AUSTIN, Texas — The 2023-2024 school year is almost over, and the Texas legislature doesn’t meet until January 2025. But Texas Republicans haven’t forgotten about school choice, why it failed, or how to pass it next year. Texas is the most prominent red state without a voucher or education savings plan for families.
At a speech to a crowd of donors, activists, and lawmakers Wednesday at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual Policy Summit, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) spoke for over an hour about a bevy of topics that have thrust Texas into the national spotlight, including the Texas-Mexico border matter, property taxes, and — he saved the best for last — school choice.
During this last legislative session, Republican lawmakers were unable to pass a bill providing education savings plans for families — one of Abbott’s top priorities for the year. The bill was thwarted by the 21 rural Republican lawmakers who refused to support vouchers. In 2025, the legislature will need 76 votes to pass it. Abbott spent several months campaigning against anti-voucher candidates, and several of those Republicans lost in the primary on March 5.
“We are now at 74 votes in favor of school choice in the state of Texas, which is good, but 74 does not equal 76,” Abbott said. “We need two more votes.”
In a panel that followed, “Power to the Parents: How Moms and Dads Became Texas’s New Activists,” several lawmakers reflected on the past legislative session and how they might successfully pass a school choice provision in the next session.
State Rep. Briscoe Cain said he supports vouchers as a way to make change in the public education system. “We want to make sure we set a path forward for kids to be successful,” Cain said, later noting that COVID-19 was the catalyst that made parents more active than ever in public education.
Brad Buckley, the chairman of the Texas House Public Education Committee, also spoke on the panel, along with state Rep. Charles Cunningham. Buckley authored HB 1, the $7 billion omnibus bill that not only bolstered spending for public schools but included school vouchers before the provision was stripped, ostensibly causing the entire bill to fold.
“I want to see kids learn more. … Kids thrive on competition,” Buckley said, after noting he comes from a long line of educators. “That’s what I think we need to inject into the system.”
Buckley, Cain, Cunningham, and dozens of other Republican lawmakers are proponents of school choice, but so far, they’re still short of the necessary votes to pass it. Cunningham pointed out that rural Republican holdouts often cite their districts’ opposition to vouchers, which informs their own lack of support. While some polling shows that just a slight majority of Texans support school vouchers, the majority of K-12 students, almost 5 million, are located in urban and suburban areas.
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Most Republican Texas lawmakers hope to continue to convince Texas voters and at least a few belligerent holdouts that school choice will bolster all schools in Texas and give students of all backgrounds the chance to succeed.
As Cain said on the panel, “[Voters] say they’re happy about their public schools, but sometimes I wonder if that’s not like Munchausen [syndrome]. Like, there’s no other choice to be happy. It’s what you have. … Let’s give them some options and let them be happy about other things.”
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a mother of four and an opinion columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas.