National leaders mount pressure campaign on Texas House GOP to pass voucher bill

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

School voucher supporters are mounting a full-court press early in the session to drive Gov. Greg Abbott’s top priority through the Texas House, turning to a stable of powerful allies to strong-arm the lower chamber into finally letting some parents use public money for their children’s private school tuition.

The pressure has come from all sides in recent days, led by President Trump, who fired a missive on social media this month praising the Texas Senate’s swift passage of its voucher bill while warning the House that he “will be watching them closely.” Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump adviser and Texas transplant, last week called out House Speaker Dustin Burrows by name in a post to his 218 million followers urging the chamber to pass “school choice.” And U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz recently sent a letter to all 88 Republicans in the state House encouraging support for “a strong universal school choice bill” this session.

Abbott has eagerly joined the fray, sparring with Democratic lawmakers online and trying to dispel anti-voucher arguments in a string of recent social media posts, leading up to a Monday rally with Burrows in San Antonio to promote his plan for voucher-like education savings accounts. Abbott’s campaign has also sent text messages encouraging voters in various districts to “thank” their state representative for backing the governor’s voucher plan – a sign that Abbott is trying to shore up support for his top legislative priority among his own party.

The all-out push, barely a month into the 140-day session, reflects how voucher supporters are trying to press their advantage early and build a sense of inevitability coming off a fruitful election year, which saw the defeat or retirement of more than a dozen House Republicans who helped sink Abbott’s voucher push two years ago. Now touting a narrow pro-voucher majority in the chamber, Abbott and his allies — including Burrows and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate leader — are presenting a united front and exerting pressure through some of the country’s most influential Republicans as they look to propel a voucher program through the Legislature before it can get bogged down by end-of-session deadlines and other priorities.

Proponents say the outside forces, paired with Burrows’ full-throated support, lay the groundwork for a voucher measure to pass the House by a comfortable margin once the details are hammered out. Recent House speakers had opposed vouchers or stayed silent on the issue.

“Gov. Abbott’s ability to deliver an impact, and his and other members’ confidence in the wisdom of this policy, have both grown in lockstep, and that has an amazing compounding effect,” said James Dickey, executive director of Liberty for the Kids, a nonprofit group that is pushing for the governor’s proposal. The support of Abbott and the chamber’s two GOP leaders, Dickey added, is “really an unstoppable combination.”

Despite the early-session momentum, Democrats and several Republican holdouts remain hopeful they can assemble another coalition to thwart vouchers in the House, where such legislation has routinely gone to die.

Rep. James Talarico, an Austin Democrat who is helping coordinate voucher opposition for the second straight session, said the outside pressure and Abbott’s “erratic tweeting” suggests there are fractures in the pro-voucher coalition — especially among Republican freshmen who generally supported the idea on the campaign trail but have not spelled out in detail what guardrails, if any, they’d like to see for how the program would operate. Questions remain about who would be eligible for the money and what kind of accountability measures would be put in place to ensure participating students still hit state educational standards.

“When they're pulling out the big guns and they're pulling out Donald Trump and Elon Musk, that, to me, is not a sign that they feel good about where they're at,” Talarico said. “It's a sign that they need to shore up their vulnerability.”

Several House Democrats took to social media last week to press their case that Abbott’s priority legislation would divert money from public schools, attracting the governor’s ire as he went on a spree of 23 voucher-related social media posts in the five days leading up to his Monday night rally.

After Rep. Mary González wrote that vouchers would “drain” millions from school districts in her native El Paso County, Abbott — referencing González’s doctorate from a “cultural studies in education” program — responded, “As a fake doctor, I could understand your confusion.” He went on to claim that Democrats were underselling how much “new funding” was approved for public schools last session.

Abbott also traded barbs with Austin Rep. Gina Hinojosa, suggesting that her background as “the former head of the woke Austin school board” made her an unreliable critic of vouchers. The governor even mixed it up with his former gubernatorial rival, Beto O’Rourke, and former Rep. Glenn Rogers, one of the anti-voucher GOP lawmakers Abbott helped unseat.

“The voters spoke, Glenn. They want school choice. They didn’t want you,” Abbott wrote in response to a recent post from Rogers that began, “VOUCHER GRIFTING KNOWS NO BOUNDS.”

In any case, Rep. Dade Phelan, a Beaumont Republican who was House speaker until this January, said Abbott’s campaign was premature in assuming his support for “school choice” in texts circulated to voters in Phelan’s southeast Texas district. Supporters often use “school choice” to refer to voucher-like programs that let some families use state dollars to help pay for the form of schooling they choose for their child, including private education and home schooling.

“To be clear—I have not made a formal commitment to support or oppose the school choice plan,” Phelan wrote on social media Tuesday. “Right now, my focus is on listening to my constituents, understanding the potential impact on our communities, and ensuring that any decision I make reflects the best interests of families and students in our district.”

Since the House’s voucher proposal had yet to be filed, Phelan added, “there is no specific legislation for me to take a position on at this time.”

That wait-to-see-the-bill attitude is what Abbott and his allies are trying to ward off with their early voucher blitz, recognizing that GOP lawmakers are being lobbied hard on the other end by educators and public school advocates who say a voucher program would draw money away from their schools. Speaking Wednesday at a policy summit for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, Abbott said Republican freshmen in particular are being targeted “by teacher union members registering their antagonism to school choice” through emails, texts and phone calls — and he dedicated his speech to countering arguments made by those critics.

“We’ve still got more to do,” Abbott told the pro-voucher crowd. “We're going to make sure that we do fulfill what the speaker said and that's to ensure he has the votes to get this done.”

Burrows, who voted for voucher-like education savings accounts last session, has signaled that similar legislation will pass the House this time, telling rallygoers on Monday that “the votes are there.”

A firewall of Democrats and rural Republicans has long stymied voucher proposals in the House, based on concerns that such programs would siphon money from public schools — which are funded by student attendance — when families shift their kids to private schools. Abbott and other proponents have disputed that any harm would come to schools, arguing that the education savings accounts would be funded from a separate pot in the state budget.

The anti-voucher coalition’s most recent stand came in late 2023, when 63 Democrats and 21 Republicans killed Abbott’s proposal by axing it from a broader education funding bill. Only seven of those Republicans returned to the chamber this year, after Abbott and his allies spent big to wipe out anti-voucher incumbents in last year’s primaries.

Voucher advocates have encountered none of the same resistance in the Senate under Patrick, the chamber’s hard-charging leader who has long been an ardent supporter of voucher-like measures. At Patrick’s behest, the Senate passed its bill this month before any other legislation — the sixth time the chamber has passed a “school choice” bill under Patrick’s watch, he noted, after the five previous versions died in the House.

In late January, eight days before Trump’s warning shot at the House on “school choice,” Patrick met at the White House with the president and other leading voucher advocates to discuss the issue over lunch. After the meeting, Patrick said Trump was “all in on school choice.”

“He has said, whatever it takes, he’ll help us to be sure it gets through the Texas House,” said Patrick, who has often leveraged his close ties with Trump for political gain in Texas.

The Senate’s voucher plan would provide families with $10,000 a year per student to pay for their children’s private school tuition and other expenses, like textbooks, transportation and therapy. Home-schooling families would receive at least $2,000 a year for each student under the proposal, Senate Bill 2.

Burrows said the House’s voucher bill would be filed this week.

Disclosure: Texas Public Policy Foundation has been a financial supporter 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.

---

We can’t wait to welcome you to the 15th annual Texas Tribune Festival, Texas’ breakout ideas and politics event happening Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin. Step inside the conversations shaping the future of education, the economy, health care, energy, technology, public safety, culture, the arts and so much more.

Hear from our CEO, Sonal Shah, on TribFest 2025.

TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.