Greg Abbott wants to call lawmakers back to pass a school voucher plan. Will they budge?

At the beginning of the year, Gov. Greg Abbott called on Texas lawmakers to pass a plan that would give every child in the state access to a school voucher-like program that would give their families public money to put toward private school tuition.

When a voucher proposal backed by the governor died at the end of the legislative session, Abbott suggested he plans to call lawmakers back for a special session on the issue later this year.

But with both sides appearing unwilling to budge, it’s unclear whether such a special session would end with a voucher plan becoming law, or with a protracted standoff between the governor and rural Republicans in the House of Representatives.

“I think that probably the telephone lines and the text messages and emails are just buzzing all over Austin trying to put together a coalition of people who might be willing to support Gov. Abbott on those issues — but they’re not going to support it without having some side payments involved,” said Jim Riddlesperger, a political science professor at TCU.

Abbott calls for vouchers to help families who feel trapped

Both Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made a priority of education savings accounts, a school voucher-like plan that would give families who pull their children out of public schools taxpayer money to put toward private school tuition or other education-related expenses. During a visit to Nolan Catholic High School in Fort Worth in April, Abbott said there are families across the state who are trapped in public schools that don’t meet their children’s needs because they can’t afford any alternative.

“We, as a state, have to help those families,” he said.

Abbott acknowledged that the state’s public school system has a critical role to play in preparing children for the future. But he accused public schools of trying to indoctrinate students into a “woke, left agenda” at the expense of math, science and reading instruction.

Earlier that month, the Senate voted to pass a bill that would have established a voucher program that was open to most students in the state. But the bill died in the House, where Republicans were more skeptical of the idea of sending public money to private schools. Senators later added a voucher proposal as an amendment to an education funding bill that originated in the House. That bill, which also included teacher pay raises and increased funding for school districts, also died when House members wouldn’t budge on vouchers.

Immediately after the end of the regular session last month, Abbott called lawmakers into special session to deal with property tax reform and border issues. Earlier this month, the governor said he expects to call them back for at least one more special session to deal with school funding issues and the voucher proposal.

Rural Texas Republicans push back against voucher plan

On June 12, House Speaker Dade Phelan announced the creation of the House Select Committee on Educational Opportunity and Achievement. In a news release, Phelan said the committee would begin work immediately to put together a roadmap for legislation in the House ahead of the special session. The committee will look at the current “menu of choices” for the state’s K-12 students and highlight other options the state could consider, he said. He didn’t specifically mention school vouchers as one of those possible options.

Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, is a member of the select committee. During the regular session, King was one of several House Republicans who opposed the voucher plan. King, who represents 19 mostly rural counties in the Panhandle, told the Star-Telegram that a school voucher plan wouldn’t help students in his district because there are so few private schools in the area.

The only private school in House District 88 that serves students in pre-kindergarten through high school is Plainview Christian Academy, which will become a public charter school before the beginning of the upcoming school year. Fewer than a half dozen private schools that serve students in pre-K through eighth grade are scattered throughout the House district. Even if lawmakers expand a school voucher program to cover every student in the state and offer each student tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money per year, private schools won’t come to rural Texas because there isn’t a big enough population to support them, King said.

King, who authored the bill that would have raised teacher salaries and increased funding for school districts, said he’s also frustrated that Abbott and Patrick are insisting on a broad school voucher plan at a time when the state isn’t fully funding its public school system. He also thinks it’s a bad idea to give public money to private organizations without subjecting them to the same oversight that public schools have to undergo.

If Abbott calls lawmakers into a special session to deal with the question of school vouchers, as he’s indicated he plans to do, King said he doesn’t think the outcome will be any different than it was in the regular session. About two dozen House Republicans have publicly said they oppose the idea. King said some, including himself, would likely be willing to negotiate on the issue.

But if lawmakers negotiate a scaled-back plan that could get through the House, it would likely never become law. Last month, Abbott threatened to veto a version of the plan that only offered vouchers to students in a few categories, including those with disabilities and those in schools rated a D or F, demanding that lawmakers “expand the scope of school choice.” If the governor calls lawmakers back for a special session, King said it would likely only continue the same standoff — one that he said doesn’t help Texas students.

“This is politics,” King said. “This has nothing to do with policy.”

School voucher debate splits urban vs. rural GOP lawmakers

Riddlesperger, the TCU professor, said there are several reasons that many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle balk at the notion of spending public money on private school tuition. Among Republicans in the legislature, that division has historically come down to an urban-rural divide, he said. For Republicans like King who represent rural districts, which historically have been GOP strongholds, the notion of school choice rings false, he said, because families in their districts generally don’t have an alternative to public schools. The idea of giving families in urban and suburban districts thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to send their children to private schools may seem wasteful to rural Texans, no matter their political affiliation, he said.

At the end of the regular legislative session, Abbott called lawmakers back into special session to take up property tax reform. Under Texas law, lawmakers can only work on issues that were specified in the governor’s special session call, meaning the only way they could consider an education savings account plan in this session would be to build it into the state’s tax code. Riddlesperger said he’s heard no indications that’s likely. But since Abbott has already indicated he intends to bring lawmakers back for another special session to deal with school vouchers, Riddlesperger said he suspects the governor is already trying to figure out whether he can gather enough support to get the plan across the finish line.

Riddlesperger said he suspects the political lay of the land wouldn’t be much different in a special session than it was in the regular session. But the governor has a few tools at his disposal, most notably the power of the veto, he said. Abbott has already vetoed more than 70 bills passed during the regular session. In some cases, Abbott said he had no philosophical objection, but vetoed the bills because they were a lower priority than property tax reform or school vouchers. Because those vetoes came at the end of the legislative session, lawmakers had no opportunity to override. That allows Abbott to use those policies as bargaining chips to convince key lawmakers to get behind his priorities, Riddlesperger said.

Although passing priority legislation is always a governor’s biggest goal, Riddlesperger said the stakes for Abbott are relatively low, at least in terms of Texas politics. The governor was re-elected just last November — “we’re an eon from the next gubernatorial election,” Riddlesperger said.

But the governor may have his sights on higher office, Riddlesperger said. Although Abbott hasn’t signaled interest in a presidential run, he remains a major figure in national Republican conversations. School vouchers are a key issue for the party nationwide, he said. By focusing on that issue, as well as other high-profile issues like border security, Abbott may be trying to keep his name in those conversations, he said.

Poll: Most Texans support vouchers, but not enthusiastically

A majority of Texas voters support the establishment of school vouchers programs, education savings accounts or other school choice programs in the state, according to a poll released June 22 by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. About 58% of those surveyed said they either strongly or somewhat supported the creation of those programs, according to the poll, which was fielded in June. Of self-described conservatives, 78% said they would support a school voucher program, while 51% of self-described liberals said they opposed the idea.

But those results may paint a misleading picture about the strength of support for school vouchers and similar programs among voters in the state, said Joshua Blank, the Texas Politics Project’s research director. When pollsters surveyed Texas voters about legislative priorities in February, only about 21% of those who responded said they thought it was “extremely important” that lawmakers establish a school voucher program, placing it near the bottom of education-related issues. By comparison, 55% named school safety and 42% named teacher pay and retention as extremely important priorities.

That level of support hasn’t changed much over the past decade, Blank said. Republican lawmakers have tried several times over the years to push a school voucher bill through the legislature, and each time, they’ve been unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the issue seems not to be one that most voters are overly concerned about, he said. There’s been a small uptick in the number of people who say they support voucher programs since the beginning of the pandemic, he said, which may be due at least in part to some families being unhappy about what they saw in the children’s school curriculum during remote learning. But that shift hasn’t been overwhelming, and it remains a much lower priority for most voters than other issues like safety and curriculum content, he said.

That could be due at least in part to a lack of connection to the public school system. Polls consistently show that about 20% of Texas voters have children enrolled in public schools, Blank said. Plenty of voters without kids in school may be concerned about how well public schools serve their communities, he said, but that concern tends to be more abstract. Those voters often don’t see themselves as having a stake in education issues, he said, so they generally don’t have strong opinions about specific issues like school vouchers.

That lack of concern could put Abbott at a disadvantage, Blank said. Before the legislative session, Abbott went on a barnstorming tour of private Catholic schools across the state, trying to rally support for the school voucher proposal. The governor could try a similar strategy during the special session to put pressure on rural Republican lawmakers to back the plan, but Blank said Abbott may find the issue doesn’t get much traction with most voters.

“I think that would work if vouchers were a really important issue for voters,” he said. “But there’s no indication that they are.”