5 Things to know about our (ugh!) new voucher bill
By Ashley Bean Thornton
Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 2 – aka “Education Savings Accounts,” aka School Vouchers — into law on May 3, 2025. I was, and am, against it.
Be that as it may, the bill we got is not as bad as it could have been. It could have been basically a bottomless bucket of our tax money going to rich folks to subsidize private school tuition they were already paying so they could go on more ski trips. That is basically how it is working now in some states. I don’t like what we got, but at least it is better than that.
Here are 5 things voters might be interested to know about the new Education Savings Account program. (If you would like to see my more detailed summary of the bill, click here.) Some of them make me feel a little better, some of them make me feel a little worse. See what you think.
1. The voucher amount available per student is NOT a flat $10,000. – In the original version of this bill the idea was that most participants would be eligible for $10,000 per year, with a little bit more for children with disabilities. That changed along the way. The bill that Abbott has signed provides for voucher users to receive “85% of the estimated statewide average of per student spending for students in public school.” That is actually more than $10,000 per student.
To give you an idea of how much this might be, as of December 17, 2024 the estimated average amount spent per student in public school would have been $13,405. So, 85% would have been about $11,394.
Children with disabilities are eligible to get this 85% base, plus whatever additional money their home district would have received (up to $30,000).
Homeschoolers get a flat $2,000 per student.
2. Students can NOT use vouchers while also attending public school. – In an interview with the Waco Trib on October 11, 2024, then candidate for the Texas House, Pat Curry, said, “ESAs are wide open in their potential use for workforce development and workforce training, so you can still stay in your school district and apply to go to Texas State Technical College for classes or McLennan Community College for teaching or nursing classes or even Baylor for engineering classes. If you get accepted, that’s fine. But the ESA will pay for that tuition and they’ll pay for the transportation to and from. So [the students] still stay in their schools.”
Mr. Curry may have thought at the time that was how it was going to work, but that is not how it turned out. According to the bill signed by the governor, students may NOT use ESA funds if they are enrolled in a public school and being counted towards that school’s average daily attendance.
3. Funding for “wealthy” kids is capped at 20%. – “Wealthy,” for the purposes of this bill, means having an income of 500% or more of the Federal Poverty Guidelines. The poverty guidelines are not the same for everyone. They are based on the number of people in the family. For example, the poverty guideline for a family of four is $32,150 per year. Five hundred percent of that would be $160,750.
Only 1 in 5 of the students receiving this funding will be that rich or richer, and of those, first priority will go to students who attended public school the previous year.
4. There are some protections against “fly by night” schools. – One of the problems other states have experienced with their voucher programs has been very low-quality private schools popping up to try to cash in on all the available money. Imagine “Joe’s Private School” appearing at a strip center with a room full of computers scooping up voucher money from unsuspecting parents while unbeknownst to them, their kids play Mortal Kombat all day.
Thankfully this bill does include at least a couple of protections against that kind of thing. In order to accept the voucher money schools have to be accredited by an agency recognized by TEA or the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission. They also have to be in operation for at least two years before they can start accepting the vouchers.
5. The Legislature will be re-negotiating how much we will spend on vouchers each session. – The total amount to be spent on ESAs for 2025 – 2027 is capped at $1 billion. That cap expires on September 1, 2027. After that, every two years the comptroller must submit an estimate of how much is needed to fund ESA participation for each participating child and all children on the waiting list, including siblings of the current participants. The legislature will then decide how much to appropriate.
For example, the fiscal note attached to SB 2 estimates that by 2028 the amount to fully fund the ESA program would be $3,072,133,443, but that funding is not automatic. The legislature must re-appropriate it each biennium. The legislature could decide to appropriate that amount. Or more. Or LESS.
It will be interesting to see how the school voucher story plays out. Will the Texas ESA Plan turn out to be a brilliantly successful compromise between divergent ideas about how to provide the best education for the children of our state, or will it be the tip of a spear that ends up crippling our ability to educate the kids who have the most to gain from strong public schools – most likely somewhere in between.
I do not like school vouchers. I do not like that the participating private schools will be held to a different standard of accountability. I do not like that we are spending money on an idea that has been shown time and time again to be of little or no value in helping low-income students succeed. I do not like to think about my tax dollars going toward ever more sorting and separating of our communities into homogenous little pods where we never meet anyone different from ourselves.
I do not like school vouchers. I do not like this bill. Given that, I am grateful for all the public school advocates who worked hard to put in a few guardrails to keep it from veering toward the worst case scenarios. Now our job is to pay attention. What will be the results? What will we learn from those results? How will we use what we learn to go about improving education for ALL our kids? Our job is to pay attention and to make sure everyone is paying attention. It’s easy to run off the road if you are not paying attention; it’s possible to correct even at the last minute if you are paying attention. Let’s pay attention.