SAN ANTONIO – Ahead of the 2025 legislative session, Governor Greg Abbott said passing a school voucher plan was a high-priority item.
School vouchers, in various forms, use taxpayer money to pay for private education.
The state Senate has already passed its version of a voucher plan with Senate Bill 2.
State lawmakers have filed their version in the house under House Bill 3. According to the Texas Tribune, a thin majority of the state House — 76 Republican state Representatives — enlisted themselves as coauthors of the bill on Wednesday.
The 76 votes would be just enough to form a majority of the 150-seat House if each member supports the final version of the bill.
At least 28 states have some version of a program that uses public funds for private education.
The newest form of such a program, called an Education Savings Account (ESA), is one Texas lawmakers are mulling over.
In 2022, Arizona was the first state to create a universal ESA program. The program meant all school-aged students were eligible.
“We have larger class sizes in our schools. We have a retention — a massive — retention issue,” Marisol Garcia, who serves as President of the Arizona Education Association and is also an eighth grade public school social studies teacher, said.
Arizona first established a school voucher program for students with disabilities in 2011.
“This is when we saw some private schools pop open for students with severe autism or nonverbal skills,” said Garcia.
In 2018, the state expanded vouchers to students in underperforming public schools.
“It just kept expanding and expanding,” Garcia said.
In 2022, Arizona opened the program to all students.
“Currently, I think there’s 1,800 teaching positions open in our schools and it’s February,” said Garcia. “So that means that there are thousands and thousands of students who are getting educated by people that are underqualified.”
Every Texan, a nonprofit focused on equitable funding of state government, examined the impact of school vouchers in Arizona.
“The Arizona government right now is about a billion-and-a-half dollars underwater because of the voucher program that they created in their state,” Every Texan Director of Economic Opportunity Jaime Puente said.
Puente points to “fly by night” schools that also opened in Arizona after the voucher program was established.
Such schools would charge the same amount of tuition offered in the voucher program. Those schools would then close down a few years later when many did not meet requirements.
Both proposals filed in Texas would require private schools to be accredited to receive funding provided by ESAs.
Every Texan looked at the potential financial impact of public schools if 1%, 3% or 5% of students were to leave public schools to opt for private settings.
“That’s where we got our $2.3 billion loss to the system,” Puente said. “When a classroom of, say, 24 loses three or four students, that school is losing up to $8,000, sometimes $10,000.”
The Texas Private Schools Association (TPSA) publicly supports the idea of a statewide ESA.
Laura Colangelo, the TPSA’s executive director, said the more than billion-dollar loss in Arizona is not squarely blamed on school vouchers.
Other school programs contributed.
Anyone who runs the numbers on exact costs of per-pupil funding, Colangelo said the use of taxpayer money to send kids to private schools saved the state $1 million.
>>WATCH: KSAT Explains how Texas public schools are funded
Should vouchers pass in Texas, Colangelo does not expect a mass exodus from public schools.
“Most families are going to want to stay in their public school, and there’s not funding for everybody to participate in this,” Colangelo said. “It’s just simple math.”
The TPSA favors HB3 because that law more heavily prioritizes students with specific needs and offers 85% of per-pupil public school funding to students who chose a private school education.
The legislation does not stipulate that the remaining 15% must return to public schools once a student leaves.
Colangelo points out that the pots of money for ESAs and public school funding are separate.
“It’s a separate appropriation, so the foundation school program is the money that is appropriated for public schools,” Colangelo said. “This is a $1 billion account through general revenue, and so it’s two different funding mechanisms.”
Colangelo looked at Florida’s ESA system as a model program.
“Those programs — the areas that have really robust private school choice programs — the public school test scores go up,” Colangelo said. “The per-pupil funding goes up, and the fact all the families are happy with the options they have. So, that’s what we’re focused on is making sure that public schools stay strong.”
>>WATCH: What happened during a privately-funded voucher program in SA
For many critics of such programs, the concern is that the programs almost always expand, similar to Arizona and Florida.
In turn, a state’s financial commitment to ESAs also expands.
“They almost inevitably grow,” said Jessica Levin with the Education Law Center. “That is the core of vouchers — that they divert public funds that are urgently needed for our already underfunded public schools.”
In Texas, public schools are funded at the state level using a school’s average daily attendance.
Fewer kids in schools means less money, but that’s not what has played out in Arizona.
“We have not seen a lot of students leave,” Garcia said. “In fact, the data shows that 70% of the students using this as a voucher program were already in private schools.”
Garcia’s point addresses another key concern of voucher critics: that the vouchers benefit families who can already afford a private education.
“There is great concern that dismantling public education is a possible effect of growing voucher programs,” Levin said.
Most people KSAT Explains talked to said the voucher debate is not about pitting public versus private education.
For supporters, vouchers mean access to options.
“They just want to offer more educational opportunities for families that don’t have it right now,” said Colangelo.
For critics, they signaled an uncertain future for the funding of public schools.
“There is never going to be a time where I’m going to say, ‘Let’s give up on public schools,‘” said Garcia. “It’s just not going to happen.”
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