Most of Texas’ school voucher applications come from white families and children who previously attended a private school or home-school.
The Texas comptroller’s office, which manages the program, released preliminary data before applications for families interested in vouchers closed Tuesday night. The program will allow them to use taxpayer funds to pay for private school or home-schooling costs.
Of the 256,700 Texans who applied as of late March, 45% are white, 23% are Hispanic and 11% are Black. Low-income families make up 36% of applicants — defined as a family of four earning $66,000 or less per year.
For comparison, 24% of Texas public school students are white, 54% are Hispanic and 13% are Black. About 60% of public school students are considered low-income — defined as a family of four earning $61,050 or less annually.
In addition, about 73% of applicants attended a private school or home-school during the 2024-25 academic year. The comptroller did not provide data on students’ current enrollment.
The state is expected to release final data this week.
“It’s not surprising that a state as big as Texas has more voucher applicants than other smaller states, especially with such a large marketing budget,” Carrie Griffith, executive director of Our Schools Our Democracy, a public education advocacy group, said in a statement.
“It’s also not surprising that so few public school families have applied for a private school voucher,” Griffith added. “Public schools deliver special education services, provide transportation, support extracurriculars, keep kids safe, and prepare them for life. They are one of Texas’s most effective, unifying public institutions. And the data remains undeniable: Most Texans want strong, fully funded public schools — not vouchers.”
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In other states with voucher programs structured like Texas’, white families with children previously in private school make up the majority of participants.
And that’s almost certainly what we’re going to get here as well. To be as fair as I can be to this little boondoggle, the lottery system they set up for it should weight the winners towards the lower income folks. But with the numbers quoted there’s no way to avoid giving some of our tax dollars to wealthier families to subsidize their kids’ private school tuition. Which was always the point.
I don’t know what the full data set for this looks like, but “In the 2024-25 school year, 5,544,255 students were enrolled in Texas public schools”, so if every applicant was from public schools it would be less than five percent of all students. Given that “73% of applicants attended a private school or home-school during the 2024-25 academic year”, it’s more like 1.2% of public school kids applied for a voucher. Meanwhile, some 257,559 kids attend private schools in Texas, a number that’s amazingly close to the number of voucher applicants. Some private schools are famously not accepting vouchers at this time; it would seem most every other student at these places wants one. It’s free money, so sure, why not. Again, this was always the point. And it should be more visible in the reporting about it.
Wait. It’s a lottery? I had not read that elsewhere. How can you plan your kid’s education from year to year if your funding source is awarded randomly?
Joel, it’s only a lottery because the number of applicants exceeded the number of available vouchers (I refuse to use the official term for it). I assume that once you have one of these things you have it going forward, and I know that the plan was always to add more money to the voucher bucket to meet demand, but how that will all work out is not clear to me and at least to some extent is still TBD.