School choice, vouchers and the future of Texas education

School vouchers, often referred to as “school choice” programs, use public funds to help families pay for their children’s private education. Supporters say families should receive state support to send their child to a different school if public schools aren’t adequately serving them. Opponents worry a voucher program would strip vital funds away from already cash-strapped public schools.

Texas lawmakers and Gov. Greg Abbott failed to agree on the details of a voucher proposal during the 2023 legislative session, but passing such a bill will once again be a top priority for voucher supporters this year. Abbott, the state’s leading voucher advocate, successfully campaigned last year to replace many vouchercritics in the Texas House with new members who have voiced support for them.

This guide brings together more than two years of reporting, research and analysis by The Texas Tribune’s education, politics and data teams. It is meant to help Texans — whether you’re a parent, teacher or policymaker — build a foundational understanding of how school vouchers work, the key players, the arguments for and against them, their history, the politics and what to followfor this year.

What are vouchers? 

School vouchers are broadly defined as programs that allow families to use taxpayer dollars to help them pay for the costs of their children’s private or home-schooling education.

What is “school choice”?

“School choice” is a term used by proponents of school voucher programs who believe that parents should have more options for where to send their kids beyond their local public school. It can encompass programs that Texas already has like charter schools and magnet schools. But supporters in Texas have been pushing to expand it by calling for a voucher-like system. They argue families should have the ability to use state money to pay for any alternative forms of schooling they might prefer for their children.

What types of vouchers exist?

In other states, themost basic school voucher programs allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to cover some of the costs of sending their kids to a private school, which includes schools with a religious affiliation.

Meanwhile, education savings accounts are essentially state-managed bank accounts for parents who remove their children from the public education system. These accounts allow parents to utilize taxpayer money to cover private school tuition and a wide range of approved educational expenses, like private tutoring, school supplies and home-schooling costs. Texas officials have sought to implement this type of program in recent years.

Some other states also have tax credit scholarships, which offer tax credits to businesses or individuals who donate to a scholarship-granting organization. Money is then given to eligible students to use toward tuition expenses at a private school.

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What are the arguments for vouchers, and who supports them in Texas? 

Top Texas Republican officials like Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, as well as conservative organizations like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, have advocated for education savings accounts in recent years. Religious organizations and some home-schooling coalitions have also voiced their support.

Many conservative politicians and organizations say parents should not have to keep their children in public schools they believe are unsafe or underperforming academically, an argument that has ramped up as schools throughout the country have struggled to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic. Voucher supporters argue such programs would push public schools to compete for students and perform better academically.

Billionaires from in and out of Texas have invested millions of dollars to help sway the outcome of local elections in favor of pro-voucher candidates. For example, Abbott received millions from Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, a vocal critic of public schools, in the governor’s bid to unseat Texas House lawmakers who helped block voucher proposals in the 2023 legislative session.

Religious groups have argued that a voucher program would make it easier for families to choose and pay for a private religious school, regardless of their income level. Some home-schooling organizations say they would also welcome the financial assistance, noting that some parents spend thousands of dollars per year to educate their kids.

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What are the arguments against vouchers, and who opposes them in Texas?

Democrats, teacher groups and some public education advocacy organizations have raised concerns that a voucher program would make things worse for already struggling public schools.

Texas is constitutionally obligated to fund public schools, and that funding is primarily based on attendance. If a voucher program caused students to leave the public school system, schools would receive less money. Opponents worry that impact would pile onto other challenges exacerbated by a yearslong lack of meaningful state funding increases. Those problems include budget deficits, campus closures, declining enrollment, expired pandemic relief funds, inflation and teacher shortages.

Some voucher opponents have accused supporters of wanting to undermine public education and establish an educational system that reflects conservative Christian values. Christopher Rufo, an influential conservative activist whom organizations like the Texas Public Policy Foundation have cited in articles and hosted on panels, publicly stated during a 2022 speech that “to get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

“Because in order for people to take significant action, they have to feel like they have something at stake,” Rufo added.

Rural Republicans have historically opposed the voucher movement. Their opposition largely stems from the fact that their communities often revolve around their public schools, which serve as major employers. They see vouchers as a threat to the survival of their schools, which serve high percentages of low-income students and are already struggling financially.

Meanwhile, some home-schooling families are opposed to vouchers because they worry that receiving public funds could bring more oversight from the state and take away the autonomy they have to educate their children.

How have vouchers worked elsewhere? 

There are 75 voucher-like programs across 33 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, according to EdChoice, an organization founded by Milton Friedman that supports such initiatives. According to the organization, education savings accounts have become the school choice program with the most students. EdChoice estimates that almost half a million students in the U.S. benefit from education savings accounts, a significant boost from a little over 19,000 children roughly five years ago.

While the country’s first voucher programs launched in the late 20th century with the goal of helping low-income students, many of the children who benefit from the more expansive programs today come from wealthier families already sending their kids to private school. Meanwhile, families from poor communities are using vouchers less than wealthier ones.

As for academic outcomes, studies in multiple states have shown that vouchers do not consistently lead to improved standardized test scores for low-income students, a measuring stick Texas Republican officials often rely on to make decisions about public education. In some cases, vouchers have resulted in steep declines. In 2017, three academics wrote in the Journal of Economic Literature that their review of research suggested that there’s some evidence that as competition from voucher programs increases, test scores in public schools slightly improve. But, they said, more research was needed to fully understand the full impact of vouchers.

Voucher advocates often note that the benefits of the programs are best measured through parental satisfaction. Families have lauded education savings accounts in states like Arizona and Florida for giving them access to opportunities outside of public schooling.

The programs have also attracted criticism for their loose financial oversight and for not requiring private schools to report student test scores or meet the same academic standards as public schools. In Florida, some families purchased flat screen TVs, paddleboards and theme park tickets, which the state approved as educational expenses. Arizona parents have spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on questionable purchases, including buying chicken coops, trampolines and tickets to SeaWorld. Also in Arizona, the state has had to make deep cuts to a wide swath of critical programs and projects because of the voucher program’s costs.

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How do Texans feel about vouchers? 

Public polling in recent years in Texas has consistently shown support for voucher-like programs in the state. An August poll by the University of Texas Politics Project found that 52% of voters support creating a voucher, education savings account or other school choice program in Texas. A different poll by the University of Houston and Texas Southern University showed that 65% of Texas adults support the creation of such programs, even if they agree with arguments against school vouchers.

But opinion on vouchers has differed based on how information is presented to people and how questions are framed. Historically, organizations and individuals on both sides of the voucher debate have funded their own research on the effectiveness of such programs and how the public feels about them. Their findings tend to reaffirm their respective viewpoints on the topic.

The pollsters at the University of Texas at Austin examined just how much the framing of questions in polling affects how people respond to vouchers. They found that 27% of the people they polled opposed establishing school vouchers. But when the researchers more specifically asked participants about their opinion on redirecting tax revenue to help parents pay for some of the cost of sending their children to private or parochial schools, opposition increased to 42%. Forty-five percent of people supported the idea.

Gov. Greg Abbott has described the success of pro-voucher candidates in the 2024 Texas Republican primaries as an “unmistakable message” that voters support such programs. Only 2% of registered Republican voters listing vouchers as a key issue that affected their support of House candidates in the GOP primary. In rural communities with few private schools, some Republican voters have said they wanted a school voucher program. Others said they voted for pro-voucher candidates because they spoke to their other concerns, like immigration and their current representatives’ perceived shortcomings.

The most reliable measure of public opinion on vouchers has come at the ballot box — where voters, even in Republican and conservative-leaning states, have overwhelmingly opposed the implementation of such programs. During the 2024 general election, for example, a majority of voters in each of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against a proposal that sought to change the state Constitution to allow the use of tax dollars to pay for private, religious and charter schools. Voucher proposals also failed in Nebraska and Colorado.

Texas has not brought the question of vouchers to the ballot. It would require legislative action for the state to do so.

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A brief history of vouchers in Texas and the U.S.

The roots of today’s school voucher movement date back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine and ruled that race-based school segregation was unconstitutional. After the decision, southern states like Texas began proposing legislation aimed at fighting integration.

A 1955 essay by the economist Milton Friedman has received praise by some school voucher supporters who view Friedman as a pioneer of their movement. In the essay, titled “The Role of Government in Education,” Friedman advocated for the flow of public money toward private schools, which he said would give parents greater control over where their children receive an education. In a footnote addressing the Brown decision, Friedman said he disapproved of segregation and racial prejudice — while also criticizing forced integration.

“It is not an appropriate function of the state to try to force individuals to act in accordance with my — or anyone else’s — views, whether about racial prejudice or the party to vote for, so long as the action of any one individual affects mostly himself,” Friedman wrote.

Around that time, Texas established a committee to study segregation in public schools. Gov. Allan Shivers, who opposed the Brown decision, requested that the committee examine and proposeways around to the Supreme Court ruling. The group recommended that the Texas Legislature give serious consideration to a plan “whereby a parent who does not wish to place his child in an integrated school may receive State funds to have the child educated in a segregated, non-sectarian private school.” Legislation that aligned with that goal followed, though it ultimately failed.

The nation’s first modern school voucher programs launched in the late 20th century with a focus on serving low-income families, following unsuccessful attempts at public school integration and frustration over poor academic outcomes, particularly for Black students. But outside of when Texas authorized its charter school system in 1995, the Legislature has long rejected programs that would support alternatives to traditional public schools, despite decades of work by Christian conservative activists to rally Republicans around the issue.

The 2023-24 fight for vouchers

The arrival of COVID-19 helped reignite the school voucher movement. Influential conservative organizations like the Texas Public Policy Foundation promoted vouchers in response to some families’ anger over pandemic restrictions and political battles over how gender, sexuality and America’s history of racism are taught in schools. Gov. Greg Abbott provided more clout to the movement when he made passage of an education savings accounts program his top legislative priority for the 2023 legislative session.

During the session, Abbott vowed not to sign a bill that boosted funding for public schools unless lawmakers passed a voucher proposal. He also promised to campaign against any Republican lawmaker who voted against the measure. The Texas Senate complied with the governor’s wishes, but Democrats and nearly two dozen Republicans representing rural districts opposed voucher bills in the House. During the fourth and final special legislative session called in 2023, the coalition voted to strip an education savings account program out of a wide-ranging education bill, putting an end to voucher supporters’ hopes that year.

Abbott followed up on his promise. During the 2024 primary election cycle, he campaigned against the Republicans who helped block his plan. He successfully did so with the financial support of people like Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, who have sought to use their money and influence against school voucher opponents across the country. Since then, many voucher opponents in the Texas House have been defeated, and Abbott has expressed confidence that the chamber now has enough votes to pass school voucher legislation in 2025.

Read more:

• Texas Legislature will approve school vouchers and boost public education funds next year, Abbott says (from Nov. 6, 2024)
• Jeff Yass, billionaire school voucher advocate, gives Greg Abbott another $4 million (from July 17, 2024)
• Here’s how school vouchers, Paxton impeachment affected the Texas GOP primaries (from May 31, 2024)
• How Gov. Greg Abbott lost a yearlong fight to create school vouchers (from Dec. 22, 2023)
• Texas House cuts school vouchers out of the education bill. See how lawmakers voted on the measure. (from Nov. 17, 2023)
• Texas House votes to remove school vouchers from massive education bill (from Nov. 16, 2023)

How will the voucher debate differ in 2025?

After years of hitting a brick wall, school voucher advocates in Texas are entering this year’s legislative session with better odds than ever of passing a measure that would let parents use public money to pay for their kids’ private schooling.

But first, lawmakers will have to agree on what the program looks like.

With diminished power to quash vouchers this time, some opponents are holding out hope that pro-voucher legislators will stumble over disputes on the many moving parts still up in the air.

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How would vouchers work in Texas? 

In their initial budget proposals for the next two years, both the Texas House and Senate set aside money for the creation of an education savings account program in the state.

It is still unclear what kind of voucher proposal lawmakers will advance in 2025. But legislation filed in 2023 offers an idea of what it could look like.

For example, one bill that would have created education savings accounts sought to offer families access to $8,000 of taxpayer money a year for each participating student to cover their private school tuition and other educational expenses. The bill sought to allocate $500 million from Texas’ general revenue fund to pay for the program for two years. That means the program would have initially allowed up to 62,500 students to enroll. Public education advocates have said that expanded eligibility and rising costs for the program in future years could place an undue financial burden on the state, just as it has in Arizona.

The Texas proposal would have required the comptroller’s office, which oversees the state’s finances, to establish and administer the savings accounts. The comptroller was also tasked with preventing fraud and misuse of funds — a major area of concern for many lawmakers — as well as finding an organization to help process applications, approve vendors and accept participating private schools.

Almost any student who was enrolled in a public school in the previous year would have been eligible to apply to the program, as well as any student ready to enroll in Pre-K or kindergarten. The bill was further amended to include home schoolers and to bar any state officeholder from being eligible. At one point, lawmakers approved a provision that would have given school districts with fewer than 5,000 students $10,000 for every child they lost to the education savings account program for three years.

The bill also included a prioritization system if applications exceeded the funding. To prioritize entry to underprivileged groups, the bill proposed that the state reserve no more than 40% of spots for students from families whose income level is at or below 185% of the federal poverty guidelines; no more than 30% for families who earn between 185% and 500% of the federal poverty line; no more than 20% for students with disabilities; and 10% for all other applicants who attended public, private or home-school in the previous school year.

The legislation did not require private school students to take a state-administered academic achievement exam. It also included a provision that would have required private schools to alert parents that they are not subject to federal and state laws regarding services to children with disabilities.

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Disclosure: EdChoice, Seaworld, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texas Southern University – Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin and University of Houston 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 list of them here.