{"id":1049,"date":"2025-06-04T10:55:15","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T15:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/?p=1049"},"modified":"2025-12-04T10:21:46","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T16:21:46","slug":"5-things-to-know-about-our-ugh-new-voucher-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/5-things-to-know-about-our-ugh-new-voucher-bill\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Things to know about our (ugh!) new voucher bill"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT OUR (UGH!) NEW VOUCHER BILL<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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This post originally appeared on\u00a0Dead Dillo<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>


Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 2<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 aka \u201cEducation Savings Accounts,\u201d aka School Vouchers \u2014 into law on May 3, 2025.\u00a0\u00a0 I was, and am, against it.<\/p>

Be that as it may, the bill we got is not as bad as it could have been.\u00a0 It could have been basically a bottomless bucket of our tax money going to rich folks to subsidize private school tuition they were already paying so they could go on more ski trips. That is basically how it is working now in some states.\u00a0I don\u2019t like what we got, but at least it is better than that.<\/p>

Here are 5 things voters might be interested to know about the new Education Savings Account program. (If you would like to see my more detailed summary of the bill, click here.<\/a><\/span>) \u00a0\u00a0Some of them make me feel a little better, some of them make me feel a little worse.\u00a0 See what you think.<\/p>

  1. The voucher amount available per student is NOT a flat $10,000.<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 In the original version of this bill the idea was that most participants would be eligible for $10,000 per year, with a little bit more for children with disabilities. That changed along the way. \u00a0The bill that Abbott has signed provides for voucher users to receive \u201c85% of the estimated statewide average of per student spending for students in public school.\u201d That is actually more than $10,000 per student.
    To give you an idea of how much this might be,\u00a0    as of December 17, 2024<\/a>\u00a0the estimated average amount spent per student in public school would have been $13,405.\u00a0 So, 85% would have been about $11,394.
    Children with disabilities are eligible to get this 85% base, plus whatever additional money their home district would have received (up to $30,000).
    Homeschoolers get a flat $2,000 per student.<\/li>
  2. Students can NOT use vouchers while also attending public school.<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 In an interview with the\u00a0Waco Trib on October 11, 2024<\/a>, then candidate for the Texas House, Pat Curry, said, \u201cESAs are wide open in their potential use for workforce development and workforce training, so you can still stay in your school district and apply to go to Texas State Technical College for classes or McLennan Community College for teaching or nursing classes or even Baylor for engineering classes. If you get accepted, that\u2019s fine. But the ESA will pay for that tuition and they\u2019ll pay for the transportation to and from. So [the students] still stay in their schools.\u201d
    Mr. Curry may have thought at the time that was how it was going to work, but that is not how it turned out.\u00a0 According to the bill signed by the governor, students may NOT use ESA funds if they are enrolled in a public school and being counted towards that school\u2019s average daily attendance.<\/li>
  3. Funding for \u201cwealthy\u201d kids is capped at 20%.<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 \u201cWealthy,\u201d for the purposes of this bill, means having an income of 500% or more of the\u00a0Federal Poverty Guidelines<\/a>. \u00a0The poverty guidelines are not the same for everyone.\u00a0 They are based on the number of people in the family.\u00a0 For example, the poverty guideline for a family of four is $32,150 per year.\u00a0 Five hundred percent of that would be $160,750.
    Only 1 in 5 of the students receiving this funding will be that rich or richer, and of those, first priority will go to students who attended public school the previous year.<\/li>
  4. There are some protections against \u201cfly by night\u201d schools.<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 \u00a0One of the problems other states have experienced with their voucher programs has been very low-quality private schools popping up to try to cash in on all the available money.\u00a0 Imagine \u201cJoe\u2019s Private School\u201d appearing at a strip center with a room full of computers scooping up voucher money from unsuspecting parents while unbeknownst to them, their kids play Mortal Kombat all day.
    Thankfully this bill does include at least a couple of protections against that kind of thing.\u00a0 In order to accept the voucher money schools have to be accredited by an agency recognized by TEA or the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission.\u00a0 They also have to be in operation for at least two years before they can start accepting the vouchers.<\/li>
  5. The Legislature will be re-negotiating how much we will spend on vouchers each session. <\/strong>\u2013 The total amount to be spent on ESAs for 2025 \u2013 2027 is capped at $1 billion. That cap expires on September 1, 2027. \u00a0After that, every two years the comptroller must submit an estimate of how much is needed to fund ESA participation for each participating child and all children on the waiting list, including siblings of the current participants. \u00a0The legislature will then decide how much to appropriate.
    For example,\u00a0    the fiscal note attached to SB 2<\/a>\u00a0estimates that by 2028 the amount to fully fund the ESA program would be $3,072,133,443, but that funding is not automatic.\u00a0 The legislature must re-appropriate it each biennium. \u00a0\u00a0The legislature could decide to appropriate that amount. Or more. Or LESS.
    It will be interesting to see how the school voucher story plays out.\u00a0 Will the Texas ESA Plan turn out to be a brilliantly successful compromise between divergent ideas about how to provide the best education for the children of our state, or will it be the tip of a spear that ends up crippling our ability to educate the kids who have the most to gain from strong public schools \u2013 most likely somewhere in between.
    I do not like school vouchers.\u00a0 I do not like that the participating private schools will be held to a different standard of accountability.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I do not like that we are spending money on an idea that has been shown time and time again to be of little or no value in helping low-income students succeed.\u00a0 I do not like to think about my tax dollars going toward ever more sorting and separating of our communities into homogenous little pods where we never meet anyone different from ourselves.<\/li><\/ol>


    I do not like school vouchers. I do not like this bill.\u00a0 Given that, I am grateful for all the public school advocates who worked hard to put in a few guardrails to keep it from veering toward the worst case scenarios.\u00a0 Now our job is to pay attention.\u00a0 What will be the results?\u00a0 What will we learn from those results?\u00a0 How will we use what we learn to go about improving education for ALL our kids?\u00a0 Our job is to pay attention and to make sure everyone is paying attention.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to run off the road if you are not paying attention; it\u2019s possible to correct even at the last minute if you are paying attention.\u00a0 Let\u2019s pay attention.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT OUR (UGH!) NEW VOUCHER BILL This post originally appeared on\u00a0Dead Dillo.\u00a0 Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 2\u00a0\u2013 aka \u201cEducation Savings Accounts,\u201d aka School Vouchers \u2014 into law on May 3, 2025.\u00a0\u00a0 I was, and am, against it. Be that as it may, the bill we got is not as bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-public-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2554,"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions\/2554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleybeanthornton.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}