A school voucher program in Texas is more likely than ever. Can lawmakers craft a bill they agree on?

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After years of hitting a brick wall, school voucher advocates in Texas are entering next 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.

Gov. Greg Abbott, the torchbearer in Texas’ voucher movement, has insisted that the Legislature pass a “universal” program that would make every Texas student eligible to access taxpayer-funded education savings accounts — a voucher-like policy that would give families direct access to state funds they could use to cover the costs of tuition, uniforms, home schooling and other education-related expenses.

Beyond that, however, pro-voucher legislators will need to iron out details like how to prioritize applicants if demand outstrips funding and what sort of testing, if any, should be used to measure the performance of participating students. And they will have to get a voucher program across the finish line while also navigating calls to boost public education spending — a challenge that led to the passage of neither in 2023.

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

This shift in tone around vouchers — from questions about whether supporters could muster enough votes, toward a sharper focus on what they should ask for in the bill — illustrates how Abbott transformed the political landscape with astonishing speed, fraying what was once an imposing anti-voucher coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans in the Texas House. Backed by a retinue of deep-pocketed allies, the governor led the charge to oust numerous anti-voucher lawmakers from his own party earlier this year, leaving him with what he claims are 79 “hardcore school choice proponents” in the House — three more than needed to pass legislation in the 150-member chamber.

Despite the slim margin, voucher supporters are bullish that their primary wins generated enough momentum and political will to keep members in line.

“I think that many Republicans are going to second-guess how much they want to double-cross the governor and how much they want to fight him, because he's proved that he's willing to push all the chips in on this,” said Genevieve Collins, director for the Texas chapter of the conservative political group Americans for Prosperity, which is pushing for education savings accounts.

After adopting the mantle of “school choice” in his 2022 reelection bid, Abbott tried to muscle a voucher program through the Legislature last year by using a mix of hardball tactics. When those efforts failed, the governor doubled down at the ballot box, spending millions of his own campaign dollars and numerous hours on the stump boosting primary challengers against fellow Republicans who had helped sink his voucher proposal last fall.

The upshot: More than a dozen of those Republicans lost their seats or chose to retire and were replaced by voucher supporters. The coalition was further bolstered in November, when two Abbott-backed GOP candidates flipped open seats held by retiring Democrats — including, symbolically, the district being vacated by Robstown Rep. Abel Herrero, who regularly authored anti-voucher budget amendments that served as the yardstick to measure the House’s voucher resistance by putting his colleagues on record with an up-or-down vote.

Still, some voucher critics argue that Abbott’s 79-vote majority assumes backing from numerous incoming Republicans who voiced general support on the campaign trail for “school choice” or education savings accounts but have never laid out what kind of voucher proposal they would back.

In a memo to members last month, House Democratic Caucus leaders urged defiance, pointing to comments made by pro-voucher Republicans acknowledging that the passage of voucher legislation is not a done deal yet. The memo noted that, “like any bill before the House, the devil is in the details.”

“Voucher proposals vary greatly from bill to bill and it has never been clear what type of bill is desired by the Governor,” the memo reads. “Certain concessions to some members may result in others [no longer supporting] the bill.”

Advocates for education savings accounts hope some of the concessions that caused heartburn between the House and Senate last session — particularly those aimed at appeasing voucher skeptics — won’t be needed now that the House is working with a tentative pro-voucher majority.

“My hope would be that in the political moment we're entering, there are fewer factions involved, and so you can focus more on the core program and a lot less on all of the peripheral accommodations for the different factions who will hopefully not be quite so prominent,” said Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy for the Texas Home School Coalition.

State Rep. James Talarico, an Austin Democrat and former public school teacher, said he remains optimistic opponents can once again block a voucher program, in part because Abbott has developed a tendency of “manufacturing momentum” by overstating support for past proposals. Talarico noted that in October last year, the governor said the House was “on the one-yard line” on passing vouchers. About a month later, a bipartisan bloc in the lower chamber axed vouchers in what proved to be the fatal blow.

“It's important to remember that Greg Abbott always conveys unreasonable or unmerited confidence,” said Talarico, who is helping lead House Democrats’ voucher opposition after playing the same role in 2023. “The emperor had no clothes at the end of the day. So, we'll see if that comes to anything, but his track record on predicting legislative outcomes is not good.”

“Cut the best deal you can”

Texas Republicans have spent decades pushing for school vouchers at the Capitol, with little to show for it.

The cause gained a flicker of momentum when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a longtime voucher advocate, won his statewide post in 2015 and took charge of the Senate. Under Patrick, the upper chamber has been a reliable champion of policies that would provide state money to pay for private and religious schooling.

But year after year, those proposals died against a firewall of opposition from Democrats and rural Republicans in the House. Abbott largely avoided the battlefield — until 2022, when he adopted education savings accounts as his top legislative priority, joining a nationwide wave that saw pro-voucher Republicans harness some parents’ frustration over school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the perception among conservatives that public schools were a hotbed of liberal indoctrination.

More than 30 states now offer some sort of voucher program that allows children to use either taxpayer money or tax-credit donations for their private schooling.

Critics of voucher programs in Texas say they would funnel money away from public schools, further choking a system that is already facing widespread budget shortfalls from inflation and five years without a significant boost in state funding. The latest effort to hike public education spending got caught up in the voucher fight last year.

Voucher supporters say programs like education savings accounts would provide alternatives for low-income families who are dissatisfied with their local public schools — whether from concerns about their children’s education quality, school safety or how students are being taught about race and sex — yet cannot afford to send their kids elsewhere. Abbott and others have also accused voucher skeptics of exaggerating the fallout for the public education system; some have pinned public schools’ budget deficits on wasteful spending or accused local officials of threatening school closures to make a political statement.

With Abbott spearheading a push for education savings accounts last year, things began to change in the House. Two years after the chamber voted 115-29 to approve Herrero’s anti-voucher amendment, a total of 63 Republicans voted for vouchers last fall — not enough to save the proposal, but a baseline for Abbott to build on in the primaries.

The House’s pro-voucher contingent has since grown via the defeat of nine GOP voucher skeptics in the primaries; the election of four voucher proponents to succeed retiring anti-voucher Republicans; the election of two Abbott-backed GOP candidates to replace retiring Democrats; and the election of a new Republican member, Brent Money, to fill a seat that was vacant when the voucher vote took place last fall. That amounts to a net of 16 new pro-voucher votes, pushing the estimated whip count from 63 last year to Abbott’s total of 79.

A few days after the November election, Patrick named vouchers as his top issue for the upcoming session. But with less than a month to go until the Legislature gavels in, only scattered details have emerged about what the voucher plans might look like. Both chambers have yet to file their main voucher proposals.

Part of the lingering uncertainty may stem from the House’s leadership vacuum, triggered by Speaker Dade Phelan’s decision to drop his bid for another term leading the chamber.

Though both of the GOP candidates running to succeed Phelan — Reps. Dustin Burrows of Lubbock and David Cook of Mansfield — have voiced support for school vouchers, it remains unclear who will be directing education policy in the chamber. Rep. Brad Buckley, the Salado Republican who chairs the House Public Education Committee and served as point man on voucher negotiations last year, is backing Burrows for speaker. If Cook or another candidate wins control of the gavel, Buckley could find himself with a lower profile in the chamber.

Some returning anti-voucher Republicans appear resigned to the measure’s passage and are gearing up to “minimize the impact of that on our great rural public schools,” as Rep. Jay Dean of Longview put it to school board members in his East Texas district earlier this year. Dean, a Republican who easily fended off a primary challenge, told trustees that the “train on school vouchers is going to leave the station,” the Longview News-Journal reported.

Republicans like Dean who represent sparsely populated districts have historically served as a key voting bloc against vouchers, viewing them as an existential threat to local school districts, which often double as the top employers in rural communities.

Rep. Ken King, a Republican from Canadian who opposes vouchers, has been even blunter, arguing at a Texas Tribune panel in September that the “fight is over.”

“The votes are there,” said King, who represents a swath of 19 rural counties covering the Panhandle, South Plains and the Permian Basin. An outspoken voucher critic, he nonetheless urged his like-minded colleagues to “cut the best deal you can, protect our public schools the best way we know how, and put some accountability on it.”

King, the lead author of the House’s public school funding package last year, was already in the mood for compromise last regular session as Abbott signaled that any increase in public education dollars would be dead on arrival if it reached his desk without an accompanying voucher program. Facing the veto threat, King said he was open to some form of vouchers if that’s what it would take to pass his bill. He eventually voted to kill vouchers, citing a lack of academic accountability measures for private schools.

Though lawmakers have yet to reveal plans for whether they’ll add testing requirements or other key provisions to their voucher proposals, some details have begun to take shape. For one, advocates for education savings accounts are pushing for the measure to be handled in a separate bill from public school funding, rather than tying them together in a massive all-or-nothing omnibus bill as in 2023.

Mandy Drogin, an Abbott ally and the campaign director for Next Generation Texas, the education advocacy campaign of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said she expects lawmakers to push the two education priorities in different bills, with “fast movement” on each.

Collins, of Americans for Prosperity, said her group prefers that approach.

“We'd like to see the school choice bill be a standalone bill, have its own merits and be able to stand on the principles that we're advocating for,” she said.

Abbott has said he is committed to hiking public school funding and teacher pay next year, painting it as a false choice to suggest that “you can't have both school choice and robust public schools.”

The governor did not respond to questions about whether he wants to keep vouchers and school finance separate or whether he would again make the signing of a school funding bill conditional on passage of education savings accounts. A spokesperson said Abbott “looks forward to working with the Texas Legislature to ensure that Texans have their voices heard and families have the freedom to choose the educational path that works best for their child.”

A bill “everybody can actually live with”

As voucher plans take shape, one key question for lawmakers is how much to spend on them. While Abbott’s insistence on making the program universal means that, in theory, every school-age child would be eligible, its true accessibility will also come down to the size of its budget.

Last year, lawmakers set aside $500 million to craft a voucher program. The final House proposal would have given each participating student $10,500 a year for tuition and other expenses, meaning that more than 40,000 students could participate before the money ran out. The Senate proposed setting the tab at $8,000 per student, allowing closer to 60,000 participants. Either way, the program would have served only a fraction of the more than 5.5 million students enrolled in Texas public schools.

State Sen. Brandon Creighton, a Conroe Republican who is poised to lead the Senate’s push for education savings accounts for the second straight session, told KXAN-TV earlier this month that he plans on filing a bill that is “even stronger than last time,” though he did not specify what that would mean.

Buckley, the House’s lead voucher author last year, did not respond to a request for comment.

Collins said she is optimistic that lawmakers will go bigger this time.

“I think $500 million was what Republicans in the House Education Committee thought they could get passed [last session],” Collins said. “But with such a sea change in the Texas House, I would anticipate that there is a bolder number, a more expansive number, that goes towards school choice.”

Newman, the Texas Homeschool Coalition policy chief, said he hopes to see an expanded list of eligible expenses and more funding per student than what was on the table last year.

Comptroller Glenn Hegar is expected to announce next month that Texas will have around $20 billion in unspent funds at the end of its current two-year budget cycle, which runs through August. The projected surplus is a sign of how much lawmakers will have at their disposal when they write their spending plan for the next two years. Vouchers will be competing with other priorities for a share of the pie, including teacher pay raises, property tax relief and shoring up the state’s water supply.

Another question is how lawmakers will prioritize entry to the program if demand exceeds available funds.

Eligibility was a top sticking point between the House and Senate last year, as the lower chamber tried to make the program available only to students with disabilities or those who attended the worst-rated public schools. But by the final overtime session in November, House leaders had come around to Abbott’s demand for a universal program, proposing a bill that would make every student eligible to apply.

Now, with the idea of a universal program firmly ensconced, lawmakers are looking at who should get to access the limited voucher funds. By the end of last year, both chambers appeared to agree on prioritizing low-income families and students with disabilities.

Collins said her organization wants the program to initially prioritize those two groups, along with students who attend schools with failing scores in their accountability ratings and students with special needs. (Texas has a limited number of private schools that offer special education programs, and many of them can accommodate only certain types of disabilities.)

The idea, Collins said, is to first ensure “kids that are trapped in failing schools get the first exit out, while also building a pipeline and an aperture for every child in the state of Texas to eventually be able to partake in a school choice program.”

But perhaps the biggest question is what sort of accountability measures will be on the table. In the last special session, Buckley tried to win over skeptical House members by adding provisions requiring voucher recipients to take a standardized test and kicking them out of the program if they had failing grades for two years in a row.

Education savings account programs in other states have attracted criticism for not requiring schools to show that students are succeeding academically, whether by reporting student test scores or holding them to the same academic standards as public schools.

For his part, Creighton staunchly opposes testing requirements for students who participate in a voucher program, arguing that the market will weed out underperforming private schools. With the Senate and private schools firmly opposed to any such requirement and the House under less pressure to offer concessions to voucher holdouts, accountability measures could face a steeper climb this time.

The numerous finer points could pose a challenge for Republican leaders as they try to arrive at something a majority of lawmakers can agree on, said Monty Exter, governmental relations director for the anti-voucher Association of Texas Professional Educators.

“A voucher bill is very different than the voucher bill everybody can actually live with,” Exter said. “I think it's a much different question to be like, ‘Is there the political will in [both chambers and the governor’s office] for them to all pass the same bill?’”