The Texas House Public Education Committee was supposed to take up two of the biggest bills of the session on Tuesday but it didn’t happen. As Texas Public Radio reports, Committee Chairman Brad Buckley, a Central Texas Republican, released a statement late Monday night announcing the cancellation. He said it comes from a commitment to members that they would have quote “ample time to review and digest the changes in the committee substitute and the district runs.” end quote.
Those runs are the fiscal analysis detailing how Texas public school districts would be impacted by the changes in the school funding bill. Buckley has now moved the meeting to Thursday. Also on that calendar is the school voucher bill that would give parents money to send their kids to private school. At issue is a potential $1 billion spending cap for the first two years of a voucher program, and the increase of $395 for the base amount of funds for each student in public school districts.
Opponents of a voucher program point to recent research on spending of public funds on vouchers in seven states from 2008 to 2019. Those states include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin. One report in particular, released in 2023, The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, revealed that voucher spending ultimately doubled in each state.
The ACLU of South Carolina pointed to research revealing that in states with universal school vouchers, the majority of families using vouchers were already in private schools to begin with, referring specifically to two states in 2023: Florida (69%); and Arizona (75%).
When it comes to states that have adopted voucher programs, funding for public schools has decreased in per-pupil state and local spending in 2007 and 2021, according to Educational Partners International. (refer to graphic above)
