent if school vouchers are implemented, yet rural areas will be hurt harder. Those living in Texas’s rural districts, where there might be only one high school in an entire twenty-mile vicinity, would see their funding disappear if parents decide to enroll their children in distant private schools or local religious institutions, and without any other public high school in the option, they’re out of choices.

This can snowball. If public schools continue to have their funding drained, and with it the good teachers, the equipment, and the community are gone as well, the only way to get quality education would be through private schools. Middle-class families would take on additional costs to put their children into these private institutions, but this is a price many disparaged minorities and impoverished communities can’t pay.

It will be modern-day segregation, not on race but on wealth. That is why school vouchers have been struck down by both Democrats and rural Republicans in 2022 and 2023, every time it was brought up. But in 2024 things have changed.

In the recent state elections, far-right Republicans endorsing Abbot’s voucher program have won enough seats to tip the scale. 76-74 in favor of school vouchers, that is the new predicted split of Texas’ congress heading its legislative session in winter. Representatives on both sides, like Republican Speaker of the House Dade Phelan, are holding out hope that the legislation fails, yet the only way to ensure it is for the Speech and Debate competitors to speak out in rounds, the Nation to speak out on Capitol Hill, and the Texas Public to speak out in the voting booths.

Democracy Dies in Darkness, Education Ends with Abbot’s Edict.

Read more here:

4) Statistics Lie to You - Economics Edition Rohan Dash

If there’s anything that affects Americans, it's the economy. Ranging from taxes to interest rates to the stock market, the concept of money dictates our lives. Four years ago, this very concept was shattered by a pandemic - sending the country into lockdown while companies went bankrupt, and fortunes disappeared.

So when President Biden was elected - his immediate priority must have been the economy. And today, we’re seeing that, statistically, the economy is performing well. As per this report, the GDP is supposed to be performing better than baseline expectations. Yet, Americans aren’t satisfied. For example - CBS reported that Americans don’t feel the economy is doing well. It’s a confusing yet interesting situation that must be explored to truly understand the ins and outs of the economy.

It turns out that statistics is a lie. A perfect example of this is mean wealth. Sure, it indicates the average wealth that an American has, but it’s skewed to the right. Specifically, there could be nine Americans with a salary of $100,000, and one American makes $1,000,000. This means the mean salary is $190,000, which is not representative of the population. This is a very simple example that shows that despite its strength mathematically, the truth is actually incorrect.

And we can look at two key demographics that help us truly understand why Biden isn’t receiving credit despite the economy seemingly performing well.

A perfect start is seen in lower and middle income citizens. As explored in the math example above, statistics don’t always represent the population. This is exactly what is happening though - a growing wealth gap between the elite rich and lower and middle income citizens has made the wealth of ten years ago the normal of today. As the Pew Research Center reports, barely three in ten Americans believe the economy is doing good, meaning the majority of Americans think the economy is not performing well, a concerning sign. As seen on the Pew’s report, on both sides of the aisle, low-income workers feel the economy is in poor condition -> with 12% of Republicans approving of it and 32% of Democrats approve. It’s clear that the strong majority of Americans fall into the same lower and middle income class that shows the economy is not working for everyone.

But if there’s anything that perfectly demonstrates the difference in elite rich corporations against small businesses, it’s the Small Business Administration, who writes that while there are 33 million small businesses in America, making up 99.9% of all businesses, they only contribute about 50% of total revenue made by all companies. And once again, we see a perception of the economy not working for everyone. Just because inflation is cooling, doesn’t mean the economy is actually in a better condition. There’s so many underlying causes, as reported by CNN. People have reduced expenditures, labor shortages, and consumer confidence declines have all made small businesses suffer, despite the key issue that affected them for so long - being inflation - finally reducing.

At the end of the day, the economy is strong on paper, but not actually. It’s up to the government to find the existing issues and ensure better days ahead.