HB 117

"🔴 HB 117 – Quiet Task Force, Big Power Shift Over Early Childhood Education

On the surface, HB 117 looks like a harmless planning bill. It creates a new “Governor’s Task Force” to study early childhood education and recommend improvements by 2026. The pitch is about improving efficiency, reducing duplication, and helping kids get ready for kindergarten.

But here’s what it actually sets up:

🔻 The Governor picks the chair.
🔻 The Governor picks most of the members.
🔻 The task force doesn’t follow the normal rules for advisory groups (no size limit, no expiration checks, no transparency requirements).
🔻 It’s embedded inside the Texas Education Agency but wields cross-agency influence over TEA, HHSC, and the Texas Workforce Commission.
🔻 And it’s charged with considering a “large-scale redesign” of the entire early childhood system in Texas.

That’s not just coordination. That’s quiet consolidation of power.

What does that mean in practice?

It means a small group of political appointees could decide what “high-quality pre-K” means—and whether your local district, Head Start, or child care provider makes the cut.

It means the same people who fundraise off privatization can now help shape the rules that drive public money into private systems.

It means local communities—parents, school boards, and neighborhood-based providers—could be locked out of decisions made behind closed doors by an unelected task force.

Who was behind the push?

✅ The Commit Partnership
✅ TLCCA (large private child care operators)
✅ Texas 2036
✅ Texas Association of Business
✅ Greater Houston Partnership
✅ A long list of nonprofit intermediaries who regularly win state contracts to “coordinate” programs they also help design

Who gets left out?

❌ Independent pre-K providers without a lobbyist
❌ Rural school districts already stretched thin
❌ Parents who rely on local trust, not centralized gatekeeping
❌ Teachers and community-based programs that don’t fit the mold of “aligned systems”

And here’s the long-term risk:

Once the task force defines what counts as quality, that definition could be used to decide who gets funding, who gets regulated, and who gets left behind. All without legislative debate. All without public oversight.

This bill doesn’t just create a task force—it creates an infrastructure for permanent executive control over early childhood policy. And once that’s in place, the next step is easy: shift the funding. Quietly. Gradually. Permanently.

If you believe early education should be shaped by teachers, families, and communities—not filtered through a governor-controlled pipeline—HB 117 deserves your attention.

This isn’t about whether pre-K matters. It’s about who decides what it looks like, and who benefits when that decision is made in private.

🔴 #HB117 #EarlyEd #LocalControl #TexasPolicy #WatchTheGatekeepers #PrivatizationPipeline"