School vouchers have been done before in San Antonio.
Well, at least a version of them.
As the current debate among Texas lawmakers continues over whether to use taxpayer money to fund private education for students, as spelled out in SB2 passed by the state Senate, here is the story of Edgewood ISD’s voucher program.
The program
In 1998, a privately funded school voucher program was offered at Edgewood ISD.
“I start the school year and some of my students are missing and we start to ask, ‘What’s going on?‘” said Diana Herrera, a former Gifted & Talented Specialist for the district. “Edgewood (ISD) was not aware that the CEO, the voucher program, had come into Edgewood.”
The vouchers were called CEO Horizon Scholarships, operated by the Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation.
The organization gave students living in Edgewood ISD up to $6,500 to attend other schools, mostly private.
Alamo Heights ISD was the only public school district that agreed to accept the vouchers.
The vouchers were paid for by the Walton Family Foundation and Dr. James Leiniger, a wealthy contributor known for medical innovations.
The voucher program ran from 1998 to 2008 and used $52.4 million for students and families.
In the final few years of the voucher experiment, the program stopped accepting new applicants, so there was enough money to pay for the vouchers of those already enrolled through 2008.
The teachers
Oralia Lara-Vargas, Dolores Mena and Diana Herrera worked in Edgewood ISD for decades spanning the mid-1970s to the early 2000s.
“That was home,” said Herrera. “It was home.”
“Back in the day, we were the small, little, poor district,” said Lara-Vargas, a former Special Education Director for Edgewood ISD. “We were the perfect data.”
According to Lara-Vargas, several families chose the vouchers but eventually returned to Edgewood ISD because the vouchers did not cover the full cost of tuition or additional necessary purchases such as uniforms.
The former Edgewood educators also recalled mostly the high-performing students leaving the district’s schools.
“They were taking my gifted kids, and they were not taking our special ed(ucation) kids,” said Herrera.
As a result, Herrera said overall scores for schools began to drop.
“In defense of the private schools, they said ‘no’ to kids with disabilities because they couldn’t provide the services,” Lara-Vargas said. “But in defense of the public schools, that means they came back to us with all those needs. If there was a child that had severe behavior issues, they would come back to us. The GT (gifted and talented) kids didn’t come back that much (sic).”
In the present day, these teachers oppose school vouchers because of the drop in enrollment they believe public schools will experience, which in turn, could mean less state funding for Texas public schools that have not seen a funding increase since 2019.
>>WATCH: KSAT Explains how Texas public schools are funded
Because of what they experienced at Edgewood ISD, they believe vouchers ultimately benefit families that can already afford a private education.
A key criticism of school vouchers today is also one these educators said they witnessed back then: private schools have the right to deny a student admission while public schools do not.
The voucher study
The claim that the Edgewood voucher program contributed to only top-tier students leaving public schools is one that two men refute: a UTSA economics professor who studied the program and the man who designed it.
“I grew up in a family of 10 embedded on the West Side where generational poverty is 99.9% guaranteed because your educational options are determined by your address,” Robert Aguirre, the designer of the voucher program, said.
Aguirre also worked as the managing director to oversee it.
UTSA conducted a study of the 10-year voucher experiment.
“The way I would describe it is categorically counterintuitive,” said Aguirre.
John Merrifield, Ph.D., was the principal investigator on the study and a UTSA economics professor from 1987 to 2019.
“One of the things that I learned from my Edgewood study is that if the children that are not doing well — that are not a good fit for their assigned school — when they leave, that makes teaching the remaining children a lot easier and more successful,” said Merrifield.
The State of Texas funds schools based on average daily attendance and characteristics of the student body.
According to the UTSA study, enrollment in Edgewood ISD increased during the years vouchers were in effect.
“People were moving in from outside of Edgewood to live there to become school choice-eligible,” said Merrifield.
The first new housing development in 40 years came to Edgewood, Aguirre said. However, not all families who moved to the district with school-aged children chose the voucher.
“The economic impacts are incredible,” Aguirre said.
According to UTSA’s study, property values increased 86.4 percent during the voucher program.
Property taxes are another key source of funding for public schools.
“Most of the inner city is much, much, much poorer than the than the outer ring and Alamo Heights,” said Merrifield. “And that’s caused, in part, by families trying to do right by their children, shopping for the best school that they can afford to live near.”
“That dynamic concentrates the poorest families near the worst schools,” Merrifield added.
Still, Edgewood ISD suffered losses.
“We know that over about the seven years of the bulk of the program that Edgewood ISD lost over $75 million in combined state and federal funding,” said Chloe Latham Sikes, Deputy Director of Policy for IDRA, a San Antonio-based non-profit focused on public schools.
For those students who stayed in Edgewood public schools, Latham Sikes said academic performance improved.
“We know that students actually were having gains in reading, math and writing scores on the state assessment,” Latham Sikes said.
Latham Sikes noted that other programs and innovations also took place within the district during the voucher years so academic improvements cannot be tied directly to the voucher experiment.
“And we know that students returning to the district faced academic losses and had, in some cases, even been discriminated against based on what special education or bilingual education needs they and their families required,” Latham Sikes said.
For Aguirre, who has helped write dozens of pieces of school voucher legislation dating back to the 1990s and continues to support vouchers, it boils down to what he believes are two premises.
“Whatever educational dollars are there are there for the benefit of the child, not for the benefit of an institution,” Aguirre said. “And a child’s future and their educational options should not be limited by the number that’s next to their front door.”
However, there was and still is a different sentiment for Edgewood ISD educators who were eyewitnesses as public school employees at the time of the voucher program.
“It’s not meant to be helpful for anybody. It’s there so that the very wealthy could have their private schools paid by tax money,” Herrera said. “I know that for a fact.”
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