Texas’ special session on school vouchers begins Monday. Can lawmakers reach a deal?

Four months after they failed to reach a deal, Texas lawmakers will return to Austin this week to try a second time to pass a statewide school voucher program.

Monday marks the beginning of the state’s third special legislative session of the year. Lawmakers are expected to take up legislation creating an education savings account system, a school voucher-like plan that would give parents taxpayer money to put toward private school tuition or other education-related expenses.

But amid growing tensions between the Texas Senate and the House — and overt hostility between the two men who lead them — it’s unclear whether the result will be any different this time around.

School vouchers, border security top special session agenda

Education savings accounts are one of four issues lawmakers will discuss during the special session, according to an agenda the governor’s office released Thursday. Lawmakers are also expected to consider measures related to border security, COVID-19 vaccine requirements and Colony Ridge, a Houston-area community that has been the subject of unsubstantiated claims that it’s a magnet for undocumented immigrants. Notably, the agenda doesn’t mention school funding or teacher pay raises, both of which were priorities during the regular session.

Gov. Greg Abbott has made a top priority of legislation creating an education savings account plan. Ahead of the regular legislative session, the governor pledged to sign an education savings account program into law, and called on lawmakers to bring a proposal to his desk. During a visit to Fort Worth’s Nolan Catholic High School in April, Abbott argued that the state has a duty to help families who feel trapped in schools that aren’t a good fit for their kids.

At the beginning of the year, Abbott also pledged to use a portion of the state’s $32.7 billion budget surplus to boost funding for local school districts, helping them raise teacher pay and keep up with rising operating costs.

In the end, neither of those things happened. Lawmakers failed to reach a compromise on school funding and education savings account proposals before the session ended in May. That left local school districts in a difficult position: Many school boards, including several in the Fort Worth area, approved deficit budgets with the expectation that lawmakers would make good on promises to increase school funding. Without that extra money, many districts have had to dip into their emergency savings to cover those costs.

During a town hall conference call last month, Abbott seemed to acknowledge that it could be difficult to get lawmakers to come up with a deal. But if they don’t, Abbott warned Republicans who oppose vouchers that he could back their challengers in next year’s primary elections.

“If we do not win in that first special session, we will have another special special session and we’ll come back again,” he said. “And then if we don’t win that time, I think it’s time to send this to the voters themselves.”

Education savings accounts remain unpopular in rural Texas

But that threat may not be as potent as the governor hopes, said Jim Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University. Republican lawmakers from rural parts of the state who oppose the plan are taking a position that’s relatively popular among their constituents, he said. In rural communities, where private schools are much less common and traditional school districts are often the only option, many voters see education savings accounts as a plan that would only benefit wealthy people in big cities and suburbs, he said.

Complicating matters further is the fact that in many small towns, the local school district is one of the biggest employers, making it difficult for lawmakers to take sides against school leaders, he said. So while those lawmakers might prefer not to have the governor raising money for a primary challenger, the threat may not be big enough to change their votes, he said.

A bigger factor affecting the proposal’s future is most likely the division between the two houses of the legislature, Riddlesperger said. Several lawmakers in both houses proposed various school choice plans during the regular session, but none gained traction because House and Senate Republicans couldn’t reach a compromise. During the regular session, the mutual animosity between Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan was “palpable,” he said, and the impeachment trial of Attorney General Ken Paxton only escalated matters. In that climate, it could be difficult for lawmakers to reach a deal on anything, he said.

School leaders push back on Gov. Abbott’s voucher plan

School voucher critics argue that they drain money from school districts and give it to private schools that don’t have to abide by the same transparency and accountability rules as public schools. Critics also point out that private schools don’t have to take all students, and can legally decline to accept students with disabilities or LGBTQ+ students. In a statement released Thursday, Rep. Chris Turner, D-Arlington, called the plan “yet another Republican scheme to dismantle and discredit our public school system.”

“No one wants Abbott’s voucher plan,” Turner said. “What Texans want is to fund public schools, pay our teachers better and fix our flawed accountability system.”

Texas school district leaders have also pushed back against a school voucher proposal. During a press conference at a recent Texas Association of School Administrators convention in Dallas, superintendents from several districts sought to present a unified message: Funding public schools, not school vouchers, should be lawmakers’ top priority. Christopher Moran, superintendent of the Whitehouse Independent School District and vice president of the superintendents association, said school leaders are “in a position of no compromise.”

“We’re not interested in compromising for vouchers to gain school funding,” he said. “This is a hill that we’re willing to die on.”

Voucher backers want flexibility in education savings account bill

Greg Sindelar, CEO of the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, said he is optimistic that a voucher plan will get through the legislature sometime this year. He acknowledged that the proposal has faced headwinds in Texas in the past, but said it’s become more of a mainstream idea among Republican voters and lawmakers over the past few years.

Sindelar said the foundation, which has been one of the biggest players in pushing for the bill, hopes to see a plan that includes flexibility to allow parents and students to tailor their schooling to their specific needs. For some students, that might not mean withdrawing from public schools entirely, he said. For example, if a high school student wants to study diesel mechanics but goes to a school that doesn’t have a program for it, Sindelar said he’d like to see a voucher program that would allow that student to attend high school part-time, then use a voucher to enroll in a nearby community college to get a professional certification.

“We believe that the importance of this is opening up options and flexibility for parents to educate their kids in the way that they see fit,” he said.

A majority of Texas voters would support some kind of school choice program, potentially including vouchers and education savings accounts, recent polling shows. In a survey released in August by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, 52% of respondents said they either strongly or somewhat supported “establishing a voucher, educational savings account (ESA) or other ‘school choice’ program in Texas.”

But the issue isn’t a high priority for most voters, polling shows. In the same survey, 26% of respondents said the issue was “extremely important,” the lowest percentage of any education-related issue included in the poll. By comparison, 60% of respondents named school safety as an “extremely important” priority, and 45% said teacher pay and retention were “extremely important.”

If an education savings account program passes into law, Texas would be far from the first state to enact a voucher-like program. This year alone, lawmakers from seven states have created new programs, and nine others have expanded existing plans.

Research into long-standing voucher programs’ educational benefits shows mixed results. In studies looking at voucher programs in Indiana and Louisiana, researchers found moderate to large declines in academic performance among students who transfer to a private school using vouchers. In most cases, those declines lasted for years. Researchers surmised that students who underperformed in public schools struggled to keep up with higher expectations and more rigorous workloads when they transferred to private schools.

But research into a voucher program in Washington, D.C., suggested that students’ math test scores declined for two years after they transferred, then rebounded in the third year. Students who used a voucher were also less likely to miss an excessive number of school days. Reducing excessive absences could be a big benefit because students who miss too many days are more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to read proficiently by third grade.

Vouchers introduce instability in education system, researcher says

Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy in the College of Education at Michigan State University, said when states introduce voucher programs, it can often have a destabilizing effect on their education systems.

States that enact voucher plans often see a large number of new private schools pop up overnight, said Cowen, who studies the effects of school voucher programs nationwide. Often, those new schools are affiliated with churches that either had never had a school, or hadn’t had one in years, but see an opportunity to turn the voucher program into a revenue stream, he said. But those schools often close just as quickly as they open, he said, because the churches operating them quickly get overwhelmed with the complexity of hiring and retaining teachers, buying curriculum and maintaining school facilities.

“It’s hard and it’s expensive to educate children,” he said.

Even at schools that remain open, large numbers of voucher students tend to come and go each year, Cowen said. Cowen and a team of researchers looked at a voucher program in Milwaukee and found that about one in five students who accepted a voucher left the program and transferred back to public schools each year.

Research in other states has shown similar results: About 25-30% of students who accepted a voucher end up transferring back to public schools each year. Although record-keeping for students exiting voucher programs isn’t as robust as it is for students coming in, students of color, low-income students and students who perform poorly on state tests appear to make up a disproportionate number of the students leaving those programs, he said.

Those high exit rates, combined with the large number of private schools that pop up and then close quickly, add up to a worrisome level of instability, Cowen said. In the business world, frequent openings and closings and a certain degree of customer turnover could be a healthy thing, he said, or at least not a cause for concern. But that isn’t true in education, he said.

“This ain’t McDonald’s. It’s not a mom and pop shop that food poisoned its customers and lost business because of it,” he said. “It’s really, incredibly destabilizing to children to have them moving from school to school.”

In the long term, voucher plans can also lead to funding cuts for school districts, Cowen said. When lawmakers propose a school voucher plan, they often include a clause that protects school districts from funding cuts for a specified number of years, Cowen said. One version of the plan Texas lawmakers considered during the regular session included such a provision for smaller districts. That clause is usually included as a way to make plans more palatable to lawmakers from rural areas, Cowen said.

The problem is that, as voucher programs grow, that provision means states are left paying for two parallel education systems, one public and one private, Cowen said. No state can afford to do that forever, he said, so when the required number of years passes, lawmakers generally have to cut funding to local school districts to make ends meet.

“That’s what’s going on in Arizona right now, and that’s what’s going on in Florida right now,” he said. “So we’ll see what happens in Texas.”