What Texas Republicans are calling “school choice” can be extremely expensive: School vouchers can cost the state billions of dollars, according to voucher programs in other states and expert analyses.
Texas is currently sitting on a surplus of tax revenues that were supposed to be spent during the last legislative session. Some of that money was spent on overall property taxes, but promises of increased funding for public schools never materialized. Those funds are being held hostage by Governor Abbott after the Texas Legislature refused to pass his school voucher plan.
The plan, like many across the country, is modeled on Arizona, which passed a comprehensive voucher bill in 2022 that allows state residents to use taxpayer money for private school tuition, regardless of income bracket or special educational needs. They called it the “Empowerment Scholarship Account.” Abbott called it the “Education Savings Account.” They’re essentially the same program.
Arizona currently reports a shortfall of $1.4 billion, more than half of which is for the voucher program, according to the Grand Canyon Institute. The shortfall for 2024-2025 is projected to be $429 million out of a total of $676 million. This is on top of the 2023-2024 voucher costs, which account for $332 million of the $650 million shortfall.
That adds up to $750 million over just two years. Original cost estimates were just $65 million per year.
Now, let’s look at Texas: According to Thalia Richman and Valeria Olivarez of the Dallas Morning News, the current projected cost of Abbott’s voucher program is more than $2 billion a year.
The actual cost of vouchers in Arizona was five times what was projected, and the following year it ballooned to six times the original figure. If Texas followed the same path, the cost could be $10 billion to $12 billion a year. That would still only amount to 3 to 4 percent of the state’s $312 billion budget, but it would quickly eat into most of the state’s remaining budget surplus.
Voucher opponents point out that vouchers inevitably put a strain on public school budgets, and the Governor’s top priority, a $12 billion budget shortfall, doesn’t bode well for public schools, especially with all school districts uniformly opposed to Gov. Abbott’s pet project.
The state may have a billion-dollar surplus right now, but when it runs out, budget cuts will come, and Abbott has already signaled he’s willing to watch public schools suffer losses in revenue, services and staffing if vouchers give him his way. He’s unlikely to be more opposed to the pain if vouchers are in place.
Arizona was meant to be a model for how vouchers would work, but in practice the state has proven that vouchers have questionable benefits at best and are prohibitively costly.
