The Texas Senate approved a $1 billion universal private school voucher program on April 24 after the Texas House of Representatives voted to approve it on April 17. Gov. Greg Abbott gave final approval and signed Senate Bill 2 on May 3. The plan will go into effect at the start of the 2026-2027 school year.

This program will provide a yearly voucher of $10,000 to each student and up to $30,000 more for students with disabilities. It would also give $2,000 a year for home-schooled children. These funds can be used for private school tuition and educational costs such as textbooks and virtual learning programs. The voucher program would be capped at $1 billion this year but could cost more than $4.5 billion by 2030.

If demand exceeds funding, priority for the money will go to children with disabilities and those from low-income and middle-class households who were previously enrolled in public schools.

State Senator Brandon Creighton, the Republican education committee chair who sponsored the legislation, along with other supporters of the bill, have branded it “school choice,” have said that parents should not have to keep their children in public schools they believe are unsafe or provide below-standard academics.

“Passing this bill sends a message to all of Texas,” Creighton said. “It tells the next generation of Texas leaders (that) your path should fit your purpose, your path should fit what’s best for you and your family, and your ambition will always be greater than any system or any institution.”

History teacher Katya Villalobos said that school vouchers have a long history in both the U.S. and in other countries.

“Early vouchers began after the Civil War in New England,” Villalobos wrote in an email to the Campanile. “These programs were created to provide education (to) rural areas where there were no public schools. After World War II is when vouchers started to be argued for (in the U.S.) because of the disparity in public school funding.”

If a voucher system were to be passed, Villalobos said the Blaine Amendment in California currently prevents government funds from going to private or religious schools. However, in 2020, Espinoza v. Montana tested Montana’s Blaine Amendment, and the Supreme Court ruled that the Blaine Amendment was unconstitutional, so Blaine Amendments around the country no longer hold ground.

Many opponents of the Texas bill argue it will not benefit the children who need it most. In 2024, the Brookings Institution analyzed data from Arizona’s universal Education Savings Accounts, a form of school choice that allows parents to use government money to attend private schools, similar to the voucher approved in Texas. They found that areas with the lowest poverty rates had nearly 80 ESA participants per 1,000 students eligible, while areas with the highest poverty rate had fewer than 25 ESA participants per 1,000 students eligible.

Some critics also say the voucher money will be used by those already enrolled in private schools, rather than low-income families who might not be able to afford private school tuition.

Data from universal private school vouchers in other states supports this trend. In Florida, after courts lifted voucher eligibility restrictions in 2023, Step Up for Students –– a nonprofit in charge of administering most of the state-backed vouchers –– reported that of the 122,895 students enrolled on these scholarships for the first time, 69% were already attending private schools.

Librarian Sima Thomas worries about a similar trend in Texas.

“My fear … is that the most vulnerable and the most needy students are going to be the most underserved in this new system, and maybe even more underserved than they already are,” Thomas said.

In addition, some fear the cost of private school will still be too high even with the voucher money, not bringing private school within the reach of students with the greatest need.

According to Private School Review, the average tuition among K-12 private schools in Texas is $11,050. The average cost for tuition at private elementary schools is $10,729 and the average cost of tuition at secondary schools is $12,161.

Thomas said private schools will likely raise tuition because vouchers will subsidize the expense.

“If everybody has that money, isn’t that going to then bump up the cost?” Thomas said. “Wouldn’t schools just make their tuition $10,000 higher?”

Researchers at Princeton University have found that some private schools in states with similar school choice programs have raised tuition costs after the programs are put into place, as Thomas predicted. Data was collected primarily from Iowa, a state with universal school choice. In Iowa schools, they found tuition increased on average from 21% to 25% when the state offered ESAs to all students.

Thomas also said she wonders what will happen to public school funding.

“What happens to the public schools?” Thomas said. “Are they going to be defunded and (are) the services that parents and families rely on going to be cut back?”

A teacher, who requested anonymity because of potential backlash, said the already sub-optimal funding of public schools will be further aggravated by the voucher.

“All it will end up doing is turning it into a situation where the private and charter schools will be that much more elite, and the public schools will turn into these leftover-type places,” the teacher said. “That’s really unfortunate because I know in a lot of areas, even in California, the public schools are hurting for money as it is, and that’s just going to further that problem.”

Some critics also say school choice programs blur the line of separation of church and state, as 71% of private schools in Texas are religious, and during the 2021-22 school year, 77% of national private school K-12 students attended a religiously-affiliated school.

Villalobos said although separation of church and state comes into question, the Supreme Court’s previous decisions make this issue much more nuanced.

“On the surface this seems to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment,” Villalobos wrote, referring to Constitutional language that encodes a separation of church and state. “However, the Supreme Court has upheld vouchers beginning in 2002 as long as they do not advance or endorse religion. In addition, recent court rulings have upheld vouchers for religious institutions under equal treatment under the First Amendment.”

In this era of a U.S. Supreme Court 6-3 conservative supermajority, religion in education has had a run of wins. On April 30, the Supreme Court heard arguments for a case in which Oklahoma could potentially use government money to fund America’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The school would teach a curriculum infused with Catholic teachings.

Additionally, in 2024, the Texas Board of Education voted to approve a Bible-infused curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade, and schools received $60 per student if they used the curriculum.

However, the anonymous teacher thinks the separation of church and state is not the biggest issue with this voucher.

“Half of our government slogans talk about ‘In God We Trust,’ and it’s on our money,” the teacher said. “It’s always been a little bit of a gray area, (but) I definitely don’t see that as the major issue as much as the (funding being taken away from public schools).”

Ultimately, Thomas said only time will tell whether passing the voucher was the right decision or not.

Thomas said, “It will be interesting to see, with this five years from now, what the state of schools will look like compared to what they look like now.”