The Senate passed a similar bill in 2023 during the 88th legislative session, but it failed after a coalition of House Democrats and Republicans voted against passing it. Again. The Senate has long been ready to help Gov. Greg Abbott see his long-described “top priority” make its way into law, but the House, and the Republicans from small towns and rural areas, more specifically, have managed to keep it from advancing.
But this time, it seems things are different.
Under Senate Bill 2, families would receive $10,000 in public funds per year, per student, through what Abbott has termed “education savings accounts.” The funds can be used towards private school tuition and other approved expenses including textbooks and school transportation. That amount would be slightly higher for students with disabilities, and families that homeschool their children would be eligible for $2,000 per year, per student.
“The fact is, it’s going to pass, the question is, how do you make it a better bill,” state Sen. Royce West said during a committee meeting in Austin on Tuesday.
The longtime Dallas senator was speaking of the bill passing through the Senate, but for the first time, that’s likely to be the case in the House as well. After he called a number of unsuccessful special sessions in 2023 to see a voucher program become law, Abbott promised he would seek revenge on the House Republicans who opposed his voucher efforts by supporting their opponents in the 2024 primaries. By the time the Nov. 5 elections were complete, Abbott saw that enough of his foes had been replaced with Republicans aligned with his education savings account vision to predict he would finally see his priority project come to fruition in 2025.
New House Speaker Dustin Burrows, told The Austin American-Statesman last week that he expects the bill to be successful.
“As Speaker, I’m committed to ensuring the agenda of the Texas House remains truly member-driven this session,” he wrote to the paper. “I support empowering parents to decide the best educational option for their children.”
Advocates, almost exclusively Republican, say this sort of “universal school choice” will allow parents to send kids to schools that they feel may be better options than what is available in their current public school district. Many conservative lawmakers have pointed to the teaching of critical race theory and DEI efforts as reasons they hope steer clear of certain public schools, while some also say that a voucher program will create a competition that they hope will lead to public schools performing better.
Opponents of school vouchers say that taking public money away from public schools will only hurt the system, especially in rural areas or smaller towns where there are fewer, if any, options for schooling other than the public schools. According to the Texas Democratic Party, 158 of 254 Texas counties do not have a private school for parents to send their children to if they wanted to.
Critics of this bill also point out that private schools do not have the same laws and guidelines as public schools when it comes to who can be accepted and denied and that the bill stands to mainly benefit those schools, not low-income families seeking a greater choice.
Dallas Democratic state Sen. Nathan Johnson spoke on the matter last week in Austin. In a video clip posted to his X account, he says “What [SB 2] does is redistribute wealth and then moves money into private schools, 75% of which in Texas are religiously affiliated.”
Perhaps the biggest complaint against the voucher system proposed in SB 2 is that rather than helping low-income families, the public money, as opponents see it, would primarily be used as a subsidy for middle and upper class families who can already afford to send their kids to private schools or are already doing so.
Recent numbers indicate that is the case in some other states by a pretty large margin. A recent study from Reaching Higher Hew Hampshire found that “historically, more than 75% of the students receiving a school voucher were already enrolled in private schools or were homeschooled.” A 2024 report from the Grand Canyon Institute estimates “that 82% of universal ESA recipients never attended a district or charter school.”
One of the reasons that concern is prominent among Texas Democrats is that the average cost of a year’s tuition for private school for one student in Texas is more than the $10,000 being offered for students without disabilities.
According to the Education Data Initiative, the average cost of private schools in Texas hovers around the national average:
- $11,050 is the average tuition among all K-12 private schools in Texas.
- $10,729 is the average cost of tuition at private elementary schools.
- $12,161 is the average cost of tuition at secondary schools.
Those numbers only represent the average costs. According to a WFAA report in January, the annual tuition for the best private schools in Dallas soar well above the state averages.
Here are the top 10 most expensive, and their yearly tuitions:
1. Greenhill School (Addison): $38,050
2. The Episcopal School of Dallas: $37,850
3. St. Mark's School of Texas (Dallas): $35,821
4. Shelton School (Dallas): $32,900
5. The Hockaday School (Dallas): $30,935
6. The Winston School (Dallas): $30,652
7. Parish Episcopal School (Dallas): $29,435
8. Akiba Yavneh Academy (Dallas): $29,420
9. Alcuin School (Dallas): $29,400
10. Lakehill Preparatory School (Dallas): $28,650
Low-income families in Dallas, for example, who may want to put their $10,000 education savings account toward private school tuition will not only have to settle for schools well outside of the upper tier of schools, they must also find a way to make up for the hundreds and possibly thousands of dollars needed for even a single year of tuition and expenses. That’s before the week-to-week costs and logistics of transportation to a school likely in a different ZIP code and then possible after-school care considerations.
The way in which even the $10,000 amount falls short of the average cost of private school tuition in Texas signifies an unfair disparity, some critics say. After the previous legislative session ended, Democratic state Rep. Ron Reynolds from Missouri City told the Observer that voucher programs did more than simply redistribute wealth among those who can already afford private school.
“This voucher system, it really exacerbates the haves and the have-nots,” Reynolds said. “It gives the ‘haves’ a subsidy to subsidize their private school tuition that most of them can already afford, and the ‘have-nots' are left at the neighborhood public schools with even less resources than they had to begin with. So this is bad for Texas.”
