Texas School Vouchers vs. Public Schools: Why Per-Student Dollar Comparisons Don’t Tell Parents the Whole Story
The first cold snap of October hit Austin the night of our elementary school’s voucher info session, and I was wearing my 10-year-old son Jesse’s old hoodie, the one with a dried coffee stain blotted on the left cuff, when the state education representative pulled up his big budget slide. Average per-pupil spending for Texas public schools: $13,900. Maximum annual voucher amount through the state’s new education savings account program: $8,000. A dad in the row behind me leaned over to his wife and muttered that private schools could clearly do more with less, so why did public schools always act like they were broke.
After the meeting, I leaned against the hood of my 2018 RAV4 (the one with the faded Maplewood Dads Club sticker I got for free at the fall festival) and sipped lukewarm sweet tea I’d grabbed on the way, while I texted my sister Lila, who lives in San Antonio. Her third-grade son Milo has dyslexia, and he’d started at a small parochial school that fall on a voucher. She texted back a photo of his tuition bill: $7,800 for the full year, all covered. Underneath, she wrote: First year he hasn’t hidden his reading workbook in his backpack before school.
That’s the line that stuck with me, because both things are true at once. The voucher changed Milo’s life for the better. And the simple side-by-side dollar comparison that gets thrown around at school board meetings and on campaign flyers leaves out almost everything that actually matters when you’re picking a school for your kid.
I work part-time as an instructional aide at Maplewood, so I’ve seen what that $13,900 per-pupil number actually pays for, line by line, things that never show up on a private school tuition bill. Last month I was in the front office waiting for the copy machine to unjam (it eats 3rd grade math worksheets at least twice a week) when our principal spent 45 minutes on the phone with the district transportation department, arguing about replacing a route bus that died on the way to school. That bus picks up 42 kids every morning, including three who use wheelchairs and rely on the built-in lift. The backup bus has a broken lift, so for two weeks those kids’ parents had to rearrange work shifts to drive them, or keep them home. A new bus costs $95,000, and that money comes out of the campus’s annual allocation, folded into that average per-pupil figure everyone quotes.
The private school Milo attends doesn’t run bus routes at all. Parents drop off and pick up, no exceptions. That’s one less huge cost they have to build into tuition.
It’s not just buses, either. Our school has one full-time registered nurse for 620 kids. She keeps a jar of dum-dums under her desk for kids who come in for allergy shots or asthma breathing treatments, she administers daily anti-seizure meds to two students, she checks for lice during outbreak season, and she sits with kids who have panic attacks during state testing. Last year she saved a kindergartener’s life when he went into anaphylaxis after a classmate brought peanut butter cookies for a birthday. Milo’s school has a front office administrative assistant who’s CPR certified, and that’s it. If a kid has a serious medical emergency, they call 911. They don’t budget for a nurse’s salary, so that cost doesn’t get passed on to tuition payers.
Most of the gap comes down to who the school is required to serve. Public schools in Texas can’t turn a kid away. If you’re homeless, if you just moved to the country and don’t speak English, if you have severe multiple disabilities that require a one-on-one aide all day, if you’re three grade levels behind in reading because you moved schools four times in two years, we have to save you a spot. We have a first grader at Maplewood with cerebral palsy whose total annual education costs come out to almost $40,000 between his aide, twice-weekly physical therapy, accessible classroom equipment, and his spot on the bus. That price tag gets averaged in to the $13,900 per-student number everyone cites.
Milo’s school doesn’t have any students with that level of need. Their 70-year-old building doesn’t have ramps to all the classrooms, and they don’t employ a full-time special education team. They don’t have to. Private schools that accept vouchers in Texas aren’t required to follow IEPs, the federally mandated education plans for kids with disabilities, and they can choose which applicants to accept. That’s not them being more efficient with money. It’s them not covering the same set of costs.
I don’t say that to bash Milo’s school, or families who use vouchers. I saw what public school was like for him the year before. His neighborhood elementary had one dyslexia interventionist split between three campuses, so he got 20 minutes of small-group reading a week, if she didn’t have to cover an absent teacher’s class. His homeroom had 28 kids, and his teacher barely had time to check in with him once a day. He started faking stomach aches to stay home. Now his reading group has six kids, he gets 45 minutes of structured reading support every single day, and last month he read an entire Magic Tree House book out loud to his class without stopping. That $8,000 bought him something his public school couldn’t, not at the staffing levels we had last year.
I’ve talked to half a dozen parents in our school parking lot who are weighing the same choice, and I never tell them what to do. But I do tell them the same three things I’ve learned from sitting through IEP meetings for Jesse, who has ADHD and a speech delay, and from watching my sister go through the voucher process.
First, write down every single service your kid currently gets for free, no matter how small. Does the nurse give them their daily allergy pill? Do they get free breakfast because you qualify for reduced-price meals? Do they get free after-school care through the district’s program for working parents? Do they get speech or occupational therapy during the school day? Call the private school you’re considering and ask if every single one of those things is included in tuition, no extra fees. A lot of schools charge extra for technology, field trips, after care, and learning support, and voucher funds don’t always cover those add-ons.
Second, ask what happens if your kid’s needs change. If they get diagnosed with dyslexia next year, or start struggling with anxiety after a family move, does the school employ certified, trained staff to support that, or do you have to hire and pay for outside providers on your own? Public schools can’t ask your kid to leave because their needs become more expensive, or because they get in trouble a couple times. A lot of private schools can, and do. Last semester a family from Maplewood used a voucher to move their autistic 8-year-old to a private academy that advertised specialized learning support, only to find out the “learning coach” was a part-time college student with no special ed certification. They tried to re-enroll mid-semester, but our special ed roster was full, and they had to wait two months for a spot.
Third, skip the state’s average number and look up your actual campus’s public budget report on the Texas Education Agency website. It’s free, and you can see exactly where the money goes: teacher salaries, new HVAC units for the wing that hit 85 degrees last September, crossing guards at the busy intersection out front, braille textbooks for the two visually impaired students in fourth grade. Most parents I talk to have never looked at it, and it makes the abstract number feel real fast.
Last week, Jesse brought home a note saying the district might cut his after-school art club next year, because enrollment dropped 12 kids this semester when families left for voucher schools, and campus funding drops with every kid who leaves. The same day, my sister sent me a video of Milo sitting on his couch, reading a dinosaur picture book out loud to his goldfish, sounding out every word without help.
I don’t have a neat answer for whether vouchers are good or bad for Texas kids long term. I know Milo is thriving, and I know Jesse still relies on services most voucher schools around here don’t offer. What I do know is that holding up $8,000 and $13,900 like they’re two prices for the exact same thing doesn’t help any parent make a good choice. One pays for a spot at a school that gets to choose who it serves. The other pays for a spot for every kid who walks through the door, no matter what they need. Those will never cost the same, no matter how many budget slides people put up.
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