Texas Poised to Create the Largest Voucher Program in the Country

The Texas House of Representatives voted to create a $1 billion school voucher program in the early hours on Thursday, representing a huge victory for the national voucher movement in the largest holdout red state in the country. It was a big win on a top priority for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Republican Party.

The House passed the bill by a vote of 85-63. It would create education savings accounts that parents can spend on their children’s private-school tuition and other education-related expenses.

The Texas Senate previously passed its own version of the bill. If the chambers align their versions in coming weeks and Abbott signs the bill, as he has said he will do, Texas will be the biggest state in the country to adopt a voucher program so far.

This represents a turnaround from the previous legislative session, in 2023, when a group of Republicans from rural districts joined Democrats in voting against the voucher proposal.

In the interim, Abbott backed a group of pro-voucher candidates who successfully challenged some of those representatives in Republican primaries last year — a strategy that appears to have paid off. In a statement, Abbott called the vote “an extraordinary victory for the thousands of parents who have advocated for more choices when it comes to the education of their children.”

A Victory Long in Coming

Pro-voucher advocates have been pushing their cause in the Texas Legislature for decades. The proposal was generally unpopular in rural areas, where public schools sometimes employ large shares of the population. That prevented pro-voucher Republicans from pushing it through the Legislature.

Abbott himself didn’t make vouchers a priority until relatively recently. Skeptics have always argued that voucher programs siphon funding away from public schools.

Both sides claim to have the public’s backing. The House “took a stand with the overwhelming majority of Texans who support school choice,” Abbott said in his statement. But Republicans rejected a last-ditch attempt by Democrats to put the proposal to a public vote. Last year, voters in three states rejected statewide ballot measures to advance school voucher policies. They include Nebraska and Kentucky, two heavily Republican states.

“Abbott is really out there saying that this is immensely popular, and we have lots of polling that says otherwise,” says state Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus.

In fact, the voucher proposal in Texas doesn’t go as far as some advocates would have liked. It caps the program at $1 billion in its first year, rather than being a universal program such as several other red states have passed in recent years.

It also limits the amount of funding that can go to high-income families, reserving 80 percent of the money for families making less than 500 percent of the poverty line, or about $160,000 a year for a family of four. “They’re appropriating the dollars, which is fine,” says Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, a pro-voucher group that’s been working to pass voucher policies in Texas since 1997. “The key question is, will that grow over time and will they serve all families?”

Will the Program Grow?

That’s a key question for opponents as well as supporters. Texas is “already underfunding its public schools,” says Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. Critics of the voucher bill claimed legislators may be forced to choose between public education funding needs and maintaining or expanding the voucher program.

That’s a familiar lament from voucher opponents. But the same day that it passed the voucher program, the House also approved $7.7 billion in public school funding, including $3 billion for raises for teachers and a $1.5 billion increase for special education. “This is more money for Texas public education than any other piece of legislation in the history of the state,” said Brad Buckley, who chairs the state House Public Education Committee. “This is landmark funding for public schools.”

The real test will come in future years. Lawmakers are also planning steep cuts to property taxes. The state has been operating in an environment of surpluses for several years, but that may not last forever. “They could find themselves two years from now with no more surpluses to pay for school choice or property tax relief without cutting spending in other areas,” says Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University. “What [voucher opponents] are concerned about is what happens in two years if public education money is either going to be flatlined or cut but the vouchers retained.”

Arizona’s universal voucher program became much more expensive than anticipated in the first years of its operation. To voucher opponents, that’s evidence that the programs gradually suck money away from public schools. To backers, it’s evidence that parents want options.

“The more choice you have, the more popular it is,” Enlow says.

A Sign of Momentum

Even with some eligibility restrictions in place, Cowen says the Texas program is likely to disproportionately benefit more privileged students. In other states with voucher programs, voucher users are on average whiter, wealthier and less likely to have special needs than their communities as a whole. Most of the benefit goes to help pay tuition for students who are already in private school, he says. “Their entire base is existing private school parents who want the cash rebate,” Cowen says.

Still, Texas being on the precipice of adopting a voucher program is a “jewel in the crown” for the voucher movement nationwide, Enlow says. Tennessee lawmakers approved a voucher program earlier this year as well. With an operational program in Texas, it will be harder for other red states to reject voucher proposals, he says.

He predicts the state, which is already growing rapidly, will attract more families from surrounding states who want to take advantage of vouchers. “The next real fight for this movement,” Enlow says, “is how to take this issue into more blue states.”