Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a $1 billion school voucher bill into law on Saturday, cementing a win for the school choice movement in the Lone Star State that was decades in the making.
“Gone are the days that families are limited to only the school assigned by government,” he said at a public signing ceremony. “The day has arrived that empowers parents to choose the school that’s best for their child.”
Under the new program, families in Texas will be eligible to receive more than $10,000 per year for each child to help cover the cost of private school tuition beginning next school year. Children with disabilities may be able to get an additional $30,000. Homeschoolers will also qualify for around $2,000 per year to cover education-related expenses.
Programs that offer alternatives to traditional public school — broadly referred to as school choice — are nothing new, but they have gained considerable steam in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. No policy has had more legislative success than school vouchers. Texas joins more than a dozen states that have installed voucher systems that are open to all students in the past three years.
While education options like charter schools have enjoyed broad bipartisan support, the spread of vouchers is driven almost entirely by Republicans. The GOP controls the legislature, governorship or both in every state that has passed a new school voucher bill recently. There is also an ongoing effort to create a national voucher program by Republicans in Congress, with President Trump's backing.
The growth of vouchers in states has been met with significant pushback, particularly from teachers' unions and other public school advocates. A judge in Utah recently ruled that the state's voucher system is unconstitutional, though the program will continue to run while the decision is appealed. A similar lawsuit is in motion in Ohio. Measures that would have established or expanded vouchers were on the ballot in Colorado, Nebraska and Kentucky this past November. All three were rejected by voters.
Despite these setbacks, school vouchers are becoming increasingly common. As of last summer, more than 1 million students across the country were utilizing some form of voucher, according to the school choice advocacy group EdChoice. Those numbers are certain to grow.
The conversation around vouchers — and school choice more generally — can get confusing fast. It’s full of buzzwords and complex details about program structures, eligibility and implementation. In hopes of helping provide some clarity on an increasingly important debate, Yahoo News is here to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about school vouchers.
What are vouchers?
Vouchers are a way that public funds are used to pay for schooling outside of the public school system. The details get complicated, but the basic premise is that vouchers allow state governments to take money that would normally go toward educating a child in a public school and instead direct it somewhere else. Usually that’s a private school, but some voucher programs allow funds to be used on homeschooling expenses, textbooks, transportation or even therapy.
How does the money get to parents?
In a variety of ways. In what’s often called a “traditional” voucher system, states send money directly to private schools to cover some or all of a child’s tuition. An increasingly popular alternative is Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) in which state funds are put into a bank account that parents can use to pay for education-related expenses. Some states also offer tax credits to families rather than distributing money directly.
These are all technically different systems, but over time voucher has become something of a blanket term to describe any program that uses public money to pay for non-public education.
I keep hearing the term 'school choice' when people talk about vouchers. What does that mean?
School choice is a very broad term that describes any policies that allow kids to be educated somewhere other than their local public school. Vouchers are just one form of school choice. So are charter schools, magnet schools, programs that support homeschooling and rules that let students go to public schools outside of their assigned school zone.
How have vouchers changed over the past few years?
Voucher programs in some form have been around for decades, but they have historically been very limited in scope — often only offering funds to low-income families or students with disabilities. Three years ago, Arizona became the first state to offer universal vouchers that are available to all students in the state, regardless of their circumstances. Since then, more than a dozen states have followed Arizona’s lead.
Where are vouchers available?
More than 30 states and Washington, D.C., have some form of voucher program, though the details and eligibility vary significantly from state to state. Currently, there are 16 states that are slated to have universal voucher programs in effect at the start of the next school year. That number could change, though, depending on the outcome of ongoing litigation challenging the legality of universal vouchers in Utah and Ohio.
What’s the argument in favor of vouchers?
Advocates for school choice in general say families deserve to have more opportunities to decide what kind of education would best serve their children, rather than limiting them to a single public school that's been assigned to them. Within the school choice movement, vouchers are seen as the most effective way to help kids get a top-quality private school education that their families otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. "The ZIP Code-based public education system has kept low-income kids out of quality schools," the school choice advocacy group EdChoice writes on its website. They also make the case that having to face more competition for students forces public schools to improve.
What’s the case against vouchers?
Critics argue that vouchers strip crucial funding from already cash-strapped public schools while only serving to make inequality in education worse. Recent analyses of universal voucher programs show that most voucher recipients were already enrolled in private schools and a significant share of the money went to wealthy families. There are also concerns that students with disabilities, religious minorities and LGBTQ children will be left behind because private schools are not bound by the same laws that require public schools to accommodate all students. There have also been cases where voucher programs have proven to be far more costly than initially anticipated, which has created big problems for state budgets.
Do vouchers help students?
The simple answer is that we don't know. Universal voucher programs are very new, so there hasn't been enough time for researchers to examine their true impact on grades, test scores and student achievement. Studies of older, more limited voucher programs can offer some clues, but the results of those are far from definitive. Some studies have shown modest improvement among low-income students in voucher programs, while others have actually found that voucher participants fared substantially worse than their public school peers.
Do vouchers hurt public schools?
Again, the recency of universal voucher programs makes it hard to give a concrete answer. There are some older studies that suggest increased competition from vouchers does result in higher-performing public schools, though there isn't a clear understanding as to why. It's also unclear just how much state spending on universal voucher programs will impact public schools' bottom lines. In general, states are not pulling money directly out of public school funds to pay for vouchers, but cost overruns to those programs have put pressure on state budgets that could lead public school funding to be cut. There have also been cases where states cut certain public school programs at the same time as they increased funding for vouchers.
How does homeschooling play into this?
The relationship between homeschooling and vouchers is complicated. State funds that go into ESAs typically can be used to cover homeschooling expenses. While that may be enticing for some families, many homeschoolers — particularly religious conservatives — fear that they would have to give up some of their autonomy over how they educate their kids in order to receive state funding. "Government money comes with government control," one member of a Christian homeschooling group told the nonprofit news organization The 74.
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