Vouchers Would Blow a Billion-Dollar Hole in the Texas Budget

What Texas Republicans call “school choice” could be very, very expensive. Voucher programs in other states and analysis from experts show that school vouchers would cost the state billions.

Texas is currently sitting on a tax surplus that was supposed to be spent during the last legislative session. Some of it was used for property tax overall, but the promised increase to public school funding never materialized. That money has been held hostage by Governor Greg Abbott since the Texas House refused to pass his school voucher plan.

That plan, like many nationwide, is loosely patterned after Arizona. In 2022, Arizona passed a sweeping voucher bill that allowed any state resident to use taxpayer money for private school tuition regardless of income bracket or specialized needs for a child’s education. They called it an Empowerment Scholarship Account. Abbott calls his an Education Savings Account. Both are essentially the same program.  

In Arizona, the state is now posting a $1.4 billion shortfall, more than half of which is the cost of the voucher program according to Grand Canyon Institute. The 2024-2025 shortfall is projected to be $429 million of the $676 million total. This adds to the 2023-2024 cost of vouchers, which made up $332 of the $650 million shortfall.

Combined, that is $750 million in just two years. The original estimated cost was only $65 million annually.

Now, let’s look at Texas. The current projected cost of Abbott’s voucher program is more than $2 billion annually according to Talia Richman and Valeria Olivares of The Dallas Morning News.

Arizona’s real-world cost for their vouchers was five times the projected estimate, and it grew to six times the original figure by just the next year. If Texas goes the same way, the cost could end up being between $10 and $12 billion annually. That would still only 3-4 percent of the $312 billion state budget, but it would quickly eat up most of the remaining budget surplus.

Opponents of vouchers point out that vouchers inevitably cost public schools funding. A $12 billion hole in the budget that is clearly the top priority of the state’s governor does not bode well for public schools, especially as every district has universally come out against Abbott’s pet project.

The state may be sitting high on extra billions at the moment, but when that is gone there will be cuts. Abbott has already shown that he is happy to watch public schools suffer losses in income, services, and staff if it means that he can get his way on vouchers. It’s unlikely he would be any more adverse to that suffering once he gets his vouchers into place.

Arizona is supposed to be a model of how vouchers can work. In practice, the state proves that vouchers are extremely costly with questionable benefits, at best.