From Houston Public Media:
Editor’s note: This is the first of two stories about school vouchers and the election.
Dee Howard Mullins knows she’s the underdog as the Democratic candidate in Texas House District 12, which generally favors Republicans.
But she also knows the largely rural district north of Houston – which stretches from College Station to Huntsville and also includes towns such as Brenham, Hearne and Navasota – values its public school systems. There are few private schools in that part of the state, and residents there don’t want their tax dollars diverted from public schools to private institutions, Mullins said.
That could happen next year if Gov. Greg Abbott finally gets his wish for a statewide voucher program that would allow families to use state education funds at the schools of their choosing. He has thrown his support behind Republican Trey Wharton in House District 12, where current state Rep. Kyle Kacal was one of 21 Republicans who joined Democrats in blocking a school voucher proposal last year.
“The voucher issue is a big part of my campaign,” Mullins said. “When I go out and talk to the constituents, that’s the issue that they bring up. That’s the issue that could impact these communities significantly.”
RELATED: Texas lawmakers kick off new season of heated debate over school vouchers
The voucher debate presents a potential opening for Democrats such as Mullins, both in the Houston area and across the state, as early voting gets underway Monday for the Nov. 5 election. District 12 is one of four state House districts in the Houston region where Republicans voted against a 2023 proposal for education savings accounts, which would have allotted participating students $10,500 per year to be spent on a variety of educational expenses, including private and home schools.
Like Kacal, anti-voucher Republican state Reps. John Raney in House District 14 and Ed Thompson in House District 29 did not seek re-election. Rep. Ernest Bailes of House District 18 lost his Republican primary against Janis Holt, a pro-voucher candidate supported by Abbott.
The governor used his multi-million-dollar campaign war chest to back a series of pro-voucher candidates in the March primary – and perhaps to scare off incumbents opposed to vouchers – as 15 of the 21 Republicans who voted against last year’s proposal either lost their primaries or chose not to run.
A foregone conclusion?
Based on the primary results, Abbott has said he’ll have enough pro-voucher allies in the Texas House to get a program passed in 2025. The Texas Senate already supports the idea.
Because the aforementioned house districts are heavily gerrymandered for Republicans, Rice University political science professor Bob Stein said it’s unlikely any Democrats can win them. But the voucher issue gives those candidates hope, he said.
“The Houston metro area is one of the fastest-growing areas, and who’s moving here? Young families,” Stein said. “I think they’re going to be looking at education as an important issue. I think the Democrats need to exploit that if they hope to have any influence.”
Despite the primary results in favor of Abbott’s voucher plan, voters across the region and the state might not be any more amenable to the voucher idea. In House District 18 northeast of Houston, for example, Stein said the voucher issue was not explicitly part of the campaign between Bailes and Holt, instead focusing on matters such as gun control and immigration.
RELATED: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott gets $6M campaign donation from out-of-state school voucher champion
“They never really discussed in any of the ads (Bailes’) opposition to vouchers,” Stein said. “Why? It wasn’t a relevant issue to voters. There weren’t any private schools to support.
“It’s not obvious that the districts we mentioned here and their reps aren’t going to be pressed to help the public schools,” he added.
That will be the case in House District 29, which is south of Houston and stretches from near Pearland to Freeport along the Gulf Coast. Republican Jeff Barry said he’s opposed to using public funding for private schools, like the outgoing representative Thompson, adding his stance on the voucher issue contributed to his primary win against the Abbott-backed Alex Kamkar.
The Texas House of Representatives’ Committee on Public Education holds a hearing on Aug. 12, 2024, at the Texas State Capitol in Austin.
Michael Minasi / KUT News
In the general election, Barry is facing Democrat Adrienne Bell, who works for a public school district and also opposes vouchers.
“I think it’s going to pass (in 2025), because the governor has gone around making sure it’s going to pass,” Barry said. “The thing that I need to focus on at this point is trying to get the best opportunity and the best deal for my district.”
Voucher programs expanding
Thirty-three other states in the U.S. have implemented some iteration of a school voucher program, with most being targeted initiatives for low-income or special-needs students that are not available to all. Some utilize education savings accounts, tax credits, direct reimbursements from the state or scholarship funds for private school tuition, according to Michael Griffith, who studies voucher programs as a senior policy analyst and researcher for the nonpartisan nonprofit Learning Policy Institute.
“What we have seen now is a lot of rapid growth,” Griffith said. “They went from the smaller, targeted programs in a handful of states. A couple of the states now have expanded them. The common term is universal vouchers. Universal means open to all or nearly all students. It’s no longer a targeted program.”
States such as Arizona and Florida have in recent years implemented universal voucher programs, at an annual cost of at least $7,000 per student. It’s unclear whether Texas lawmakers in 2025 will try to pass a targeted or universal initiative.
Depending on the election results, pro-voucher Republicans might not need to negotiate with anti-voucher lawmakers to pass the type of program they prefer, according to University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus.
EdChoice president and CEO Robert Enlow, whose Florida-based nonprofit advocates for voucher programs, is keeping an eye on what happens in Texas.
“It’s one of the largest states that doesn’t give parents all the opportunities,” he said. “We think it’s time Texas joins the party.”
But there are questions about whether school voucher programs are cost-effective for taxpayers and beneficial to student outcomes. Griffith said it’s hard to tell in many cases, because most states that offer vouchers either do not collect data about who exactly uses them, how the money is spent and how the programs affect academic performance – or the states do not publicize that data.
“We just don’t know who these kids are,” Griffith said. “We’d have a better understanding of what’s going on if we did.”
Arizona as an example
Griffith studied universal vouchers in Arizona, where there is no budgetary cap on the program and no limit to who can use them. The cost ballooned from $65 million in the first year to $700 million in the second year, and continues to rise as more families take advantage, Griffith said.
He also said voucher programs in Arizona and elsewhere are administered by third-party companies that take cuts of the public funds. In Arizona, that was a multi-million venture last year, according to Griffith.
“If you’ve got a flat budget and the program is growing by 10 percent or more every year, at some point it’s going to put strain on a budget,” he said.
Griffith also said nearly 70 percent of the Arizona students who received vouchers last year were not previously in public schools, which could mean they already were in private schools and the state began paying the tuition that previously was covered by their families.
RELATED: School vouchers, proposed in Texas, are mostly used by the wealthy in Arizona
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks at Annapolis Christian School on Jan. 31, 2023.
Office of Gov. Greg Abbott
Jessica Levin with the Education Law Center, a nonprofit that opposes vouchers and advocates for public schools, challenged the notion that vouchers could make private schools affordable for low-income families.
“Vouchers often don’t come close to covering the cost of tuition at most private schools,” she said. “That means that either it’s going to be wealthier families who could already afford it, who are making up the difference, or voucher students are going to be attending schools that have popped up in strip malls or a fly by night.”
Enlow, with the pro-voucher organization EdChoice, said the programs are about giving families options beyond attending the public schools where they live.
“What we’re really looking for here is the same thing that happens when a family moves from one public school to another public school,” he said. “Guess what happens? The money follows the kid. We just want that for all school types.”
Equal accountability?
But not all schools are treated equally by the state. Public schools in Texas must meet state accountability standards for academics and employ certified instructors. They also cannot turn away special-needs students.
That’s not the case for most private schools, which are not inherently better than public schools, according to Duncan Klussmann, a former Houston-area school superintendent who works as an associate professor of education at the University of Houston. He said the voucher program proposed last year would have created a double standard in Texas, where lawmakers have not increased the per-student allotment for public schools since 2019, contributing to budget shortfallsfor districts across the Houston area and the state.
RELATED: Here’s everything you need to know about school vouchers in Texas
“We say, ‘Hey, we’re not going to give school districts another dollar unless we ratchet up the accountability and make it tougher for schools to receive higher ratings,’ ” Klussmann said. “On the flip side, the interesting thing about vouchers is, ‘We’ll give you $8,000, but we’re not going to hold you accountable for student performance.’ ”
Voters can hold Texas House candidates accountable this fall, partly based on their stances on the voucher issue. The choices made at the ballot box could impact what type of program is implemented, or whether one comes to pass at all.
Mullins, the candidate for House District 12 north of Houston, said the voucher issue is a central part of her campaign against Wharton, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment. She also said vouchers are not a Democratic or Republican issue, but rather a community issue.
“Every time vouchers have been put to the people on a ballot,” Levin said, “voters have rejected them.”
