There is no such thing as a modest school voucher program
A Texas newspaper recently published an editorial acknowledging that Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick should “draw most of the fire” for failing to increase public education funding last year, leaving school districts with serious budgetary problems, including deficits and layoffs.
But the editorial said educators also were partly to blame for “refusing to budge over a modest school voucher pilot program.”
The reference, of course, was to the public education community’s unwavering opposition to spending tax dollars on private school vouchers, even though Abbott had vowed not to increase public school funding without them. And he didn’t, despite his constitutional duty to support free public schools.
Despite what the editorial claimed, the governor and other voucher advocates never intended to pass a pilot voucher program. I don’t recall the governor ever mentioning a pilot program. He intended (and still does intend) to pass a permanent voucher program, a program whose drain on tax dollars would continue to grow.
Even if you want to claim that Abbott’s education savings account (or voucher) plan from last year would have been initially “modest,” it wouldn’t have stayed that way.
The Legislative Budget Board estimated the voucher program, had it passed, would have cost taxpayers $461 million in fiscal 2025, ballooning to $2.3 billion by 2028. Many of the voucher recipients would have been kids who had already been attending private schools, including some from upper- or middle-income families receiving taxpayer-paid subsidies for tuition they already could afford.
Last year’s failed voucher program would have given priority to children from low-income families and kids with disabilities, but the program would not have been limited to them because Abbott demanded a wide-open program, a wide-open raid on tax dollars for unregulated private schools. In any event, the $10,500 voucher per year wouldn’t have been enough for many low-income families to pay the full tuition and fees at many private schools. And many private schools don’t accept children with disabilities or other special needs.
Meanwhile, the cost of the program would have continued to grow, until it was costing taxpayers – and public schools – untold billions of dollars a year.
This pattern of increasing voucher expenditures – at the expense of public schools – has been documented in several states with existing voucher programs.
According to a report, linked at the end of this post, by Public Funds Public Schools, seven states with some of the longer records with vouchers have seen substantial increases in state funding for vouchers over the years as funding for public schools has declined.
Public Funds Public Schools is a partnership between the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Examples in the report, released last year, include:
- Florida – This state, like some other states, has multiple voucher programs, and spending on three of the oldest programs increased by 313 percent between 2008-2019, while per-pupil funding for public education was cut by 12 percent.
- Arizona –Increased spending on voucher programs by 270 percent between 2008-2019, while cutting per-pupil spending for public education by 5.7 percent.
- Georgia – Increased spending on vouchers by 883 percent between 2009-2019, while cutting per-pupil spending on public schools by 1.9 percent.
- Indiana – Increased voucher spending by 796 percent between 2012-2019 and cut per-pupil spending on public education by 1.5 percent.
- Public school advocates understand they must kill voucher programs before they have a chance to get a chokehold on the state education budget and kill the public education system. We have seen what already is happening with charter schools.
The charters began rather modestly, but now they are beginning to strangle traditional public schools in Texas. There are hundreds of them with more campuses being approved every year. Many of these charters are not needed and don’t perform any better – often worse – than the neighborhood public schools from which they are now taking $4 billion a year. And that raid on tax dollars continues to grow, while average per-pupil funding for Texas public schools is more than $4,000 a year less than the national average. Read more.