The application window for Texas' new statewide school voucher program will open Feb. 4.
New details for the $1 billion initiative, known as Texas Education Freedom Accounts, or TEFA, were released by state officials in December. The program flows taxpayer dollars into education savings accounts, or ESAs, for families who want to enroll their children outside of the public school system.
Most participating families will receive about $10,000 per student each year or 85% of a public school student’s allotment from the state. Homeschooled students are eligible for $2,000 annually, and students with disabilities could receive up to $30,000, depending on their needs.
The program is opento all students, but if applications exceed available funding, the state will use a lottery system to determine which families receive vouchers. Priority will first go to students with disabilities from families earning up to about $240,000 per year for a family of four. Next in line are students from households earning roughly twice the federal poverty level, or about $60,000 for a family of four, followed by families earning between $60,000 and $240,000. Families earning more than that would have the lowest priority.
The funds may be used for a wide range of education-related expenses, including private school tuition, meals and uniforms, approved online or out-of-state programs, transportation costs and pre-kindergarten education. The money cannot be used to pay a family member.
RELATED: Texans can use school vouchers for pre-K, but the pool of families who qualify is limited
State officials have not finalized the full rollout timeline, but initial funds are expected to be available to some families as early as July.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed the voucher program into law in May, under Senate Bill 2, after failing to get the initiative passed in previous state legislative sessions. It has been a divisive program. Supporters say it gives parents more opportunities and autonomy over their child's education.
"Gone are the days that families are limited to only the school assigned by government," Abbott said. "The day has arrived that empowers parents to choose the school that's best for their child."
Opponents say the program pulls resources from already struggling public schools.
"Remember this day next time a school closes in your neighborhood," state Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, who is now running for senate, said on the day of the bill's signing.
Additionally,Abbott announcedin December that he intends to opt Texas into the Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program, created under a massive spending bill passed by Congress over the summer. The program starts in January 2027 and operates like a tax-credit program, not as direct vouchers. It allows Texans to receive credits for donations to qualified scholarship-granting organizations.
Who will be applying?
School voucher-like programs have a long and controversial history. While early versions appeared in the late 1800s, the first major expansion of vouchers came after the Supreme Court's 1954Brown v. Board of Educationdecision, when some Southern states used voucher-style programs to undermine school integration efforts. Modern voucher programs emerged in the 1990s, reframed as tools to expand choice and often marketed as a way to support students with disabilities or those from low-income communities.
Now more than 30 states and the District of Columbia have some sort of voucher program. In recent years there has been a sharp uptick in states adopting universal voucher programs or expanding their existing voucher program to be universal. Education savings accounts (ESAs), which are often considered the most extensive and flexible kind of voucher, have become the program of choice.
The programs are frequently advertised as a way for lower-income families to access private schools they couldn't otherwise afford. Supporters argue they move families with limited means into new education settings.
However, thestate's fiscal analysisshowed that 87% of the applicants for Texas Education Freedom Accounts are expected to be students who already attend private schools, meaning the program may serve as more of a tax break for wealthier families. Texas' projection is in line with other states with similar voucher programs.
A report from the Department of Public Instructionin North Carolina found that to be the case with its school voucher program. After eliminating income caps and prior public school enrollment requirements, nearly 90% of the recipients of the new universal voucher program were students currently enrolled in private schools. The report adds the context that families with a child in private school earn nearly double the typical household in North Carolina.
Reporting from Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio and Wisconsin shows the same trend: In each state, more than 60% of voucher recipients had never attended a public school, including 95% in Arkansas.
A September report from theNational Center for Research Education Access and Choiceshowed voucher-like programs had raised private school enrollment by 3-4% nationally, meaning the biggest beneficiaries of the programs are families whose children already attend private school.
Erin Baumgartner, the director of the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC) at Rice University, says there may be a couple of factors that contribute to this.
Texas' approach stops short of strict income caps and instead opts for income-based tiers to prioritize applicants rather than limit eligibility.
"Twenty percent of the funds can go to families that are over 500% of the poverty line. That is a pretty high benchmark for families to be reaching," Baumgartner said. "So it’s giving a lot of support to sort of middle- and middle- to upper-class families that maybe aren’t getting the same sort of access for families who are closer to the poverty line."
And vouchers don't often cover the full costs of attending private school, Baumgartner said.
"I think a big piece of this is information," she added. "Do families who potentially could be interested in a program like a voucher program have the information they need to make decisions about applying to these programs [and] how they can use these programs?"
In early November, the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Center at Texas Southern University released a report that showed more than half of Texas parents still hadn't heard of the state's private school voucher program.
Mark Jones, a public policy professor at Rice University who co-authored the report, said an education campaign for the program would be critical.
"Because only 18% of these parents are very familiar with the program, meaning that four out of five are either somewhat familiar, some not too familiar, or not at all familiar, and for parents to make the best decision for their children, they need to have the most information," Jones said.
The survey also found that 40% of parents said they would apply for a voucher. Most said their main motivation was to seek a better education.
Is private better?
There is fierce debate about whether students who utilize vouchers to move from public school to private schools perform better in the latter setting.
"We tend to see that students aren’t necessarily performing better educationally when they move to those private school settings," Baumgartner said. "The other thing that we see is families who take advantage of vouchers, a lot of students end up returning to public schools, and so what the long term outcome is is a question mark a lot of times."
As the Texas program stands now, it may be difficult to measure the progress of recipients in private schools compared to their public school counterparts as private school students will not be required to take the same standardized tests.
Baumgartner said the voucher program in Indiana, which lifted its income cap earlier this year, requires both private and public school students to take the same standardized test.
"In a place like Indiana, where they are able to make those more direct comparisons, we’re seeing that students who go to private schools aren’t getting the academic benefits," Baumgartner said. "Their test scores are either the same as or lower than their peers who are in public school settings."
Signed into law just eight months ago, Texas' voucher program remains a work in progress, with some details still being developed and private school partners yet to be finalized. Baumgartner says one thing she is looking out for is when and how the state will release information about the quality of the programs being offered.
She says parents should continue to ask who is keeping tabs on the private schools participating in the program to make sure they maintain high standards.
"This isn’t a one-time thing," Baumgartner said. "I would hope that there is a robust process in place for maintaining kind of checks with those schools to understand how they’re serving students, whether all students' needs are being met, and helping families have information so they can keep making that decision about whether they want to stay in that place or whether another option makes more sense for them and their student."
Applications for private schools, pre-kindergarten providers and tutors opened Dec. 9.An update from the Texas Comptroller's office,who oversees the program, said about 600 schools and 200 education service producers had applied to participate during the first 10 days of the application window.
"TEFA is designed to put parents in the driver's seat, and the early responses from schools show that Texas families will have meaningful choices when applications open in February," acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock said in a news release.
Information has not yet been made available for how the participating schools and service providers will be vetted.
A squeeze on public education
Opponents of voucher programs argue they drain resources from public schools, which received an $8.5 billion boost as part of another state law that passed this year. That's because public school funding in Texas is tied to student enrollment and attendance.
While it may seem logical that fewer students would mean fewer costs for public schools, many expenses do not shrink when enrollment drops. Fixed costs, like building maintenance, utilities and electricity, remain largely the same regardless of how many students are enrolled.
As a result, districts that lose students to private schools must spread reduced funding across those unchanged expenses, leaving less money available to support classroom instruction and educational services for the students who remain.
Houston ISD, the largest school district in the state, has faced several years of steady enrollment declines. It is built to service more than 200,000 students, but enrollment this year is around 170,000.
Enrollment declines could be exacerbated by the voucher program.
"So I expect to see that the districts in these large places are the ones who feel most of the students getting pulled out," Baumgartner said. "When one or two students leave a school to utilize vouchers, that doesn’t mean you need one less teacher, right? You still have 20 other kids to educate, and the cost of the teacher, the cost of the building, is the same whether you have 20 kids or 24 kids in that classroom."
There's also concern about ballooning costs. Texas' program, with $1 billion initially earmarked for it, is now home to one of the largest school voucher programs in the country. And the program's price tag is expected to rise. Raise Your Hand Texas reviewed the Legislative Budget Board and estimates the initiative's budget will increase significantly and could reach $7.9 billion by the 2030-31 school year.
States with similar programs have run into funding issues as their participation grew.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Arizona legislators underestimated the cost of their voucher program by tenfold. It was initially projected to cost $65 million and is now upwards of $708 million. The overruns are now leading to astate budget crisis.
Baumgartner says transparency may be the best tool to combat mismanagement.
"If the program is not run in a completely transparent way, where people are keeping tabs on those things along the way, stuff might get out of control before people realize it happens," Baumgartner said. "I mean, Arizona is having to cancel water infrastructure projects for the state, which, in a state where water is an issue, that’s a big deal. And so how do we make sure that that doesn’t happen in Texas? The biggest [way] is information and transparency."
Copyright 2026 Houston Public Media News 88.7