School Vouchers Won in Texas. Next Up, the Nation.

New York Times

17-04-2025

With a big win for school vouchers in Texas in the early hours of Thursday morning, the private-school choice movement conquered the last major Republican-led state.
Next up, the rest of the country.
Voucher advocates will now turn their attention to Washington, D.C., where Republican allies are advancing a bill that could force the concept even on Democratic states that have resisted for decades. In President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, voucher proponents have friends in the highest of places. They also have a plan for a federal private-school choice program that could pass this year with simple majorities in the House and the Senate.
'It's a monumental and cascading moment for the school choice movement,' said Tommy Schultz, chief executive of the American Federation for Children, a private-school choice advocacy group.
In recent years, the nation's Republican-dominated and Democratic-dominated states have gone their separate ways on fundamental issues such as abortion rights, health insurance, climate change and energy policy. On education, red states, in a remarkable procession, have adopted measures to use taxpayer dollars to finance private school tuition and home-schooling.
In many cases, Washington has let the states drift apart. Vouchers might be different.
A national bill would bring private-school choice to states where Democrats and teachers' unions have always been successful in quashing the concept, contending that vouchers could drain resources from public education, diminish learning standards and leave the most disadvantaged children warehoused in poorly funded public schools.
The federal legislation is structured as a $10 billion tax credit for donations to nonprofit groups that offer private-education scholarships, and as such, it could be included as part of a giant budget reconciliation bill expected to be assembled this summer. If so, it would need only 51 votes in a Senate where Republicans hold 53 seats.
The scholarships would be made available to students as a voucher. A vast majority of families could be eligible, based on their household incomes not exceeding 300 percent of their area's median income — over $300,000 per year in some regions.
The bill could end up providing $5,000 vouchers to as many as 2 million children annually. The money could be used not only on private-school tuition, but also for home-schooling costs or for-profit virtual learning.
'If we're serious about raising the bar and expanding opportunity, school choice has to be part of the equation,' said Representative Burgess Owens, Republican of Utah and a cosponsor of the legislation, citing low test scores.
The Senate's chief sponsor, Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said on Thursday that he was optimistic, but that passage 'is not a sure thing.'
The vociferous objections of Democrats, teachers' unions and many public-school parents have not changed.
Critics have raised concerns about the limited number of seats in private education to serve millions of new children, and pointed to the fact that some existing private schools have raised their tuitions in response to the influx of taxpayer dollars — making it difficult for low-income families to take advantage of vouchers, since the amount received is often less than the full cost of attending a private school.
They have also pointed out that new schools founded to take advantage of private-school choice policies have sometimes struggled to find their footing and shut down quickly, sending students back into public education.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the Republican proposal in Congress 'an attempt to redistribute dollars to the wealthy through another tax cut, pretending it's for schools.'
And she contrasted Mr. Trump's support for tax incentives to fund private-school vouchers with his many attempts to cut off federal funding to schools and universities that do not hew to his priorities around race and gender, and to withdraw Harvard's tax-exempt status.
'The road they're taking, trying to make the tax code ideological as opposed to financial, is a very dangerous road,' she said.
Despite fierce resistance from Democrats, in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, vouchers have boomed, propelled by conservative donors, right-wing activists and ordinary parents frustrated by school closures, mask mandates and what they could see of the curriculum when their children were learning online.
Public dollars are now financing private education for over 1 million students nationwide, more than double the number in 2019.
In 2022, Arizona pioneered a new approach: universal vouchers available to all students, in the form of education savings accounts filled with public dollars that could be spent on almost any private school or home-school expense. It expanded an existing program, which had been reserved for students with disabilities and other specific challenges.
The biggest rush came in the first year, largely driven by families already in private school or home-schooling, a built-in clientele that was happy to quickly sign up for a subsidy from the state.
About 60,000 Arizona students were enrolled after the first school year, up from 12,000 before the expansion. Half had never been enrolled in public school.
The program has continued to grow, with enrollment now at 83,000.
As time has gone on, enrollees have been more likely to come directly from public schools. For new sign-ups last summer and fall, about 55 percent of students came from public school, up from 20 percent a few years ago.
Wealthier areas still have some of the highest rates of uptake for the program, according to an analysis of 2024 data by the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning think tank. Those include areas like Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, two affluent suburbs of Phoenix.
Fewer private schools are in poor neighborhoods, and families cannot always afford tuition, which is often higher than the $7,000 to $8,000 typically provided by the state.
In part because of the limited uptake in low-income neighborhoods, there has not been the feared mass exodus from the most vulnerable public school districts, said Dave Wells, research director for the Grand Canyon Institute, a nonpartisan research group that has studied the program.
He said the biggest losses have often come from charter schools, which already serve families who have learned to exercise educational choice, and from more affluent public school districts.
Arizona's total public school enrollment, including charter schools, has hovered around 1.1 million, with slight declines in recent years that can also be attributed to falling birthrates and other demographic trends.
Other states have limited their programs, in part to avoid the steep costs faced in Arizona, where demand has outpaced initial projections and costs are expected to reach $1 billion next year.
Nonetheless, with Texas' imminent adoption, the education savings account approach has taken off in 18 states. No longer aimed at only small numbers of low-income children, students in low-performing schools and students with disabilities, vouchers are now being pushed for everyone.
'What we are doing is redefining public education to mean an educated public, regardless of where they are educated,' said Robert Enlow, president of EdChoice, the voucher advocacy and research group founded by the movement's godfather, the free-market economist Milton Friedman.
The moment also represents a major shift for the Republican Party.
Texas, after all, is the home state of George W. Bush, the former president and governor who embodied a now-antiquated style of G.O.P. education politics — termed 'compassionate conservatism,' in Mr. Bush's memorable phrasing.
He saw only a limited role for vouchers, in providing an escape hatch for children attending the lowest-performing public schools. His bigger focus was on improving basic education in public schools. He promoted phonics in early grades, a strategy backed by research, and pushed hard on standardized testing, holding educators accountable for raising student scores.
Many on the left hated the emphasis on testing. But looking back, some acknowledge they shared key values with that earlier generation of Republicans.
'Bush really had in mind reforming public schools and improving public education,' said Clay Robison, a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, a union affiliate, and a longtime observer of Austin politics. 'That has changed as the Republican Party has changed.'
Indeed, the education savings account bill that passed the Texas House on Thursday displayed drastically different ideas.
While at first it will prioritize low-income and disabled children, it creates a pathway toward universal eligibility for vouchers — even for students already attending private school, whose parents have no problem paying the tuition out of pocket.
In campaigning for the bill, supporters did not dwell on old arguments that promoted choice's potential to improve public education through competition, or on the belief that academic achievement would improve in private schools.
Instead, Gov. Greg Abbott and allies emphasized parental rights and personalized learning. They also leaned on the culture war issues that have dominated the Trump era, arguing that vouchers would allow families to escape liberal teachings on gender, sexuality and race.
The national bill is structured to make an even greater percentage of families immediately eligible, including affluent ones.
For voucher advocates, the moment is filled with possibility. But they also acknowledge that the private-education system will need to grow quickly if it is to serve millions more children across the country.
They are hopeful about new models like microschools, which are led by a single teacher and often meet in a home, and about the burst in venture capital investment in virtual schooling.
'Now the real hard work starts, building new learning opportunities,' said Mr. Enlow of EdChoice. He sketched out a future in which students receive credit for being at school if they visit a museum, or combine online learning with a few days per week in a classroom.
'The growth here,' he added, 'is in the marketplace of options outside of buildings.'