Houston American Federation of Teachers president Jackie Anderson is worried that a new taxpayer-funded voucher program could dismantle public education.
Last year, Republican lawmakers led by Gov. Greg Abbott championed “Education Freedom Accounts,” a $1 billion school choice program advertised as a taxpayer-funded mechanism to give poor kids and students with disabilities an opportunity to learn in a private setting.
Who doesn’t like freedom and choice? But it’s nothing but a grift, says Anderson, who retired from teaching in public classrooms after a 33-year career.
“The money that is being used for the vouchers is pulling dollars directly from our public schools and making it available to private schools, mostly for parents who can already afford to pay for their students to be in private schools,” she says. “This is why we said it’s welfare for the wealthy. It’s a big grift. It’s a way to destroy public education.”
More than 274,000 voucher applications were filed by the March 31 deadline, and there’s not enough money in the pot to go around. Only about 90,000 to 100,000 vouchers will be awarded, based on the funds available.
The comptroller’s office, which oversees the program, says priority will be given to low-income families and students with disabilities, but the number of people who fall into those categories and actually applied is low, and approved private schools can use discretion in who they accept.
An Austin legislative consultant who has worked on the voucher issue and asked to remain anonymous said she’s received reports that some of the voucher-accepting schools are attempting to determine what faith an applicant practices, requiring a letter from a pastor and asking questions about how many parents are in the household in order to vet applicants.
Anderson says that’s discriminatory. “I would venture to say, and I don’t have the statistics, that a private school would not take a child with any severe disabilities, as public schools must do, because they know they cannot provide the care that these students need,” she says.
Most voucher recipients will receive about $10,300 per child to attend private schools. Students with disabilities can receive up to $30,000, and homeschool students get $2,000.
According to data from the comptroller’s office, 75 percent of Texas voucher applicants attended a private school or homeschool in the 2024-25 school year. That’s not unusual. Ninety-five percent of voucher users in Arkansas and 87 percent in North Carolina were already enrolled in private schools, according to the nonprofit Raise Your Hand Texas.
Forty-five percent of Texas voucher applicants are white; 23 percent are Hispanic; and 12 percent are Black, a contrast from Texas Education Agency data showing public school enrollment at 24 percent white, 53 percent Hispanic, and 13 percent Black.
Low-income families, defined by the program as a family of four earning $66,000 or less per year, make up 37 percent of applicants. Children with disabilities make up 16 percent of applicants, according to the Texas Tribune.
There’s also a huge looming question about oversight.
The Texas American Federation of Teachers raised numerous inquiries about how the comptroller’s office will monitor spending, citing questionable expenditures like Arizona homeschool parents spending $1 million on LEGOs and Florida families taking taxpayer-funded trips to Disney World.
Anderson says she remembers how challenging it was for parents trying to teach their kids at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and predicts that some will attempt to do it again just for the voucher money.
“This is my teacher’s mind, but I envision a lot of pop-up homeschooling programs,” she says, explaining that a person with no qualifications could offer to homeschool a group of students and pocket the voucher money. “Are they really schooling the children or are they just getting a check from all these parents? I can envision these places cropping up all over the place and children walking the streets all day. I could see how people could think that they’re dropping their children off for homeschooling and the children are not being taught anything. I could see that being a real problem.”
How will Texas ensure that voucher money is spent on educational materials? “That’s what I want to know,” Anderson says.
Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock appears to be silent on the concerns raised by the public while he doubles down on the notion that the funding will be exhausted in the first two tiers of a lottery system going to low-income and disabled students, rather than families whose kids were already enrolled in private school.
“Texas didn’t just meet expectations, we set the national record for year-one demand in a school choice program,” Hancock said in a statement. “Families across Texas made it clear they want a greater role in their child’s education, and they showed up in record numbers.”
But it’s unknown who will actually get the vouchers, whether the schools they apply to will accept them and whether they’ll be able to afford the remainder of tuition once the voucher runs out. The comptroller’s website doesn’t address those questions.
Hancock’s office said some recipients are being notified this month that they’ve been accepted, and the money will be doled out in July ahead of the 2026-27 school year.
“We Have Questions”
Anderson wasn’t the only one who had suspicions about the voucher program when it was first proposed two sessions ago and again in 2025 when Abbott essentially threatened that lawmakers couldn’t leave Austin until it passed.
“They should have rolled out their cots and ordered their personal items and brought them right on the floor at the Capitol and stayed there and showed him,” Anderson says.
Some tried to sound the alarm. State Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston, warned the Republican-led Texas Legislature in April 2025 that taxpayer dollars could go toward out-of-state schools as long as they were registered as vendors in Texas.
Earlier this month, the comptroller’s office confirmed that North Forest Baptist Church Academy, based in Tallahassee, was approved to participate in the Texas voucher program because it is a registered Texas vendor. The law allows funds to go toward private and virtual schools, pre-K programs, homeschool materials, and vendors like therapists and tutors.
Anderson says that’s ridiculous.
“Now we have a school in Florida qualifying for the money,” she says. “We also have this new school, a sports academy, which is giving two hours of academics, and the rest of the day, the students are doing sports for [Division 1] athletics. They’re getting our money.”
Even if low-income and disabled children get picked first, the voucher won’t cover all their educational needs, Anderson says. “What is $10,000 going to do for a parent whose child suffers from a disability?” she says. “Any school that would be capable of working with those children and providing for their needs, $10,000 isn’t going to cut it.”
State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, raised concerns about the program during the 2025 legislative session and has continued to criticize Abbott in her campaign for the governor’s seat, referring to the school choice legislation as a “voucher scam.”
“Public school students are subjected to deeply flawed standardized tests while private school students get a free pass — and a taxpayer-funded school voucher,” Hinojosa wrote in a March email to supporters. “I’ve seen what our public schools can do when they’re supported — and I’ve seen what happens when politicians rig the system against them.”
Public school board members, community activists and parents also raised concerns when Senate Bill 2 was being debated at the Capitol but the criticism has ramped up now that the program is being rolled out.
The HOUmanitarian account on X, which describes itself as sharing news and opinion related to nonprofits and activism, posted last week: “Texas school voucher applications are very different from the racial makeup of Texas public schools. While schools are 54 percent Hispanic, white families are by far the largest group applying. This may reignite 70-year-old charges that vouchers are just a re-segregationist tool.”
Carrie Griffith, executive director of the Austin nonprofit Our Schools Our Democracy, says Texans have heard political posturing and marketing statistics for months, but state leaders have not answered the many questions that taxpayers and families have about vouchers.
“Even some private schools are choosing not to participate because of concerns with the program,” Griffith says. “The most important questions won’t be answered until the private schools choose which students to admit and Texans learn who is really benefiting from the program, not just who has applied.”
State Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Salado, chaired the Texas House Public Education Committee and helped lead the voucher legislation with former Republican Senator Brandon Creighton, who gave up his Senate seat to become chancellor of Texas Tech University late last year. Buckley acknowledged that many of the early applicants were families already connected to private schools, a common pattern in other states.
“I think it is natural to see in year one of a new program, a lot of the families who apply will be those who are already connected to a private school,” Buckley said.
Julie Hinaman, president of the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD school board, wrote on Facebook that most of the students who applied for vouchers will be turned away due to ineligibility based on current pre-K requirements or they won’t be accepted by a private school due to unacceptable test scores, behavior concerns, inability for parents to provide transportation or inability to meet fundraising requirements.
“Remember, private schools select their students,” Hinaman wrote. “It’s the schools’ choice. So while many applicants will be rejected, the students that private schools actually want and already serve will have access to tuition subsidies paid for by you and me. Even though there seems to be plenty of our public tax dollars to give away, the state legislature will use the inflated number of applicants versus actual recipients as an excuse to try to grow vouchers next year.”
More than 25,000 voucher applications were deemed ineligible by the state, and no reason was given for why they were turned down. Some critics say the applications are cumbersome and require a legally-binding Individualized Education Plan for students with disabilities, and if the IEP isn’t filled out properly, the application gets rejected.
When Texas Center for Voucher Transparency Director Dee Carney was asked to outline her concerns about the program, she said she wasn’t ready to talk about that, since so much is still unknown.
“We do have questions,” Carney says. “We certainly have questions around who will benefit from the program. Is it private entities or the Texas public who’s paying $1 billion into this taxpayer-funded program? We have questions about fairness. How will school districts and rural counties be impacted? We have questions about transparency. Data doesn’t always provide answers but it helps us ask better questions. Good policy requires great information.”
Fiscal Transparency
Hancock can deduct up to 8 percent of the total voucher budget for marketing and administrative costs, totaling about $800,000 in taxpayer dollars. Texas has an additional $26 million, two-year contract with New York-based technology company Odyssey to administer the program, including a $4 million marketing commitment.
Anderson says she believes there’s an effort by Abbott and Republican lawmakers to undermine the public school system.
“I will get political,” she says. “I think that’s exactly what it’s about. They are privateers and they are looking for a way to make money off the backs of our children. If you really cared about children, you wouldn’t have been sitting on that $38 billion rainy day fund and not sending money to the schools when they were yelling and screaming and begging for funding. You didn’t do it.”
Carney says the staff at the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency read through 44 pages after the comptroller released the final program rules.
“What we saw, going through 300-plus comments, was that, regardless of people’s positions on vouchers, regardless of how they voted, regardless of where they lived, people wanted accountability, transparency and fiscal responsibility,” she says. “We saw that people across all divides of this issue had questions and wanted answers.”
The Waiting Game
There have already been lawsuits and more are expected. Islamic schools claimed religious discrimination when they weren’t allowed into the voucher program. That matter was temporarily resolved when Hancock’s office approved the protesting schools and extended the application deadline by a couple of weeks.
Litigation is ongoing, however, because a question remains over whether public funds can be used to support discriminatory practices. Attorney General Ken Paxton withdrew himself from representing Hancock in the case, raising questions about whether the timeline for funding decisions would be affected.
Some who have concerns — or questions — about how the program will shake out are waiting to see the data on who benefits from the program before they raise a fuss. Maybe it will end up helping poor children get better educational opportunities, but the suspicion lingers.
The Texas Center for Voucher Transparency created a map displaying by county which schools are accepting vouchers. It shows that over half of Texas’ 254 counties don’t have a participating brick-and-mortar elementary, middle school or high school.
Carney says taxpayers in rural counties are helping foot the bill for vouchers that they aren’t able to use unless they pick an online school. So far, 31 online schools have been selected for the voucher program. Sixty percent of the approved providers only enroll pre-K and kindergarten, further limiting the applicant pool.
Griffith says that less than 2 percent of Texas public school families have applied for private school vouchers, which is not surprising.
“Public schools deliver special education services, provide transportation, support extracurriculars, keep kids safe, and prepare them for life,” she says. “They are one of Texas’s most effective, unifying public institutions. And the data remains undeniable: Most Texans want strong, fully funded public schools, not vouchers.”
Anderson also turns the conversation back to what the voucher program means for public education, noting that Houston ISD has already lost thousands of students in the current school year.
“We were already behind the eight-ball with funding,” she says. “The state has not been funding schools at adequate levels and now we’re going to lose even more money. Who suffers? The children.”
Anderson added that she’s “really afraid” about the future of public education.
“With that fear comes fight,” she says. “We need to hold the people we elected, whether we voted for them or not, accountable. When they are not doing what we elected them to do, whether it be red, blue, green, purple, whatever, we need to vote them out. We need to become more vocal and more active.”
