The long fight towards passing Texas’ first voucher programs ended in 2025, when Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 2 into law on May 3.
The bill establishes a program to “provide funding for approved education-related expenses of children participating in the program.”
Supporters of the bill have cited school choice and support for low-income families. However, the bill comes with a set of faults that may make it more trouble than it’s worth.
Less per-pupil funding for public schools
Texas public schools receive a set amount of money for each student’s average attendance. If a large number of students from a public school decide to leave and enroll in a private school instead, the public school loses money to maintain daily operations. These include paying staff, utilities, purchasing school supplies and paying for campus safety measures such as district police officers.
This poses a large threat to public school districts, who have already seen declining enrollment rates in recent years. A number of districts have also been facing financial troubles due to additional causes, such as pandemic-era funding ending, so any budget decrease now could prove severely consequential. The amount of public school closures and program cuts could increase as students flock to private schools.
Opponents of the voucher bill recognized this flaw. The Texas AFL-CIO is the state’s labor federation. The labor union has been a vocal critic of the program. At an event on May 9, 2025, state Representative James Talarico stated, “Remember this day next time a school closes in your neighborhood… Remember this day next time a beloved teacher quits because they can’t support their family on their salary. Remember this day next time your local property taxes rise because the state government is not doing its fair share of school funding. And if recession comes and we are forced to make even deeper cuts to public education, remember this day.”
Future costs
The state’s voucher program launched with a $1 billion budget, making it the largest first-year program in the nation. Although the cap currently prevents the state from spending more than $1 billion until August 2027, budget experts claim the cost could rise to $4.8 billion by 2030, according to The Texas Tribune.
Other states’ programs have shown costs don’t stay down. About two years after Arizona launched the country’s first universal school voucher program, costs of the program skyrocketed from $65 million to about $325 million. This drastic increase put Arizona in a $1.4 billion deficit in 2024, according to ProPublica.
This led the state to cut multiple programs in an attempt to offset the deficit. According to AZ Mirror, one of the programs cut is the state’s Water Infrastructure Finance Authority, a fund created to finance the construction, management and rehabilitation of water infrastructure. Additional cuts include cuts to Arizona colleges and universities and cuts to worker programs. The budget also called for delays in road and highway projects, while introducing a plan to allocate funds that were meant to fight the fentanyl crisis to the Department of Corrections instead.
Benefiting the wrong groups
Despite supporters of the bill claiming it would help low income families receive better, more specialized education, existing programs have shown wealthy people tend to use the program more often.
Florida’s voucher program changed drastically in 2023, when a bill allowed all students, regardless of income, to apply for taxpayer funded school vouchers.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, over 122,000 new students started using vouchers during the 2023-2024 school year. Of those students, about 70% were already attending a private school. “…according to data from Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most of the state’s scholarships. About 40 percent came from families too wealthy to have qualified previously.”
Additional data at the local level confirm this to be true in San Antonio as well.
According to an article by the San Antonio Current, families residing in wealthier school districts apply for vouchers more than those in lower income districts.
“Of the 10,428 combined San Antonio public, private and home-school students who have applied for the voucher coupons, 5.9% reside in the boundaries of North East ISD. Another 4.1% are from Northside ISD. The annual median family income in both of these districts is around $80,000.”
Meanwhile, “just 1.2% of students living within the Harlandale ISD school district boundaries have applied for vouchers. That ratio stands at 1.8% in Southside ISD and 2.3% in Edgewood ISD. The median annual family incomes [in] those districts is below the Bexar County average, and those in Harlandale ISD and Edgewood ISD hover around $35,000.”
Other states’ programs
Florida’s existing program shows the complications that can arise from it. Private school owners are suing Step Up for Students, the organization in charge of distributing scholarships to Floridian students, for failing to distribute payments in a timely manner.
The schools claim payments were delayed from between 90 days to over a year. Additionally, complaints of partial payments, funding reductions and sometimes no payments at all for over two years were also vocalized in the lawsuit, according to News4JAX.
The schools claim the funding was necessary to enroll students, hire staff and provide services for students with disabilities.
With all these potential issues present, as well as existing examples from other states, it’ll be interesting to see how the state manages the new program in the upcoming 2026-2027 school year. It’s also necessary to be aware of how a program this large affects our state budget, as it affects every Texas resident, not just school age kids.