The Schools Your Tax Dollars Are Funding
The law that created TEFA contains a clause that drew little attention during floor debate.
It says that participating private schools are not state actors. And the state of Texas can’t impose any requirement on them that runs contrary to their religious or institutional values, their curriculum, or their admissions standards.
And that’s a problem.
Public schools in Texas operate inside a thick wall of accountability that keeps our children safe and provided for by a variety of laws and federal obligations.
For voucher funded private schools, the list is shorter.
| Obligation | Public Schools | TEFA Private Schools |
|---|---|---|
| Accreditation | ✅ Required | ✅ Required |
| Norm-referenced test, grades 3–12 | ✅ Required | ✅ Required |
| Two years of continuous operation | Not applicable | ✅ Required |
| Federal civil rights law | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
| Title IX protections | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
| IDEA / IEP services for students with disabilities | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
| Non-discrimination in admissions | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
| Cannot expel a student for being LGBTQ+ | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
| Open records | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
| Open meetings | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
| Elected school board accountability | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
| State academic standards and testing | ✅ Required | ❌ Not required |
That’s it. Three items, standing in for everything a public school is required to do.
A contributing factor to that tiny obligation is that the program is administered by the Texas Comptroller, not the Texas Education Agency.
The Comptroller is the state's tax collector. The office has no education staff and no school accreditation experience.
So, we’re staring down some big problems here: participating schools are not required to accept any particular student. They are not required to keep students they have admitted. They are not required to accommodate disabilities, even when a family is using the disability tier voucher of up to thirty thousand dollars.
The Texas Council for Developmental Disabilities has flagged this directly. A family that accepts the disability award and enrolls their child in a participating private school surrenders the protections of federal special education law. The IEP’s obligations get checked at the door.
The speech therapist. The reading specialist. The behavioral support staff. None of it is guaranteed.
The private school gets paid with public money but doesn’t have to provide the way the public does. Which raises the obvious question. What kind of schools is Texas writing checks to?
A Texas Observer investigation published in January 2026 examined the schools enrolled in TEFA at launch. The findings came from the schools' own published materials.
| Finding | Share of TEFA schools |
|---|---|
| Religiously affiliated | ~80% |
| Religious schools requiring or prioritizing same-faith admission | ~40% |
| Religious schools with written policies discriminating against LGBTQ+ students | ~30% |
Source: Texas Observer investigation, January 2026, based on schools' own published admissions data.
About 80% of voucher schools are religiously affiliated. But one religion is conspicuously missing from the list.
When the Comptroller's office launched TEFA in February, not a single accredited Islamic school had been approved to participate.
More than twenty-two hundred other schools were on the list. Hundreds of them were Christian.
Now, the state offered no individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific Islamic school. So, the exclusion was categorical, at least it appeared that way.
Muslim parents and Islamic schools sued.
At the March 17 hearing, U.S. District Judge Alfred Bennett called the absence of approved Islamic schools troubling. From the bench, in open court, he said this: "If you were to roll dice in a game of chance, you would not come up with those numbers. The appearance of this reeks."
He extended the application deadline. He ordered the state to send registration links to the plaintiff schools within twenty-four hours.
The day after the order, the Comptroller approved five Islamic schools named in the lawsuit. More followed in the days after. One of them was Excellence Academy in McKinney right here in Collin County.
But even after the approvals, the state's compliance has not been clean.
The Comptroller has since sent a letter to the attorney general asking him to sue Houston Quran Academy to block it from operating in Texas, despite the Comptroller's own office having approved the school.
Plaintiffs' attorneys have called the state's acceptance of Islamic schools late, partial, and unstable. The underlying discrimination claims remain in federal court.
I have taught middle school in Collin County for fourteen years.
When I sent my children to public school, I didn’t have to wonder whether they’d be turned away for who they are or what they believe in.
I didn’t have to read a school's private policy to find out whether my daughter would be allowed to stay if teachers didn’t like her sexuality.
That protection isn’t a courtesy. It’s the law, and it exists because the public paid for it to exist.
TEFA sends public money to schools where none of that applies.
A program built this way is not a neutral expansion of educational choice. It is a transfer of public dollars to private institutions that the Legislature specifically exempted from the civil rights obligations the public has spent decades putting in place.
Somewhere in Texas, a parent is reading a glossy admissions packet and deciding whether to risk it. Somewhere, a child is doing the math on whether to tell the truth about who they are.
The state of Texas decided that is a private matter.
And I disagree.
Our next post takes the program onto the map. Texas has 254 counties. TEFA has not arrived in most of them.
