MAGA Moms and the Republican Resistance to School Vouchers
Make education public again
By Brant Bingamon, Fri., March 21, 2025
Hollie Plemons is not a liberal, and that’s putting it lightly. Plemons is a grassroots conservative activist. She believes what conservatives believe. She’s anti-immigration, anti-abortion, pro-gun. And yes, she supports Donald Trump.
“I did vote for Trump,” Plemons told us. “And I block walked for him. I’m a Republican precinct chair in Tarrant County. I’m a Christian. I’m a stay-at-home mom, been married for almost 25 years. We’ve got three kids. I’ve stayed at home with them every single second of their lives. And I believe in the family unit. And, absolutely, we should shut the border.”
There is, however, one Republican cause that Plemons viscerally opposes: the initiative Gov. Greg Abbott refers to as “school choice” and “education savings accounts,” but that is most commonly called school vouchers. Vouchers are complicated and many people don’t understand the issue. The simplest explanation is that it’s a government program – Plemons calls it an entitlement – that lets parents divert taxpayer money from public schools for use in their children’s private schooling. These parents receive a “voucher” – a check or coupon or disbursement of money into a bank account – to help them pay for the private school.
Over the last three years, support for vouchers has become a litmus test for Texas Republicans, as Abbott and his wealthy donors have driven Republican opponents of the measure out of the Legislature. Abbott didn’t push hard for vouchers in his first seven years as governor but flipped in 2022, after surviving his own primary challenge. This session, he and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick designated vouchers the state’s No. 1 priority, ahead of the border, the electric grid, and school funding. Patrick’s Senate passed a voucher bill in early February – Senate Bill 2 – as its first order of business. The Texas House is currently considering its own voucher bill – House Bill 3 – and will likely approve it soon. The bill has 76 sponsors, the exact number it needs to pass.
Voucher supporters say the proposal will allow parents to rescue children, especially low-income kids and those with special needs, from struggling public schools. They also argue that vouchers will improve public education by forcing schools to compete for students. HB 3’s author, House Rep. Brad Buckley, refers to vouchers as “another tool in the toolbox to provide the best education environment for children.”
Most Democrats, teachers, and public school supporters disagree. They have many arguments, but the unifying theme is that vouchers would bleed money from the state’s chronically underfunded public education system, weakening it and leaving schools more segregated by class, race, and disability. Many rural Republicans – the backbone of the Texas Republican Party – share this concern. They also oppose vouchers because to get any benefit out of the program there must be private schools available, and in many of Texas’ rural counties there simply aren’t any.
Abbott and Patrick claim that Texans are clamoring for vouchers, citing a pair of polls conducted over the last eight months. Voucher opponents have their own poll refuting the claim. Plemons told us that she knocked on over 20,000 of her neighbors’ doors in the 2022 and 2024 primaries in support of conservative candidates and met few who understood the idea. When they did understand it, they didn’t support it, she said.
“Not one person that I ever knocked on their door said they wanted school choice,” Plemons said. “If they brought it up, they told me how they didn’t want it.”
Vouchers are not conservative, Plemons told us. If they’re approved, she believes they will grow the government and become a breeding ground for fraud and corruption. She suspects they’re a Trojan horse for government intrusion into families’ private lives, with their proposed regulation of private schools and home schools. She says Abbott and Patrick are pushing vouchers in exchange for campaign donations. She told us she’s been taking this message to Republican clubs and other venues almost every night for the last two months. She and her allies – who some on the left have dubbed “the MAGA moms” – are also leading a scorched-earth campaign against vouchers on social media. They are part of an ever-louder movement of Texans, many of them conservative or apolitical, who have, in recent weeks, confronted pro-voucher legislators at public events in Salado and Palestine, booing them off the stage. As the veteran Texas political observer Scott Braddock commented online, “It’s getting ugly out there.”
“We, the people, don’t want this,” Plemons said. “So if those elected officials know that we the people don’t want it, and they vote for it anyways, because King Abbott wants it, and because his donors want it, they just sold Texas.”
What Are Vouchers?
Vouchers have been proposed many times in Texas over the years. The idea first appeared here in 1957, as a way to keep classrooms segregated after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. It was defeated then and has been ever since, most recently in the 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023 legislative sessions.
However, some form of vouchers already exists in 29 states – in fact, Texas is the only Southern state that has not yet adopted it. Half of those states’ programs are designed to serve a limited number of kids who are economically disadvantaged or disabled, something most Democrats still oppose because they believe limited programs will open the door to universal programs. Fifteen states have such universal programs, the kind Greg Abbott is insisting on, which would be open to any K-12 student.
There is research showing that students who use voucher programs to attend private school do better than their public school peers; there is research showing they do worse. There is research showing that most voucher money goes to students who are already attending private schools, that vouchers are, in the familiar construction, welfare for the wealthy. And there is research showing that universal voucher programs are expensive for taxpayers, that costs can get out of control. In Arizona, for example, the state faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall in 2024, much of it the result of new voucher spending, according to a nonpartisan think tank.
The two near-identical voucher proposals that Texas is considering would take $1 billion in taxpayer money to provide roughly 90,000 kids – one out of every 60 of Texas’ 5.5 million public school students – with “education savings accounts,” starting in the fall of 2026. Education savings accounts are essentially bank accounts that the state deposits money into. The money may, in theory, only be used to pay for private school tuition and education expenses like tutors, online courses, special education services, and transportation. The Senate’s bill provides $10,000 per year for most students, $11,500 for special education students, and $2,000 for homeschoolers. The dollar amounts in the House’s bill fluctuate depending on how much the state is providing to public schools, but the numbers are similar, except for special education students, who could get as much as $30,000 a year.
The $1 billion for the program would come from the General Revenue Fund, the main pot of public money collected from all Texans, mostly through sales taxes. Most of $1 billion would go directly to voucher payments for students, but the bills specify that $50 million of that figure would be given to vendors – private companies – to manage the payouts, while $30 million would go to the government, to the Comptroller of Public Accounts and the Texas Education Agency, to operate the program.
The state’s own analyses of SB 2 and HB 3, conducted by the Legislative Budget Board, predict that the voucher program would become very expensive, very fast. By 2030, the LBB predicts the program will have cost taxpayers over $10 billion.
The state projects that over two-thirds of the $10 billion will go to kids who are already attending private schools today. This is a pattern documented in Florida and Arizona. Voucher opponents argue that vouchers create an unnecessary third rail for education – in addition to public schools and charter schools – and only serve a small percentage of kids. They point out that the voucher program would be funded by the state’s $24 billion budget surplus but that, historically, Texas rarely has those kinds of budget surpluses. “If they’re planning on funding this through the surplus, we’re going to blow through that in less than 10 years,” Plemons said. “And then what? Oh, that’s right, then it’s a new tax.”
Those supporting vouchers don’t focus on new potential taxes, but what they view as the unfairness of the current system, which requires parents sending their kids to private school to continue paying property taxes to fund the public schools. “Families should not have to pay twice – once in taxes for a system that may not meet their child’s needs, and again, for tuition, for the education they truly want,” said Brian Archer, an administrator for the Joshua Christian Academy in North Texas, at a hearing before lawmakers March 11. “HB 3 empowers parents, not the government, to make the best decision for their child’s education.”
Although private schools participating in the program would be receiving public tax dollars under the proposed system, they would not be required to use state-approved curriculum. They would not have to test students with the standardized tests required in public schools and wouldn’t have to report student performance. They could reject students on the basis of sexual preference. They could require the parents of kids with disabilities to give up their children’s right to an appropriate education in order to be admitted. Private religious schools could reject students on the basis of sex and religion. It’s exactly the opposite for public schools. They are required by law to accept every child who comes through their doors, regardless of income, disability, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else.
Democratic Rep. James Talarico, a former schoolteacher who represents the Austin area in the Texas Legislature, riffs on this contradiction in every speech he gives. Talarico says that vouchers would be “a massive, historic transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.” He emphasizes that the name given to vouchers by Republican leaders – school choice – is intentionally misleading.
“How is it school choice when the private school has all the power?” he asked a statewide gathering of the PTA in February. “How is it choice when a majority of counties in the state of Texas don’t have a single private school in them? How is it choice when private schools don’t have to provide transportation or special education services? And how is it choice when the voucher doesn’t even cover the full cost at most private schools in Texas?”
According to the Education Data Initiative, the average cost of private schools in Texas is about $11,000 per year. According to the Texas Private Schools Association, the median tuition in Texas was roughly $9,800 during the 2021-22 school year.
“If you gave my former students on the west side of San Antonio a $10,000 voucher, there’s still no way they could afford a $20,000-a-year private school,” Talarico says. “But here’s the catch: the wealthy parent who is already sending their kid to a $20,000-a-year private school is about to get a $10,000 discount – a $10,000 coupon at our expense.”
The state estimates that if vouchers become law, 98,000 students currently in public school will leave by 2030. This would drain millions of dollars from the schools because their funding is based on how many students attend. Public school advocates say the lost funds would cause school districts to lay off teachers, close schools, and end successful programs. They say it would damage the quality of teaching, setting off a chain reaction encouraging more high-achieving and affluent students to abandon the public schools.
The voucher proposals in the House and Senate prioritize providing vouchers to low-income students and those with disabilities. Voucher proponents argue the program would be particularly beneficial for disabled kids, who need special services they say can’t be provided by all public schools. Laura Colangelo of the Texas Private Schools Association told lawmakers on March 11 that Texas has about 50 private schools that serve only students with disabilities. “Very often,” she said, “these schools specialize in having these children with learning differences, or autism, or some other condition that prevents success in public school come to the private school and get intensive interventions, with the goal of getting them back into the public schools with the skills and confidence to make friends, find academic success, and develop a lifelong love of learning.”
Voucher opponents respond that the voucher money provided by the state would not be adequate to pay for most private schools focused on special ed kids, because those schools are more expensive. So the majority of special ed kids would remain in the public schools. “Who’s going to be left if vouchers passes?” Plemons asks. “You’re going to have your special education kids. Some of them require a private aide that can be $40,000-50,000 a year, just for that private aide. Where are they going to go? Nowhere. Then we’re going to have all of our behavioral issue kids. We’re going to have our kids that are super far behind and couldn’t pass the entrance exam.
“Why don’t we just fund the schools?” Plemons asks, repeating a common Democratic argument but giving it a Republican twist. “As conservatives, if we’re concerned about taxes and we’re concerned about all the welfare that we have to pay, why don’t we stop creating the need for the welfare, and fix the public schools, where the majority of our kids are going to be? As a Christian, as a conservative, do we not care about them? I do. I do. I care about them.”
Selling Out Rural Texas
Talarico has become one of the state’s smoothest messengers against vouchers. He makes a digestible argument for why he believes Greg Abbott is working so hard to pass vouchers.
“Six years ago, Greg Abbott promised to invest in public schools like this,” Talarico told a group outside Parmer Lane Elementary School in Austin this January. “Now, he’s letting them close. So what changed? Follow the money. A group of billionaires who want to privatize our Texas schools bought our governor. One of them, an East Coast billionaire named Jeff Yass, gave our governor one check for $6 million – the largest campaign contribution in Texas history. So now Greg Abbott is starving our public schools and pushing a private school voucher scam, which will take even more money out of schools like this one, and put it in the hands of millionaires and billionaires.”
Yass has now contributed at least $12 million to Abbott, according to Transparency USA. Talarico also calls out Trump’s former secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, whose American Federation for Children has spent millions supporting vouchers in Texas. And he was one of the first to name-check Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, a pair of religious extremists reinvigorating a Texas tradition of kooky, obscenely wealthy oilmen dragging the state’s politics to the right.
Tim Dunn is a particularly interesting figure. He is a lay minister of an extremist church in Midland. The Baptist News Global calls him a Christian nationalist, and he says that evangelical Christians should control education, government, media, and pretty much every bit of contemporary American life. In an essay on vouchers in 2005, he described the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the conservative think tank he’s helped to lead for more than 20 years, as “long-time advocates of eliminating the government monopoly in public education.”
According to ProPublica, Dunn has contributed millions of dollars to right-wing lobbyists (Empower Texans, Defend Texas Liberty, Texans United for a Conservative Majority), grassroots lobbyists (True Texas Project), and conservative media (the Texas Scorecard). He has spent millions more funding extreme opponents to already-very-conservative Republican incumbents. Talarico framed the influence of Dunn and other billionaires in a speech in January: “They already bought our governor. They bought our lieutenant governor. They bought our attorney general. They bought our state Senate. And now, to complete their takeover, they’re trying to buy the Texas House.”
Abbott declared school vouchers his No. 1 priority in 2022, after surviving a primary challenge facilitated by the Dunn-and-Wilks-funded PAC Defend Texas Liberty. Throughout the 2023 legislative session, the governor boasted that he had the votes to pass vouchers. But he ran up against the same numerical reality that had doomed vouchers before: the difficulty of persuading at least 76 of the 150 representatives in the Texas House to support the proposal. Through that year’s regular session and three special sessions, more than 60 House Democrats uniformly opposed vouchers. They were joined by 21 Republicans, most of them from rural areas. The coalition voted vouchers down three times.
Glenn Rogers was one of the 21 Republicans. He represented a district to the west of Fort Worth, with several counties and more than a dozen public school districts. “In each and every case, those schools are just so loved by the community,” Rogers told the Chronicle. “They are the backbone of the community. They are the leading employer in the community. I don’t think people realize just how important public schools are to rural Texas and rural America. The whole town lives for the high school and high school athletics and the band and everything. You lose your school, you lose your town.”
Abbott denies that vouchers hurt rural public schools, emphasizing that funding for the proposal would come from taxes in the General Revenue Fund, whereas public school money comes mostly from property taxes. He identified a dozen rural towns with private schools in a recent speech to the Texas Public Policy Foundation and has repeatedly held rallies at Kingdom Life Academy, a Christian private school in Tyler that fervently supports vouchers.
Rogers said Abbott asked him to support vouchers in the 2024 primary but he believed his constituents wouldn’t benefit from the proposal, because there were few private schools in his district. “Many of the schools in my district and in the Panhandle and in South Texas and the South Plains, they’re a long ways apart,” Rogers said. “It’s some very, very remote country. Folks travel tremendous distances for football games and that kind of thing. And the idea that they would have any options for private schools is just crazy. The distance just precludes that.”
Abbott had endorsed Rogers in both of his previous campaigns but after Rogers’ refusal to go along on vouchers the governor started working to remove him and the other Republicans from the Legislature. Of the 21 who had voted against vouchers, five decided not to run again. Abbott didn’t mount challenges against four others. For the remaining 12, he took $6 million from Jeff Yass in the primary, and another $4 million from Yass in the runoff, and ran ads accusing the anti-voucher Republicans of being soft on the border. Nine of the 12 lost their seats, including Rogers. Today, just one-third of the Republicans who opposed vouchers in 2023 remain in the House.
Rogers points out that Abbott never campaigned on vouchers. “The voucher issue itself was not polling like he wanted it to, so he shifted to lying about our position on other issues, like our stance on the border. And it’s really unfortunate that the governor of Texas would resort to just outright lying like he did. For instance, he made a statement in a rally that he couldn’t trust me on the border, I was weak on the border. I voted with every single one of the governor’s legislative priorities, other than vouchers. My Republican colleagues went through the same thing I did. I mean, we were in one of the most conservative sessions in Texas history, and we were with the governor on everything but this.”
After beating Rogers and the others, Abbott proclaimed that he had the votes to pass vouchers in the next session. Rogers believes that might be true. But he said if Abbott does pass vouchers, he will have done it by betraying his own voters. “The governor was bought by the billionaires,” Rogers said. “Then he sold out his most loyal supporters – his rural Texans.”
Vendor Bills
Hollie Plemons calls SB 2 and HB 3 “vendor bills.” In her world, it’s about the harshest term she could use.
A vendor bill is one that politicians push, knowing that it will enrich particular private interests. Since SB 2 and HB 3 dropped, Plemons has been conducting her own analysis of the bills, paying particular attention to the fiscal notes prepared by the Legislative Budget Board, which detail what the bills will cost, how many kids they will serve, and what their long-range financial implications will be. Her conclusion: The proposals grow government. They create opportunities for kickbacks and fraud. They will eventually lead to tax increases.
The fiscal note for SB 2 predicts that the Comptroller of Public Accounts would need to add 36 full-time employees if the bill passes. The Texas Education Agency would need to add six employees. HB 3’s fiscal note estimates 38 new employees for the comptroller and eight for TEA. $50 million per year is allocated for up to five vendors.
Plemons condemns the idea of new government employees and vendors. Voucher proponents express the same values but argue it is the public schools that spend too much on private companies. At the TPPF policy summit where Abbott spoke in February, a video played several times, slamming public schools for spending tax money on private vendors.
Bob Popinski of the nonpartisan public education advocates Raise Your Hand Texas says the new vendors could be for-profit companies already handling voucher disbursements in other states, like ClassWallet, Odyssey, and Skyward. Voucher opponents note that it will be up to the comptroller, not local school officials, to decide which companies get the contracts. They fear they will go to businesses connected to billionaires like Yass and DeVos, who will then kick back donations to the governor and others.
Austin Rep. Gina Hinojosa, another of the Democrats’ most effective messengers on vouchers, frequently emphasizes this dynamic. “When the billionaires see our local schools, they see dollar signs,” Hinojosa said. “They see an opportunity to pull out profit from every part of the system, just like private equity has done to health care.”
For Plemons and other MAGA moms, the potential for fraud, corruption, and government bloat is one thing. But they are also deeply suspicious of the rules that private schools and home schools would have to follow to receive taxpayer money. For example, HB 3 requires private schools that accept voucher funds to be accredited by an organization recognized by the TEA or the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission, and to give students yearly assessment tests.
“That’s why we call it 'government-regulated’ school choice,” said Lynn Davenport, a Republican precinct chair in Dallas County who has warned against several of the House’s education bills this session. “Because your private school and your home school would no longer be private if you accept the dollars. If you read the bills, they have those strings attached that would tie the children to assessments, to regulations, to curriculum standards. We don’t want that.”
There’s an Agenda
Hollie Plemons, Lynn Davenport, and Alice Linahan stood laughing outside the hearing room of the House Committee on Public Education on March 11, marveling at being on the same side as Democrats.
“They’re listening to us but our own side calls us names!” Plemons said.
“Talarico was talking and I was like, 'yeah, yeah, yeah’ – just agreeing with everything,” Davenport replied.
It was a break in the hearing for HB 3, which went on to be an all-day, all-night affair, finally wrapping up at 6:30am. Over 300 people signed up to speak, many voucher supporters and at least twice as many more opponents. Plemons spoke at 7pm, delivering her Republican-themed arguments – that vouchers aren’t conservative, that they would go to undocumented immigrants, that private schools getting taxpayer money could be established for LGBTQ and Muslim students. She ended by calling HB 3 a government takeover of private education.
Rep. Gina Hinojosa thanked Plemons for her remarks. “I giggle a little bit because I’ve had so many Republicans come up to me today and say, 'I don’t agree with you on a lot of things, but I agree with everything you’re saying about this bill.’ And so I want to encourage you. Thank you for having this conversation with a Democrat. We don’t have to agree on everything, but we can agree on this bill.”
The Public Education committee has not yet voted on HB 3, so it remains pending. Now, voucher opponents have turned their attention to the small number of Republicans they hope they can flip. With HB 3’s 76 co-authors including its author Brad Buckley, plus Speaker of the House Dustin Burrows, the bill should be a shoo-in. But Rogers and Plemons say they’re hearing that some Republican reps are nervous about voting for vouchers. And yet any Republican who votes against the proposal must assume they will face a primary challenge financed by Abbott’s billionaires in the next election.
“There are some R electeds who don’t want to vote on this but are being told if they don’t they will be destroyed – lose their seat, lose their reputation, lose their businesses and friends,” Plemons said. “The House reps are terrified. They’re literally being bullied.”
Still, Plemons said she’s hearing more and more doubts about vouchers from the Republican rank and file. Glenn Rogers agrees and calls it a great awakening. He says that while the 2024 Republican primary wasn’t decided on the issue, he hopes the 2026 primary will be.
“There’s voter education going on now,” Rogers said. “People are studying and they’re saying, 'Wait a minute, this is not what we thought it was going to be. This is not giving a child another option. It’s just basically an expensive entitlement program.’ Whether or not we can maintain that momentum into the next cycle, I don’t know. But at least voters will be more educated on the issue.”
Rogers and Plemons believe Abbott is betraying his core supporters. Plemons said she regularly hears from Republicans who feel the same way and are angry with the governor and the representatives supporting vouchers. As someone who wants her state to stay red, she is concerned.
“This issue is making so many Republican voters so mad, because they know that they’re being lied to by their government, that they elected. And that really concerns me.
“I’m telling people in leadership, 'Do you really want to be known as someone that lied to your voters? Do you think that’s going to get Republicans’ votes in the future?’ Because I don’t. It is a government for the people and by the people – and they’re not listening to us.”
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