Texas lawmakers passed a bill in 2025 that allowed families to use public taxpayer dollars to fund their children’s education at an accredited private school or pay for a variety of other school-related expenses. The state calls this program education savings accounts, but it is often referred to as school vouchers.
The passage of Senate Bill 2 last year was a victory for Gov. Greg Abbott, who pushed hard for the program in 2023 but could not get it across the finish line.
The money for these education savings accounts was made available to families starting this fall. But analysis from the Dallas Morning News found that over 20,000 students who were initially awarded vouchers returned the money without using it.
Jessica Ma, who covers education for the Morning News, said the money is overseen by the Comptroller’s Office and the program numbers are still in flux.
“The most recent number they gave was there are 118,000 students with active awards. That includes 85,000 students who have confirmed their participation, and the rest haven’t yet confirmed, but they still have time to,” Ma said. “For us, what wasn’t immediately clear was how many students returned their voucher.”
A public records request revealed that as of Aug. 5, 20,700 students gave up their state funding under this program.
“So these students were awarded, they were invited to participate, but ultimately opted out of the program,” Ma said. “So that can mean they formally declined their funds. It can mean that they didn’t select their school by the deadline, or the school didn’t confirm their enrollment. Regardless, their voucher ultimately gets reassigned to someone on the wait list.”
It isn’t immediately clear why students might not accept their education savings account funds, Ma said. However, the data showed that over two thirds of the students who returned the money were previously enrolled in public school — whereas some vouchers were given to students already enrolled in private schools.
“This was interesting because proponents and politicians really promised that these school vouchers would help families leave public schools. And now critics sort of say this recent data casts doubt on that premise,” Ma said. “The state awarded students based off this priority structure. So, students with disabilities were first in line to get those funds. There were about 29,000 students in this tier who were deemed eligible, but our data shows that 7,000 of them opted out. So that’s nearly a quarter of eligible applicants in the first tier.”
These numbers could point to the challenges families discovered when trying to use the funding for private education, Ma said.
“Private schools have limited seats and they can deny admission. If you have a child with special needs, a private school can say they can’t accommodate the child’s needs,” she said. “There are these specialized private schools geared towards serving students with special need but… They tend to be concentrated in urban metro areas.”
Families may also have found that tuition was higher than the voucher was able to cover.
“Sometimes at these very specialized schools (for students with disabilities), tuition can reach over $40,000,” Ma said. “And the average amount awarded to students with special needs was about $16,000.”
Money returned by students awarded education savings accounts will be reallocated to students on the waitlist — and Ma said there are over 100,000 students waiting.
“The comptroller is still making its way through that wait list and actually started awarding students in the third tier,” Ma said. “Earlier this year, they didn’t even anticipate getting to this category of students, they expected funding to run out by the second tier, but with more students leaving the program — or maybe they are choosing the lesser homeschooling amount, which was about $2,000 — reaching this third tier became possible.”
The first tier was for students with disabilities and then the second tier was for students at or below 200% of the federal poverty line, which is about $66,000 for a family of four. The third tier was for children who live in households with incomes that are between 200% and 500% of the poverty line.
Ma said this early data raises questions about whether this program will deliver on lawmakers’ promises.
“A program of this magnitude is really promising access, and it’s promising access to the state’s most vulnerable children: the low-income students, the students with special needs,” she said. “I think reporters are trying to evaluate whether that promise of access holds true in practice. For some families, it really does. Being able to afford private school is life-changing for them. And for others, it isn’t. They’re learning that they may qualify for a voucher, but that doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed access to private education.”
