Losing My Lege is a weekly column about the goings-on in and around the Austin capitol building during the 84th Texas legislature.

Texas lawmakers turned their attention to public education this week—or perhaps, more specifically, to tearing the very concept apart.

You see, the Texas public school system is, according to state Sen. Donna Campbell, a “monstrosity.” What makes it so bad? It’s a “monopoly,” she said, wherein Texas families do not have the choice to receive taxpayer dollars in order to send their children to private—often religious—schools. I don’t think the word “monopoly” means what Donna Campbell thinks it means, but I’m just working with what I’m given.

In any case, taxpayer-funded subsidies for private religious instruction have been sold to Texas voters under the moniker “school choice,” as “vouchers” that will enable parents whose children attend struggling public schools to transfer their children to more expensive private institutions. Funneling more money to public schools is apparently out of the question; only private entities, including charter schools, can be trusted to educate our kids now. Campbell’s SB 276 is meant to make such a dream a reality.

I have tried, and failed, to find a way to understand this as something other than a plan to forcibly use taxpayer dollars to effectively pay people to receive religious instruction.

But this is all very necessary, according to the “school choice” crowd, which had nothing nice to say about the state of public education here in Texas during hearings this week. They alleged that classrooms are overrun with children who fail to get the one-on-one attention they need, that lazy teachers have no incentive to ensure that their students pass any of Texas’ myriad standardized tests, and that Texas’ decrepit public schools have “over a 40 percent dropout rate.”

It’s hard to see this last claim, made by former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm as he testified in front of the legislature, as anything other than an outright lie meant to manipulate lawmakers into funding private education with public dollars.

In fact, Texas’ dropout rate for middle and high schoolers was 1.6 percent in 2012-2013. As the Texas Observer’s John Savage pointed out, Gov. Greg Abbott himself just got done bragging about Texas’ top nationwide graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students.

Another piddly detail that the “school choice” crowd failed to examine is this: If Texas public schools are failing and teachers are struggling—though perhaps not to the degree that voucher proponents claim—it might be, just maybe, due in small part to the fact that the Texas legislature made $5.4 billion in cuts to public education in 2011.

Remember that when you hear lawmakers talk about Texas’ broken public schools: They themselves are the ones responsible for the damage. And now, their fix isn’t to shore up public school funding and strengthen districts across the state, but to cut a few parents checks so they can send their kids to private school. And sure, some parents might be able to supplement their taxpayer-funded subsidy enough to make private school a reality. Others? Will watch as their kids navigate the consequences of an increasingly socioeconomically stratified educational landscape.

Now, public education is not my area of expertise. Instead, I concern myself predominantly with reproductive health policy. But this week’s political posturing about the dire state of public education in Texas triggered something in my Lone Star-addled brain: the way these “school choice” proponents talk about education sounds a whole lot like the way anti-choice lawmakers talk about health care. First, lawmakers decimate public funds needed by an important social institution, then they propose non-solutions that benefit their donors and allow them to woo highly conservative primary voters.

In 2011, our anti-choice lawmakers slashed more than $70 million in public funds for reproductive health-care and family planning programs so that they could brag about taking a hardline stance against Planned Parenthood. Two recently released studies have shown that more than 200,000 Texans lost access to contraception and cancer screenings as a result of those cuts.

In 2013, lawmakers realized they needed to do something about the havoc they’d wrought—without, of course, admitting that the havoc was deliberately engineered in a froth of anti-choice posturing. So they reallocated funds to primary health-care providers, hoping that general practitioners would suddenly become conversant in the nuances of specialized reproductive health-care provision. The success of that decision has yet to be determined, and it does little to help the 200,000 Texans who needed and failed to receive care before the new program.

This year, in 2015? Texas lawmakers are doubling down on a bad idea again, and trying to make further modifications to the state’s breast and cervical cancer screening program, ousting Planned Parenthood from providing care and likely leaving low-income Texans without the screenings and treatment they need.

But come election time, lawmakers will get to brag about their “pro-life” crusade against Planned Parenthood. What they’ll also be bragging about, inevitably? How they stood up for “school choice” freedom.

Texas already spends very little, per capita, on its residents. Now, “pro-life” lawmakers, and those who tout “school choice,” are ensuring that even fewer resources will be provided to the Texans who need it most, whether we’re talking about low-income Texans with cervical cancer or parents hoping to keep their neighborhood elementary school open.

I wonder: freedom for whom? Life, for whom? Only for those who are already economically advantaged enough to be able to buy it on their own.