How Texas Education Freedom Accounts Actually Work
When Senate Bill 2 was signed into law in May 2025, it was described by Governor Greg Abbott as the largest day-one school choice program in the nation.
The pitch was specific. Vouchers would help working families afford private school with some sort of universal eligibility. They would expand options for students with disabilities. They would put parents, not bureaucrats, in charge of their children's education.
That was the pitch.
The program that was built tells a different story, and most of that story lives in the mechanics. And we’ll lay it out here in two parts.
Part One
The first sign that the program was not built the way it was sold is who was put in charge of it.
TEFA, the voucher program, is administered by the Texas Comptroller's office rather than the Texas Education Agency. The Comptroller is the state's tax collector. The office has no education staff, no curriculum expertise, no school accreditation experience, and no history of overseeing programs that serve children.
What it does have is the checkbook. The first-year budget for vouchers is $1 billion, enough to fund roughly 90,000 students.
Vouchers are available to students who attend or plan to leave public school for private school, homeschool, or a specialized disability program. Here is what each student will get based on where they head:
| Student | Annual Award |
|---|---|
| Private school | $10,474 |
| Homeschool | $2,000 |
| Disability | Up to $30,000 |
Those are the numbers. They sound straightforward but they aren’t.
There are two places where the pitch really splits from reality before a single child sits down in a new classroom.
The first catch is that a family that receives a voucher is not guaranteed admission anywhere.
Participating private schools retain full control over who they admit and may reject any applicant for any reason consistent with their existing policies. The state explicitly cannot impose admission rules on participating schools.
It was written in SB 2; schools accepting voucher funds are not state actors and are not subject to the civil rights requirements that come with federal financial assistance.
This is a big red flag.
The second catch is that the voucher does not cover most schools.
The $10,474 award won’t cover the tuition at about 42% of participating schools. Meaning families pay the difference out of pocket.
For a family earning $60,000 a year, the gap between the voucher and a $25,000 tuition is a wall, not a door.
So the program hands a family a check, does not promise them a seat, and at most schools doesn’t cover the cost. That is what TEFA looks like at the door.
Part Two
There is a difference between a program that delivers less than it promised and a program whose design tells you the promise was not the point. And the first tell is the priority tier system and who the program was actually built for.
Because the program has more applicants than there is money for the program, awards are distributed by lottery within four priority tiers.
| Tier | Household Income | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Up to $165K, with disability | Fully funded |
| 2 | Up to $66K | Funding runs out here |
| 3 | $66K to $165K | Mostly waitlisted |
| 4 | Above $165K (20% cap) | Mostly waitlisted |
Tier 1 receives funding first. Tier 4 receives whatever is left, capped at 20% of total program funding regardless of how much money remains.
Here is what the 20% cap actually means. No more than $200 million of the voucher budget can go to Tier 4 families, the ones earning above $165,000 a year. Even if the lower tiers don't use up the other 80%, the leftover does not roll down to Tier 4.
Important to note that the cap is a good thing. It protects the budget from being drained by the wealthiest applicants. But the fact that it had to be put in at all speaks about the program as a whole.
If vouchers were designed for low-income families and students with disabilities, why are wealthier families even considered?
The legislature wrote the cap in because the nature of vouchers is to rush money to the wealthy who could cover tuition gaps on their own. At its core, vouchers are a subsidy.
That 20% cap is the program admitting in writing that "universal eligibility" was always going to mean money flowing up, not down.
Finally, the disability award is a trade.
Public schools are required by federal law, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, to provide every service listed in a student's Individualized Education Program, or IEP. That requirement is the legal backbone of disability rights in American education.
A student with a disability can receive up to $30,000 in voucher funds. And the award is substantial, but it is also the program's most carefully constructed loophole.
A family that accepts a $30,000 disability award and enrolls their child in a participating private school forfeits their federal protections at the door.
The school is not required to follow the IEP. It is not required to provide the services the IEP specifies. It is not required to retain the speech therapist, the reading specialist, or the behavioral support staff that the public school was legally bound to provide.
The award follows the student. The legal protections do not.
The cap and the IEP forfeit are not separate problems. They are the same program telling on itself in two different places. The cap admits, in budget law, that the program would otherwise serve wealthy families first. The IEP forfeit admits, in education law, that the families the program claimed to prioritize are the ones being asked to give up the most to participate.
What it adds up to
I have spent fourteen years teaching middle school in Collin County. I have sat in IEP meetings. I have watched parents fight, sometimes for years, to get specific services written into those documents. I have seen what it costs them to get there, and I have seen what those services do for their kids.
TEFA's voucher machine does not guarantee a seat for your child. It does not cover most tuitions for your child. And the disability award asks families to trade a federal guarantee for a private school's goodwill.
Families will be told to wait, to try again next year, or look elsewhere.
In the next post of this series, we'll examine the data. Who actually applied, who the program actually reached, and further dive into the difference between what was sold to Texans and what we got.
