Skyler Sikes is a former Texas public-school teacher and administrator — but he knew a private Christian school was the best choice for his own three children.
In order to make it happen, Sikes, who also works at the children’s school, has had to make numerous sacrifices in order to afford the tuition.
“We have a tighter budget, with the way that we eat and our groceries and stuff like that,” he said, noting the family has foregone both luxuries and necessities in order to do what they believe is best for their children’s education.
But Texas’s new universal school-choice bill could change all that.
Governor Greg Abbott signed the $1 billion measure into law on Saturday, capping off a 30-year effort to bring universal school choice to Texas.
The program, which will launch at the start of the 2026–27 school year, will place $1 billion toward education savings accounts (ESA) over the course of two years.
Families can receive roughly $10,000 per year for each child. Children with disabilities will be eligible for an additional $30,000 in funds, while homeschoolers could receive up to $2,000 per year.
Families could use the funds for private school tuition and other school-related expenses, like textbooks, transportation and therapy.
Almost any school-age child who is a U.S. citizen or lawfully in the country would be eligible to receive funding under the program.
If public demand proves greater than the $1 billion allotted over the program’s first two years, the measure would prioritize students with disabilities and low-income families, as well as students exiting public schools over those already enrolled in private schools.
Sikes notes that despite the stereotype that people who send their children to private school are “rich millionaires,” that most of the families at his school make less than $64,000 annually.
The Texas program is the largest rollout of a universal school-choice program in the country.
“I think the real reason this is historic is because of the size and scope of Texas,” said Genevieve Collins, Americans for Prosperity Texas state director. “This is not really just about the dollar, it’s about the fact that we have 5 million students in our state and have finally been able to break through the urban versus rural divide on school choice and have unified Texas as a state that wants to prioritize students.”
“It’s a very thoughtful bill, one that makes sure that we prioritize students,” said state Representative Brad Buckley, the Republican chair of the House Public Education Committee.
He told NR that he expects the measure to “absolutely change the trajectory of education in Texas.
“Educating kids in the world today is more complicated than ever,” he added. “And so it just provides another option for some families that are really struggling, in areas where the schools aren’t great, where there’s violence in the schools and where there’s real challenges – this just gives those parents an opportunity to make some decisions and hopefully access some education that others have been able to do for years now.”
The program will be housed under the state comptroller’s office.
The comptroller will go through the process of finding a certified educational assistance organization that will operate the ESA similar to a health-savings account. That organization will then create an interface for parents to access the funds once they are accepted into the program and have gained enrollment in a private school, for example, though the funds are also available to homeschoolers. The payments will be directed on behalf of that parent to a private school or for other qualified expenses.
“That’s an important component of this bill, because parents will not receive a check,” Collins said. “They will not ever see the dollars themselves. We did it this way to ensure that there was no waste or abuse [and] to make sure that the state comptroller can have consistent auditing of the program.”
Texas has been trying to pass school choice for decades.
“We’re coming out of a Covid world where parents have been really enlightened as to what their children are learning and, whether they agree with it or not, they’re finally seeing behind the classroom door, because the classroom door was on their screens,” Collins said.
AFP has grassroots engagement directors across 14 cities in Texas; the group began hearing that parents were “really dissatisfied” with their child’s academic progress and that there was a mismatch between what was happening on their child’s screen and what they expected the classrooms to begin teaching.
In previous legislative terms, rural Republicans had sided with Democrats to oppose school choice measures.
The state GOP’s intraparty fight over school choice came to a head in 2023 when 21 Republicans joined with Democrats to remove a provision on school choice vouchers from an education bill.
Abbott threatened to take on the school choice opponents “the hard way” and used his massive war chest to primary more than a dozen lawmakers who stood in the way of his school choice goals.
The governor’s efforts proved successful in nine races. Abbott’s school choice math was further improved when four anti-voucher Republicans retired and were succeeded by pro-voucher lawmakers, and again when two GOP candidates were elected to replace retiring Democrats.
Democrats remained in steadfast opposition to the school choice bill that Abbott signed into law on Saturday.
Democrats in the state senate expressed concerns over the bill’s exclusion of illegal immigrants and questioned whether the program takes away funding from public schools to the benefit of children already enrolled in private schools.
Collins called it a “battle of false choices.”
Buckley disputed concerns about how the bill might negatively impact public schools, noting he is a former public ISD school board member and his wife is a public school administrator and he has “looked at this issue every which way that you can look at it and studied across the country and there is no evidence of a negative impact in public schools.”
Public schools in Texas are funded through a foundation school program that is automatically set within the state budget, while the ESA program will have to be appropriated by the legislature every session, which means the state legislature will have to continuously take into account how many students have enrolled in the program and how much interest there was, as well as the track record of academic success.
The bill would require students who receive the funding to take a nationally recognized exam, and orders the state to complete an annual form compiling data on participating children’s demographics, testing results, and preparedness for college, career and the military.
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