Texas Spent $1 Billion on School Choice: Why Most Recipients Were Already in Private or Homeschool, and What It Means for Parents
Last month, I sat on a cracked plastic folding chair in my Round Rock elementary school’s cafeteria, folding book fair flyers while our principal walked through next year’s budget cuts. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, and a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie left over from after-school care oozed crumbs across the table beside me. The part-time dyslexia tutor, the woman who works with my 8-year-old son Milo twice a week, was getting her hours cut in half. Per-pupil state funding stayed flat again, she said, and federal relief money ran out last fall. By the time she finished, most of the dozen parents in the room were quiet. A few of us typed quick notes for the PTA group chat.
After the meeting, I helped Lisa, a mom I know from the neighborhood playgroup, carry a stack of leftover flyers to the teacher workroom. She homeschools her two boys, ages 7 and 10, and mentioned offhand she’d just gotten her first deposit from the state’s new school choice program: $8,000, enough to cover their entire year of math and reading curriculum, co-op fees, and the travel soccer league she’d been planning to pay for out of her family’s Christmas bonus. “I applied in 20 minutes on my phone one night after bedtime,” she said, wiping a smudge of marker off her jeans. “Didn’t even have to switch anything. We were already homeschooling.”
I went home and pulled up the first six months of public enrollment data for the $1 billion program, which gives families education savings accounts (ESAs) of up to $10,000 per child a year to cover private school tuition, homeschool supplies, therapies, and other education costs. The number jumped out right away: 7 in 10 families who got grants already had their kids enrolled in private school or registered as homeschoolers before they applied. Only 30% were leaving public district schools to take the money. I’d voted for the bill back in 2023, when ads ran nonstop saying the program would give low-income kids trapped in underperforming zoned schools a way out. I thought of Milo’s dyslexia, of how lucky we were to get a spot with the tutor this year, and wondered how that sales pitch lined up with the numbers I was seeing.
I ran into Marnie, another mom from Milo’s class, at the neighborhood playground a week later. Her son Javi has ADHD, and she’s spent two years asking the district for smaller class accommodations that never materialized. She was leaning against the fence watching him climb the monkey bars, her phone open to an official state email, when I walked up. She’d applied for the ESA back in March, hoping to send Javi to a small private school 20 minutes away that caps class sizes at 12 kids. She got denied a week before. “They needed three proofs of address, his last year’s test scores, and his birth certificate, and my work schedule got switched last minute so I sent everything two days late,” she said, wiping a chocolate smudge off Javi’s hoodie when he ran over to show her a dandelion. “Even if I got it, tuition’s $12,000 a year. I still couldn’t cover the other $4,000 on my CNA salary. I don’t know why I thought it would work.”
I’ve talked to half a dozen parents about this since that PTA meeting, and no one I know who got the grant is a bad person for taking it. Lisa and her husband budget carefully for homeschooling, and if the state is offering money to cover costs they were already paying, of course she’s going to apply. The Catholic school families from our church who now have most of their $9,000 annual tuition covered aren’t cheating the system; they’re just following the rules as written. The problem isn’t individual families choosing what works for their kids. It’s that the program was sold one way, and built to work another way. I do know one family who used the ESA to leave public school: a single mom whose daughter was relentlessly bullied at her zoned middle school, who got a spot at a small private Christian school and says the grant changed everything for her kid. Those stories are real, they just don’t make up most of the grants awarded so far.
Lawmakers who pushed the bill said it would expand options for families who never had them. But the design all but guarantees that most of the money goes to families who already had the option to leave public school. Application windows are only three weeks long, with almost no in-person outreach to low-income neighborhoods, Spanish-speaking families, or parents working multiple jobs who don’t spend time on local education Facebook groups. The grants don’t cover full tuition at most private schools, so even families who get approved often can’t cover the remaining cost out of pocket. There’s no requirement that grants prioritize low-income kids or kids with learning differences who aren’t getting support in their zoned schools. The result is exactly what the numbers show: $700 million of the first $1 billion went to subsidize choices families were already making, not to create new choices for kids who had none.
If you’re a Texas parent trying to figure out what this means for your own kid, I’ve picked up a few small, practical things from talking to parents, district staff, and ESA recipients over the last month that don’t require a trip to the capitol. If you’re hoping to apply for an ESA in the next round, don’t wait until applications open to get organized. Save digital copies of your kid’s birth certificate, two current utility bills for proof of address, and their last two school report cards or test scores in a single folder on your phone right now. Mark the tentative application window (the state usually posts dates 2-3 months in advance on the TEA website) on your calendar, and set two reminders: one a week before it opens, one three days before it closes. Before you get your heart set on a private school, ask their front office for an all-in cost sheet that includes registration fees, uniforms, field trips, and after care, not just base tuition. Most ESAs don’t cover those extra costs, and they can add $2,000 to $3,000 a year to the bill.
If you’re planning to stay in your neighborhood public school, like we are, you don’t have to just wait for budget cuts to hit services your kid needs. Our PTA voted last week to reallocate 30% of our annual fall fundraiser money, which usually goes to new playground balls and end-of-year snack gifts for teachers, to hire a shared part-time dyslexia tutor that will work with six kids across 2nd and 3rd grade. It’s not enough to replace the district position, but it keeps Milo and kids like him getting the extra reading help they need four days a week. If you’re looking for a different placement for your kid but can’t cover private school tuition even with an ESA, call your district’s student services office and ask for a list of open-enrollment and magnet campuses inside the district that specialize in the support your kid needs, whether that’s dyslexia intervention, smaller class sizes for neurodivergent kids, or art and STEM programming. Most districts offer these spots for free, but almost none advertise them widely; half the parents I talked to had no idea they existed until I mentioned it.
Last week, Milo came home with a drawing he made for his tutor, Ms. Rita, covered in dinosaur stickers. We still don’t know if she’ll be able to keep working with him next year, even with the PTA money. Lisa texted me a photo last weekend of her boys using their new ESA-funded science kits to do a volcano experiment in their backyard. Marnie put in an open enrollment request for Javi at the district’s neurodivergent learner magnet school last week, and she’s waiting to hear back if he got a spot. No one I know thinks school choice is entirely bad, and no one thinks public schools are perfect. But $1 billion is a lot of money, and it’s hard to look at the numbers and argue it’s going to the kids who needed the most help getting an option in the first place. For now, most of us are just doing what parents always do: sorting through the paperwork, pooling what we have, and trying to make the best choice we can with what’s actually there.
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