A Texas-Sized Victory for Education Freedom
The nation's second-most populous state just passed universal eligibility for Education Savings Accounts usable at public or private schools or other options. Gov. Abbott's hardball approach won out.
For several years now, school-choice proponents have been looking at Texas as the biggest potential prize among all the states across the nation. With a Republican governor and solid GOP majorities in both houses of the legislature every year, Texas seemed a natural for an expansive voucher or education savings account program. It never happened.
Until now, that is. The Texas Legislature has finally passed a school-choice bill, establishing universal eligibility for education savings accounts (ESAs) averaging more than $10,000 per child per year. If Gov. Greg Abbott signs the legislation, Texas will enact “the largest day-one choice program in the country,” the American Federation for Children (AFC) reports.
Thus Texas is poised to become the 18th state to adopt an ESA program. Currently, 488,736 U.S. students are using ESAs to attend the school of their family’s choice: public, private, home, online, blended, or some other option.
Abbott, a conservative Republican, will certainly sign the bill, having gone so far as to call a special session for consideration of school choice legislation last year after the legislature adjourned with the state’s House of Representatives having failed to pass a bill that had already made it through the Senate. That legislation went down, as had many others over the years, because powerful Republican lawmakers refused to vote for it.
Rural Republican legislators in particular opposed these bills over the years because they feared their local school districts would lose money as children left for better options. These lawmakers were content to waste taxpayers’ hard-earned money on schools they obviously thought parents would prefer their children not have to attend.
Abbott, a strong proponent of school choice, led primary fights against multiple Republican legislators over the past couple of years, knocking out 15 incumbents last year alone, solely over this issue. Whereas 21 House Republicans voted with all Democrats to stop a school choice bill in 2023, this year only two Republicans voted no. Legislators from both parties said Abbott had told them before the House vote that he would veto every bill they sponsored if they voted against the school choice bill, according to The Texas Tribune.
I like that: a Republican playing hardball like a Democrat.
Here are the major provisions of the legislation, as reported by the AFC:
All six million Texas K-12 students will be eligible to apply.
ESAs will be funded at more than $10,000 per student.
ESA funds will cover a variety of educational expenses including tuition at a non-public school, tutoring, extracurricular activities, transportation, special needs therapies, and more.
Students with disabilities and students from low- or middle-income families will be first in line if demand exceeds available funding.
Participating schools and families will remain protected from burdensome regulations affecting curriculum, admissions, and other matters.
Spending for the ESA program is capped at $1 billion per year. That means the upper limit for first-year enrollment is about 90,000 students—special education students get a larger allocation for each child, which could hold the total number of enrollees below that.
If all the spaces in the program get filled, that would give Texas the largest first-year number ever for a private school-choice program in the country, EdChoice reports. Expansion in the coming years is a must. Florida now has more than 434,000 children in its program, EdChoice notes. “When accounting for total K-12 budget sizes, Texas’s program would be less than a fifth of the size of Florida and Arizona’s programs,” EdChoice reports. “In fact, when adjusted for K-12 spending, Texas would still trail at least eight other states.”
Texas will not reach those states’ levels of student participation until the $1 billion cap sunsets or the legislature removes it. Even so, this is an extraordinary achievement in terms of the sheer numbers involved and the amount of effort it took to make it happen.