Education advocates said Tuesday they’re concerned about new data showing a whopping 80 percent of the people who remain on the school voucher waitlist have never sent their children to public school.
The new information comes after an earlier analysis revealed that roughly 75 percent of the program applications came from non-public school families.
It’s a problem, critics say, because the $1 billion Texas Education Freedom Accounts program was championed by Gov. Greg Abbott and his supporters as an opportunity for low-income families and children with disabilities to choose where they go to school. It was also supposed to be a chance for people to pull their kids from low-performing public schools, but that hasn’t actually happened.
The Houston American Federation of Teachers, the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency and Abbott’s Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa have been saying since the Texas Education Freedom Accounts legislation passed last summer that it appears the program was always intended to bankroll established private school families.
Dee Carney, director of the Austin-based Center for Voucher Transparency, said in a press briefing Tuesday that “the comptroller has described the waitlist as evidence of demand, but who is waiting matters as much as how many are waiting.”
“Texans deserve to know whether the $1 billion taxpayer-funded program is delivering on the claim from supporters that vouchers would create new educational opportunities for those who wanted to leave public schools, or just shifting taxpayer dollars to families already in private schools,” she said. “In its first year, the voucher program is primarily subsidizing private education for families already able to afford it, rather than expanding opportunity.”
Travis Pillow, a spokesman for the TEFA program, has said repeatedly that even though someone sent their kids to private school in the past, they may be working a second job or foregoing a family vacation to do so. Additionally, a high percentage of voucher applicants are pre-K and kindergarten students who didn’t go to any school last year.
Interim Comptroller Don Huffines has already asked to double the program’s funding to $2 billion for the next school year, a request that will be considered when the legislature reconvenes in January and discussed at a Legislative Appropriations Request hearing on September 9.
The Texas State Teachers Association issued a statement criticizing the budget request and saying that taxpayers need more information before agreeing to increase the funding. “Many school districts have been forced to close campuses or eliminate programs to tackle budget deficits,” the statement reads. “We can’t afford to keep draining increasing amounts of tax dollars from these public schools to support religious and other private schools.”
Carney has said that eligibility for a voucher does not equate to access. During Tuesday’s briefing, officials with Our Schools Our Democracy and its subsidiary, Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, shared research they gathered in a review of 221 voucher-accepting private schools across the state, titled “Choice on Paper, Not in Practice.”
During the briefing, Carney said “religion is the dominant gatekeeper” determining whether a private school was accepted into the voucher program.
“We thought it was interesting that 23 percent [of the private schools reviewed] use religious preference somehow in admission,” she said. “It could be admission priority, pricing, parish versus non-parish members, continued enrollment eligibility, statement of faith or worship participation requirements. Some schools require letters of recommendation from a pastor.”
And just because a family gets a voucher, they’re not guaranteed entry into the school of their choice, one of the reasons more than 20,700 families declined the subsidies. Others said they were surprised by hidden fees or the voucher didn’t cover the full amount of tuition. “The sticker price rarely tells the full story,” Carney said.
Additionally, Carney said some parents claim their preferred private school advertised that it could serve students with disabilities and they later found out that not all disabilities were included in that description.
The TEFA provides up to $30,000 for students with disabilities, $10,000 for traditional private school students and $2,000 per child for homeschool students. More than 200 Houston-area private schools were approved by the state to accept vouchers.
The new data examined during Tuesday’s briefing included the statistic that, of the 106,142 who remain on the voucher waitlist, 20 percent had previously enrolled in public school, less than half of a percent of the 5.5 million Texans who currently attend public institutions. Carney also noted that all waitlisted applicants fall above the low-income threshold.
In a 2025 study on school vouchers, researchers found “little evidence that private school vouchers created markets that produced valued educational outcomes. In many cases, policymakers used vouchers as a tool to maintain racial segregation or the programs failed to increase student achievement outcomes. These failures underscore how education markets do not meet basic assumptions of competitive markets.”
The report also found that “some politicians running for the highest offices within states and nationally have championed vouchers as a tool to strengthen education (e.g., President Donald Trump, Texas Governor Greg Abbott) many of whom find themselves receiving significant political campaign contributions from an elite class of pro-voucher, right-wing billionaires.”
Carrie Griffith, co-founder and executive director of Our Schools Our Democracy, said that as budget season begins at the state Capitol, “we know we will hear a lot of praise for the $1 billion program and a list of reasons defending why expanding the program would be in response to demand.”
“Our intention with this report was to examine the promise made by the 89th Legislature for the vouchers and look at it from the perspective of a family engaging with the TEFA program at the stage of trying to find a school,” she said. “Our goal was to examine the processes of voucher-accepting private schools.”
The report presents high-level trends rather than individual school policies, Griffith explained. For example, the advocates wanted to determine whether tuition information and all associated costs such as uniforms and textbooks are publicly available. That data is not on the website of more than 50 percent of the private schools they reviewed. And nearly half of the schools that do post tuition prices charge more than the base voucher amount, according to the report.
Carney encouraged members of the public and families who have gone through the voucher process to read the report and make their own determinations but noted that one thing is clear: the subsidies aren’t being handed out graciously to public school families in a low-income bracket who were looking for a school that could serve their child’s special needs.
“Many of the private schools state that they reserve the right to deny admission based on a subjective determination of right fit,” she said.
