In 1989, Jim Leininger and I sat down together and decided to do something about education in Texas. We did not have a complete plan. We had a conviction: that every child in America deserves access to a great school, regardless of their zip code or their parents' income.
What followed was one of the most consequential decades of my life.
We co-founded the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 1989, which became one of the most effective state policy organizations in the country. In 1992 we launched the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation of San Antonio — giving low-income parents the resources to choose the best school for their children. We knew we would face legal challenges, so in 1993 we started a public interest law firm called The Justice Foundation to fight for those families in court.
Then, in 1994, John Walton and the Walton Family Foundation invested $2 million to help us take the model national. Children First America was born. Over the next seven years, we helped launch more than 80 private scholarship programs across the country — representing over $350 million in charitable giving to families who needed it most.
I want you to understand what $350 million in scholarships looks like when it reaches a family. It looks like a mother in San Antonio who was working two jobs and watching her son fall further behind in a school that was failing him. It looks like that same mother walking her son through the door of a school that saw him — not as a number, but as a child with a future.
I have been blessed to work at the intersection of faith, enterprise, and public life for five decades. Of all the work I have been part of, this remains among the most meaningful. Not because of the dollars. Because of the faces.
The fight for school choice is far from over. But the foundation has been laid. And every family that exercises that choice today is standing on the work of thousands of parents, donors, lawyers, and advocates who believed that access to a good education is not a privilege — it is a right.
That belief is still worth fighting for.