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On Feb. 4, Texas families can begin submitting applications for Texas Education Freedom Accounts, also known as school vouchers. Now legal after several failed attempts, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature legislation allows families to use public funds for private schooling.
Throughout its successful 2025 legislative campaign, Senate Bill 2 was billed as a way for parents to choose where their child attends school, more freely than they already can. But it’s not that easy. Although “freedom” is part of the program’s name, many families, and perhaps even many private schools, across the state won’t have much freedom to participate, according to recent reports.
Some of the obstacles to families participating in the $1 billion program have been highlighted each time the topic has come up for debate in the Capitol. Although families are eligible for $10,474 per student, at least a third of the schools that offer classes beyond Kindergarten charge tuition above the allotted dollar amount, the Texas Observer recently reported. On top of that, tuition fees do not cover extra costs such as field trips, supplies, or uniforms.
To be clear, $10,474 isn’t even a third of the amount a family must pay per student to attend some of Dallas’ top private schools, including Greenhill School, The Hockaday School, or St. Mark’s School of Texas, where the annual tuition exceeds $30,000.
But many families in Texas don’t even have to worry about the cost, as there simply aren’t any private school options on the table for them to begin with. The Texas Observer noted in its report that a sweeping majority of Texas counties,180 out of 254, do not have an elementary school, junior high or high school enrolled in the voucher program.
In many rural counties, the public school district is a top employer, which is one of the reasons there were more than enough Republican House voucher holdouts, session after session. In order to hopefully keep their offices, GOP representatives like Glenn Rogers, a true conservative who represented parts of Palo Pinto, Parker and Stephens Counties, were staunchly anti-voucher in an effort to prevent taking money away from the public schools. That position, however, put him on the losing end of Abbott’s overwhelmingly successful war against voucher opponents, costing Rogers his office in 2024.
Religion in Schools
Putting the Christian religion into schools has arguably been one of the primary goals of conservative lawmakers in recent years. Although the law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public classroom is currently in legal limbo, other avenues, like the Bluebonnet Learning curriculum, literally put the Bible squarely into lesson plans.
Another key reason voucher opponents cited for their stance was that private schools, most of which have a religious affiliation, do not have to accept every student who can afford tuition one way or another.
The Texas Observer’s report noted an overwhelming majority of private schools with classes beyond Kindergarten are religious. Beyond that, a majority of those are Catholic schools, many of which reportedly prioritize admission for students from the school’s own parish or other Catholic congregations. Some religious schools surveyed in the report “bar from enrollment students who are not from Christian families.”
While students belonging to certain religions or denominations may have a leg up in gaining admission into the private school of their choice, that is not the case for others.
In December, acting state Comptroller Kelly Hancock requested a legal opinion from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on whether some schools should be included in the voucher program. For those who have been following state news headlines in recent months, you won’t be surprised to learn that some schools with possible ties to a prominent Islamic organization are ones that conservative leaders wouldn’t mind leaving out of the mix.
In a letter, Hancock asked for “legal clarity” regarding schools that are ““based at an address that have hosted publicly advertised events by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),” as well as at least one school that “may be owned or controlled by a holding group linked to foreign adversaries seeking influence over U.S. education, specifically an adviser to the Chinese Communist government.”
In November, Abbott designated CAIR, along with the Muslim Brotherhood, as foreign terrorist organizations, although there is no evidence to support any direct link between CAIR and terrorism. The federal government has not designated CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a news release at the time of the designation. “The actions taken by the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR to support terrorism across the globe and subvert our laws through violence, intimidation, and harassment are unacceptable.”
For nearly a year, Abbott and Paxton have led the charge against the two prominent groups after they began vocally opposing and launching investigations into a proposed housing development in North Texas owned by the East Plano Islamic Center, which they claim would result in a “Sharia city.”
A spokesperson for CAIR told the Texas Tribune in December that the school-hosted events in question were “Know Your Rights” sessions designed for students learning about state and federal rights.
“Hosting civil rights education for students is lawful. So is teaching students about their rights under the U.S. and Texas Constitutions,” a spokesperson with CAIR Texas told Texas Tribune. “Any attempt to penalize schools for learning about their civil rights from an organization Greg Abbott happens to dislike would raise serious First Amendment concerns.”
The homepage of the TEFA website has a message that reads “Education freedom accounts are designed to open doors, expand opportunities, and give each Texas child the chance to learn in the environment that fits them best.” Sounds good, but for parents who live in areas without private school options, are not members of a church, or are interested in one of the many schools that have hosted a CAIR information session, the appearance of voucher-powered freedom could likely be a mirage.
