Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wants to get a little of that sweet, sweet school voucher publicity. Two days after the Nov. 5 election, Patrick joined Gov. Greg Abbott in announcing that school vouchers, also known as school choice, will be his No. 1 priority in the upcoming Texas legislative session.
“Voters have spoken clearly,” Patrick said. “The time for school choice in Texas is long overdue.”
Vouchers are a favorite cause of Republicans and Christian Nationalists. They allow parents to withdraw money from public school funding to use to pay tuition at private schools, often religious schools, creating a decline in funding that undermines public education.
Abbott expended enormous political capital to pass vouchers in the 2023 legislative session but was repudiated by a group of two dozen Republicans in the House of Representatives who joined Democrats to repeatedly defeat the measure. After the defeats, Abbott took millions of dollars donated by out-of-state TikTok billionaire Jeff Yass to fund primary challenges to the Republicans who voted against him. Fifteen anti-voucher Republicans were run out of the House. On Nov. 6, Abbott held a press conference at a private religious school in Tyler to declare that he now has 79 solid House votes for vouchers, three more than necessary to pass the legislation on to the Senate.
With the state’s two top leaders prioritizing vouchers and House and Senate Republicans behind them, the proposal does seem unstoppable. But Republicans still have to write the legislation, Bob Popinski of Raise Your Hand Texas said. And that process will provide an opportunity to publicize all the ways that vouchers make bad policy.
“What they have to deal with now is the hard bureaucratic truth of how to make this program work properly for the state of Texas,” Popinski said. “And what we’re seeing from other states that have implemented universal voucher programs is that it’s bad news. You’ve seen what’s happened in Arizona.”
“I would not read the election results as a mandate for vouchers.” – State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin
Arizona instituted a universal voucher program in 2022 which allows any family in the state to take money out of the public schools. This summer, ProPublica reported that the program has blown a massive $1.4 billion hole in Arizona’s budget. Raise Your Hand wants to make sure that Texas legislators – of whom three in the Senate and more than 30 in the House are freshmen – learn about the problems vouchers have caused in other states.
“There’s a lot of fraud, abuse, and waste in these programs,” Popinski said. In Arizona, he points out several people have been indicted for allegedly defrauding the state’s voucher program. “So we have to have a really serious debate. And I hope that those that are now potentially voting for this program understand that Texas is in a unique position to have the receipts from all the other states.”
Popinski also points out that vouchers are not actually popular, once voters learn how they work. Voters in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska rejected vouchers in general elections this November. It’s a point that state Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, also emphasizes.
“I would not read the election results as a mandate for vouchers,” Talarico said. “Greg Abbott did not campaign on vouchers in any of the Republican primary races on his revenge tour. He also didn’t campaign on it in swing districts during the November elections. And that’s intentional, because Greg Abbott knows that vouchers are unpopular.”
Talarico said that, as bad as things look currently, he and his fellow Democrats will not budge on vouchers. “We’re gonna do what we always do, which is fight like hell and stand up for our constituents between now and May,” he said. “We’re not going to throw in the towel. We’re not going to sell out our students.”
This article appears in November 15 • 2024.
