Special report
School choice, vouchers and the future of Texas education
Everything you need to know about what they are and how they will change the state’s educational landscape.
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, under the stewardship of Gov. Greg Abbott, approved voucher legislation this year. The program, slated to become one of the largest in the nation, comes after lawmakers in 2023 repeatedly failed to get several voucher proposals through the House, where some rural Republicans joined Democrats in blocking the measures. Abbott, the state’s leading voucher advocate, successfully campaigned last year to replace many of those voucher critics with new members who have voiced support for them.
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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 and the politics.
What are vouchers
The term “vouchers” can refer to multiple types of programs that let parents use taxpayer dollars to subsidize their children’s private schooling. Texas Republicans also typically refer to these programs as “school choice.” Read more
How will vouchers work in Texas?
Texas will put $1 billion over a two-year period toward the program, which is expected to launch at the start of the 2026-27 school year. The program’s benefits would be tied to how much public schools receive per student from state and local sources. Read more
Why do people support voucher programs?
Many conservatives say parents should not have to keep their children in public schools they believe are unsafe or underperforming academically. They also argue vouchers would push public schools to compete for students and perform better. Read more
Why do people oppose voucher programs?
Public schools will receive less money for every child who leaves for a private one. Some voucher opponents have also accused supporters of wanting to undermine public education and establish an educational system that reflects conservative Christian values. Read more
How do vouchers work in other states?
While several voucher programs are meant to help low-income students, many of the children who benefit from the more expansive initiatives today come from wealthier families already sending their kids to private school. Read more
How do Texans feel about vouchers?
Even polling doesn’t provide a completely clear picture of whether most Texans support or oppose vouchers. Claims about support or opposition can differ based on how polling questions are framed. Read more
The history of vouchers in Texas and the U.S.
The roots of today’s school voucher movement can be traced back to the desegregation of American schools in the 1950s. Read more
What happened in the last years of fighting over vouchers?
In 2023, Democrats and nearly two dozen Republicans representing rural districts blocked voucher legislation in the Texas House. Gov. Greg Abbott helped oust many of those lawmakers who opposed vouchers, giving him the votes to pass the program during the 2025 legislative session. Read more
How do vouchers work?
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 argued for a voucher system, saying 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, the most 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.
During the 2025 legislative session, Texas lawmakers approved the creation of education savings accounts, which are 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.
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.
Read more:
- What you need to know about education savings accounts, the voucher-like program championed by Gov. Greg Abbott (from Feb. 22, 2023)
Support
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.
Read more:
- Facing enrollment declines, Texas Catholic schools are leading supporters of school vouchers (from Oct. 27, 2023)
- Voucher proposal spurs mix of excitement, wariness in Texas home schooling community (from Oct. 20, 2023)
Opposition
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 will 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.
For years, rural Republicans opposed the voucher movement, but many lost their seats to voucher supporters during the 2024 primary elections. Their opposition largely stemmed from the fact that their communities often revolve around their public schools, which serve as major employers. They saw 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.
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Vouchers in other states
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.
Read more:
- Texas’ main voucher bill seeks to avoid other states’ mistakes but keeps ideas that attracted criticism (from Oct. 13, 2023)
Public opinion
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 listed 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 voters. Before the Texas House approved its school voucher program in April, lawmakers shot down a bid to put the proposal on the statewide ballot.
Read more:
- How a school voucher supporter won in a Texas House district with almost no private schools (from Oct. 2, 2024)
- Most Texas adults support school vouchers, new survey finds (from July 29, 2024)
History
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 propose ways around 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.
Years of fighting
The 2023-25 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. Many voucher opponents in the Texas House were defeated.
Early during the 2025 legislative session, the Texas Senate passed its school voucher proposal, Senate Bill 2. A few months later, after years of political wrangling, lawmakers in the Texas House approved the measure and sent it to Abbott’s desk.
Read more:
- Private school vouchers head to Abbott’s desk to become law (from April 24, 2025)
- In historic first, Texas House approves private school voucher program (from April 17, 2025)
- Texas bill that lets families use tax dollars for private schools swiftly sails through Senate (from Feb. 5, 2025)
- 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)
Vouchers in Texas
How will vouchers work in Texas?
The proposal approved by the Texas Senate and House, Senate Bill 2, would create education savings accounts that families could use for private school tuition and other school-related expenses, like textbooks, transportation and therapy.
The program is set to launch at the start of the 2026-27 school year. The Texas comptroller, who oversees the state’s finances, will determine when families can begin applying and the process they must follow. The finance chief has until May 15, 2026, to establish the rules and procedures of the program.
Most families participating in the voucher program would receive an amount equal to 85% of what public schools get for each student through state and local funding — roughly somewhere between $10,300 and $10,900 per year for each child, according to a recent legislative budget analysis.
The bill ties the voucher program’s per-student benefits to public education funding, so the amount available to each student with an education savings account would increase when public schools receive more money and dip when public education funding declines. It also limits program spending to $1 billion for its first two years of implementation.
Children with disabilities will be eligible for the same funding as other students, plus up to $30,000 in additional money, an amount based on what the state would regularly spend on special education services for that student in a public school. Home-schoolers could receive up to $2,000 per year.
Almost any school-age child eligible to attend a public school — including those already enrolled in a private school — could participate in the program. Only U.S. citizens or people lawfully in the country will receive funding under the initiative.
If public demand exceeds the funding available, the bill will give priority eligibility to students with disabilities and families it considers low income. The measure will also prioritize students who exit public schools over those already enrolled in private schools.
The bill’s priority system ranks families in this order:
- Students with disabilities from families with an annual income at or below 500% of the federal poverty level, which includes any four-person household earning less than roughly $160,000
- Families at or below 200% of the poverty level, which includes any four-person household earning less than roughly $64,300
- Families between 200% and 500% of the poverty level
- Families at or above 500% of the poverty level, which would be about $160,000 or more for a family of four.
Unlike public schools, which are generally required by law to educate every child in their community who seeks admission, the bill does not require private schools to accept certain students who do not meet their admissions standards. That means private schools can still deny any child the state places first in line for eligibility. Higher-income families whose children were already attending private schools have primarily benefited from the large-scale voucher programs enacted in other states.
The bill also does not require that participants take the same state standardized tests administered to public school students each year — the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. Some voucher critics and school officials have said that distinction creates an unfair playing field because the state often uses those exams to judge the effectiveness of districts and educators.
The voucher bill does require that participating students take a nationally recognized exam. It also mandates an annual report from the state that would include data on participating children’s demographics, testing results, and preparedness for college, career and the military.
The bill requires private schools to have existed for at least two years before joining the program; grants the state auditor more power to review the activities of organizations contracted to administer the program; and requires the state’s annual report on the program to include dropout, expulsion and graduation data on participating students with disabilities — broken down by grade, age, sex and race or ethnicity.
The bill directs the state to refer to local authorities any organizations or individuals helping administer the program or participating in it who use the funds fraudulently. The state would work with a private auditor responsible for making sure program participants follow state law. The bill directs the state to suspend the account of participating children not in compliance with the law or program guidelines.
Read more:
- In historic first, Texas House approves private school voucher program (from April 17, 2025)
- Under Texas House bill, value of education savings accounts would be tied to public school funding (from Feb. 20, 2025)
- Texas bill that lets families use tax dollars for private schools swiftly sails through Senate (from Feb. 5, 2025)
- Texas Senate unveils its plan to create private school voucher program (from Jan. 24, 2025)
- Texas budget writers prioritize school vouchers, teacher raises and border security in early drafts (from Jan. 22, 2025)
Have more questions on vouchers?
Get quick answers from our archive of school voucher reporting with our AI assistant.
Learn more
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Lawmakers sacrificed school funding to block school vouchers, but the issue could be debated again in a special session. Districts will get new funds for school safety, though Uvalde families were ultimately left disappointed with inaction on gun restrictions.
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.
Suraj Thapa contributed to this report.
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