Gov. Abbott stumps for school vouchers in Fort Worth as lawmakers hammer out details
Speaking Thursday evening at a Fort Worth private school, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made the case for school vouchers — again: That parents, not the government, are best equipped to decide what type of education is best for their children.
Although Abbott has struggled to get a voucher proposal through the Texas Legislature in years past, he sounded confident that a bill will reach his desk this year.
Abbott was in Fort Worth on Thursday to rally supporters of education savings accounts, a school voucher-like program that gives families public money to pay for private school tuition or homeschooling expenses. The governor spoke at a Parent Empowerment Night at Temple Christian School.
During the event, Abbott acknowledged that the proposal has passed the Texas Senate in “session after session after session,” only to fail when it reached the House. But the current session is likely to bring different results. Currently, 77 representatives are signed on as authors on the House’s education savings account bill — one more vote than the bill needs to get through the chamber.
Abbott, however, encouraged families not to assume the bill is already across the finish line. Pointing to a row of Republican lawmakers in the audience, he encouraged parents to call their senators’ and representatives’ offices to voice their support for school vouchers.
Abbott insisted that the proposal doesn’t represent an attack on public schools, saying that the state will have approved record per-student funding and teacher pay by the end of the legislative session. But he also accused public schools across the state of promoting a “woke, leftist agenda.”
“Our schools are for educating our kids, not indoctrinating our kids,” he said.
Before the event Axel and Stacy Van Hout were standing in the back of the school’s gymnasium, waiting for Abbott to arrive. The couple’s son is a first-grader at Temple Christian. Although he’s a public school graduate himself, Axel said he isn’t happy with the quality of education provided in public schools. So when his son was old enough to start pre-K, he and Stacy decided to look for options outside their school district.
“There’s been so much push for different ideologies,” he said. “I want my son to be raised in the Christian faith, and that’s where we want him to be.”
Axel said he didn’t think families who are looking for better educational options for their kids should be penalized by having to pay private school tuition. If anything, he said he thinks low-performing schools should be penalized, so families could get a better idea of what’s going on there.
House, Senate voucher bills differ on details
Two separate education savings account plans are working their way through the Texas Legislature. While both plans would set up programs that give families public money to pay for private school tuition, they differ on some key details. The House version, House Bill 2, would establish a priority list for applicants, giving highest priority to students with disabilities whose families earn up to 500% of the federal poverty level — about $156,000 for a family of four — if the number of applicants is greater than the number of spots available. Following those students on the priority list would be students whose families earn up to double the federal poverty level, followed by those whose families earn between 200% and 500% of the poverty level, then those in families earning more than five times the poverty level.
The Senate version, Senate Bill 2, would set aside 80% of the voucher program’s spots for students with disabilities and students in families earning up to 500% of the federal poverty level. About 79% of school-aged children in Texas fall under that income threshold. Unlike the House version, which gives higher priority to lower-income families, the Senate version would treat families earning less than the federal poverty level the same as those earning more than $100,000 or more a year.
The idea of a universal voucher program is more popular among Texas voters than one restricted to lower-income families, according to a survey conducted last month by Texas Southern University’s Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center. Of the 1,200 Texas registered voters polled, 63% said they would support a universal education savings account program, while just 45% said they would support a program that was only available to lower-income families.
But critics point out that voucher programs without income restrictions tend to benefit wealthiest families the most. In states that have already implemented voucher programs, the majority of students who accepted a voucher were already enrolled in private schools before the programs rolled out, according to a report released in October by FutureEd, a nonpartisan think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Both Arkansas and Iowa launched voucher programs in 2023 and expanded eligibility to all students in the state starting this year. In 2023, 64% of voucher recipients in Arkansas and 66% in Iowa were enrolled in private schools the year before, according to the report. That effectively means that taxpayers in those states were subsidizing private school tuition that those students’ families had already committed to paying.
Also in 2023, state lawmakers in Oklahoma passed the Parental Choice Tax Credit Act, creating a voucher-like program that gives tax credits of up to $7,500 for families to put toward private school tuition. Lawmakers said the program was intended to help low-income families who were trapped in failing public schools. But last month, the Oklahoma Tax Commission reported that nearly half of the tax credits the agency gave out for the spring 2025 semester went to families making $150,000 a year or more — more than double the state’s median household income.
This story was originally published March 6, 2025 at 9:18 PM.
