The rollout of Texas’ new school voucher program is entering a new phase.
After months of applications and debate, the state has published its first snapshot of the students selected to receive education savings accounts. The numbers offer an early look at who’s participating in the billion-dollar program, but they also leave some questions unanswered.
For a closer look at what we know so far, the Standard was joined by Lawrence Mower, who covers education for the Houston Chronicle’s Austin Bureau. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So what are the key findings of this report?
Lawrence Mower: Well, like you mentioned, I mean, when legislators designed this system, they did prioritize a ranking system for children with disabilities and children from households basically 200% below the poverty level, which for a family of four is about $66,000. And what the data shows is that, yeah, this is largely how the program is operating.
About a quarter of these people who use the voucher are children with disabilities. About 80% of the recipients are below that 200% level. So those are indicating that the program is doing what it was designed to do.
There’s some other things too, though, that we’ve noticed in the data. The one thing that really stands out is that a lot of parents were awarded a voucher, but did not use it. And specifically about 122,000 students were awarded a voucher, but only about 85,000 actually accepted them by the report’s deadline, which was last week. That’s about 30%.
And, you know, it’s a number that is pretty surprising, frankly. And it’s even surprised the comptroller’s office. They say that the real number, I mean, there’s still people who have time to accept their vouchers. The number could still go up. The comptroller says they expect the number to be around the 80th percentile of people actually taking up the voucher.
But regardless, they were surprised by this number as well. And they plan on surveying parents about why they’re not tapping into this.
What determines whether applicants actually get a voucher?
Well, you have to qualify, for one thing. That’s really the big thing.
There’s four tiers of people. The first tier is students with disabilities. Second tier is children who come from households below 200% of the federal poverty level. And then the next tier is 200 to 500% of the poverty level, and the fourth tier is basically people beyond that.
But one thing that will get you in is if one of your siblings gets accepted.
You just mentioned that some students did not accept the vouchers after receiving them. Are there any running theories as to why that may be?
There’s a few. Nobody really knows why or what’s going on, but there are a few major things that could be going on.
Basically, when you get this voucher, you apply to a school, and you might not get into the school. Some of these schools have waiting lists. Also, the voucher might not cover the school’s tuition.
It could be that, frankly, the process is a little confusing for some people. And that could be a reason. I mean, you had a July 31 deadline to accept the voucher. A number of those people, we don’t know exactly who or what number, but a number those people could simply could have just missed the deadline because they could have been confused by the process or whatnot.
So there’s a lot of questions around why people are not doing this. Another reason still could be that, you know, if you have a child with special needs and you get a voucher, well, there’s a chance that no school will take you in your area.
And some of those questions that you mentioned might also be related to some of the data that maybe wasn’t included in the report. You wrote that some data required by law wasn’t released. What is the report missing?
Yeah, state law required the report to basically say the number of voucher recipients in each zip code. And that was not in the report. And the comptroller’s office says it’s not in the report for student privacy reasons.
Basically, there’s some zip codes where you’re potentially only going to have a few people. There’s also not any data for for about 560 school districts in which basically fewer than 30 kids are participating in the program.
But there’s other major questions that people have about this program, which is like, for example, what’s the percentage of kids who got homeschool vouchers versus private school vouchers? The homeschool voucher’s about $2,000.
And the other big question is, where were these kids coming from? Were they going to private school already? Were they going to public school? That’s not addressed in this report. And the comptroller’s office says it’s not addressed because it’s required by law.
Does this report maybe answer concerns from critics about the initiative?
Well, it’s kind of unclear. Because the data doesn’t include things about… Like one of the main criticisms, of course, was that vouchers were just gonna help kids who already were going to private school, which was gonna help them pay for private school. And that’s not addressed in this report because that data isn’t in here. And again, it wasn’t required to be in here, but it’s not.
The other concern was that there would be kids who are from extremely well-off families getting this voucher money. I mean, that’s how it works in Florida.
Here though, except for maybe just a few kids, all of the kids’ parents are making less than 500% of the poverty level. So that seems to verify that this program is serving children from poorer households.
