Different pace and priorities separate Texas Senate and House on school vouchers

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The last time the Texas Legislature tried to pass a school voucher program, nothing seemed to go right for Gov. Greg Abbott and his pro-voucher allies.

After months of political threats and last-ditch attempts to salvage Abbott’s signature issue, the demise of vouchers in late 2023 underscored a simple truth: lawmakers couldn’t engineer anything that would pass the voucher-resistant House while meeting the standards of Abbott and the Senate.

Two years later, the gulf between the chambers is far narrower as the GOP-controlled Legislature takes another stab at providing taxpayer funds for families to send their kids to private schools. To make vouchers a reality this year, House and Senate lawmakers will have to reconcile differences in their respective bills over how much money students would receive, which applicants would take priority and how the program would accommodate students with disabilities.

Those disparities, though significant, are nowhere near the discord from 2023, voucher supporters and critics agree. Last time, House and Senate negotiators butted heads over formative issues like who would be eligible to participate and what sort of academic accountability standards to impose.

Sen. Brandon Creighton, the upper chamber’s lead negotiator on vouchers for the second straight session, said it was “very encouraging to see the alignment” between the first drafts of the voucher plans, known as Senate Bill 2 and House Bill 3.

“There are some distinct differences, but that's always the case,” Creighton, R-Conroe, said in an interview. “I was so concerned about vast differences, like I've seen in the past, that when I saw the House version, I was very pleased.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the powerful Senate leader and a fervent voucher supporter, has also given his stamp of approval to the House’s opening salvo.

Rep. Brad Buckley, the Salado Republican who is the House’s point person on vouchers, said he had not yet discussed the bill with Patrick but took his comments as a positive first step.

“That's always good, because this process does require both chambers to agree,” Buckley told The Texas Tribune. “I think that we've got everything sort of lined up for us to really get some good policy done, make a historic investment in public schools, and then also pass a very strong school choice program.”

A slim majority of the House signed on in support of Buckley’s HB 3 last month, the first sign it has enough support to pass. That marked a key milestone for the lower chamber, where past voucher proposals have repeatedly gone to die, thwarted by opposition from Democrats and rural Republicans. Voucher critics say such a program would drain resources from Texas’ already struggling public schools, which receive state funding based on student attendance. Supporters say vouchers, or “school choice” programs, would provide alternatives for families who are dissatisfied with their local public schools yet cannot afford to send their kids elsewhere.

Last year, many of the House’s GOP holdouts retired or lost their primaries against Abbott-backed candidates who are now among the majority supporting Buckley’s bill.

The reconfigured math in the House explains much of the alignment between the two chambers’ voucher bills. Many of the biggest differences in 2023 boiled down to Buckley’s attempts to win over skeptical lawmakers — concessions that often proved unpalatable to Abbott, Patrick and Creighton. Among the carrots Buckley offered was limiting eligibility to those with a disability, those who qualify for free or reduced lunch, or those who attend low-rated schools; and imposing stricter accountability measures such as kicking students out of the voucher program if they fail a standardized test two years in a row.

Now unfettered by the need to court so many voucher skeptics, Buckley’s latest proposal, HB 3, is more expansive than versions rejected by the House two years ago. Both chambers have proposed opening eligibility to virtually any school-aged child and not requiring private schools to administer the state’s standardized test — aligning on two of the biggest sticking points from 2023.

“They're nearly identical, except for some key areas,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at the left-leaning think tank Every Texan, contrasting the situation this year to “the chasm that we saw in the House last time from what the Senate was proposing.”

Still, the voucher bills have several hurdles to clear before reaching Abbott’s desk — leaving myriad opportunities for changes that could complicate negotiations or bleed support in the House, where Buckley’s bill has only a few votes of breathing room. Creighton acknowledged the potential for “many amendments and changes” to the House’s current draft.

While the Senate sprinted out of the gate and in a 19-12 vote passed SB 2 in early February, the House voucher bill has yet to clear Buckley’s Public Education Committee, which heard more than 22 hours of testimony on the measure last week. Buckley said Wednesday he is working on an updated draft of HB 3 based on feedback from the hearing, along with a new version of the chamber’s school funding bill, which House Republicans are moving in tandem with their voucher proposal.

Buckley said he is waiting for updated language from the Texas Legislative Council — the state agency that drafts bills for lawmakers — and expects to advance both education bills in “probably a week or two.” As for the pending changes to HB 3, Buckley said, “a lot of it's technical, quite frankly.”

“I think we will, hopefully, have something that the Senate will feel like is close to what they would like,” Buckley said. “That'll be their call, but hopefully we’ll be close.”

At the core of each voucher bill is the creation of education savings accounts, a type of school voucher program that families could use for private school tuition and other educational expenses, like textbooks, transportation and therapy. The House and Senate have each proposed putting $1 billion toward the program over the next two years, and both would allow state leaders to add money to the program between sessions by pulling from other agencies. Neither bill would require participating private schools to accept students who do not meet their standards, nor would they have to follow federal and state laws designed to ensure students with disabilities receive proper evaluations and learning accommodations.

Unlike the Senate voucher bill, House Bill 3 includes a provision that would put more pressure on public schools to conduct evaluations used to decide whether a student needs special education services. Federal law already requires public schools to perform those evaluations for private school students in certain cases, but HB 3 would require them to do so within 45 days.

The House bill also appears to give voucher applicants priority access to the special education evaluations, putting them ahead of students who already were “waiting in line to get the same kind of assessment,” Puente said.

“That burden is placed on the school to do the assessment, but also, there’s no funding provided” from the state to cover the cost, Puente said. He noted that under the House voucher proposal, students with disabilities could receive up to $30,000 per year — an incentive for parents to request the special education evaluations from their local school district, Puente argued.

In a separate school funding bill, House lawmakers have proposed reimbursing schools $1,000 for every initial special education evaluation they conduct, while a Senate measure would provide $500.

The Senate’s voucher plan would provide $11,500 for students with disabilities, diverging from the $30,000 cap in the House proposal. Creighton said he was open to the House’s differing approach to special education, calling it “very much worth the merit and consideration. I wouldn't say one's better than the other.”

The chambers also have different ideas for how much to provide students without disabilities. With the Senate plan, those participants would get a flat $10,000 each year.

Under HB 3, students would receive an amount equal to 85% of what public schools get for each student through state and local funding. That comes out to roughly $10,893 a year — similar to the Senate amount, though the total would fluctuate based on future changes to state education spending. (The overall budget of the voucher program — which would start at $1 billion and is projected to grow — would be unaffected.)

Another key difference is how each chamber would prioritize applicants if demand for the voucher program exceeds funding.

The Senate bill would reserve 80% of spots for public school students with disabilities or those from families the bill defines as “low-income” — households with an annual income up to 500% of the federal poverty level. That threshold means the Senate bill would equally prioritize, for instance, a family of four earning roughly $40,560 per year and a family of four with an income of about $156,000, according to census data.

The remaining 20% of spots under the Senate plan would be available to anyone.

The House bill, meanwhile, proposes a more detailed ranking system. If more students apply than the number of spots available, applicants would be prioritized in the following order:

• Students with disabilities from families with a yearly income at or below 500% of the federal poverty level, which includes any four-person household earning less than roughly $156,000, according to 2024 statistics
• Families at or below 200% of the poverty level, which includes any four-person household earning less than roughly $62,400
• Families between 200% and 500% of the poverty level
• Families at or above 500% of the poverty level

“The House has a little bit more stratification and has a little bit more preference for students who might need it, per se,” said Puente, who nonetheless testified against HB 3 last week, arguing that it would “transfer the tax dollars of hardworking Texans to wealthy private school parents.”

Creighton defended his bill’s higher income threshold, maintaining that it still would ensure most benefits go to low-income families and students with disabilities. He contended that all families deserve the chance to access education savings accounts, and said he is focused on “helping kids that are trapped in a certain zip code and having to attend a certain public school without other opportunities.”

Renzo Downey contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Every Texan has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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