Where Texas School Vouchers are Headed, and how we know
There are about 145,000 children on a waiting list in Texas right now.
They applied for a voucher. They qualified. And according to the Comptroller's office, the line they are in has barely moved.
The man who ran the program until this year, Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock, has a phrase for that line. He called it the longest school choice waitlist in the country.
He said it to brag.
That tells us a lot about where this is headed. A waitlist that long is not an embarrassment to the people who built TEFA. No, that’s a necessary cover. Because its purpose is to use that number has a demand for money next legislative session.
The scam is coming into picture.
The Road
Texas did not invent this program. It copied it.
Arizona launched its vouchers with an estimate of roughly $50 million a year. A targeted program, a manageable cost, help for the families who need it most. The same pitch Texas used. Arizona's program now runs more than $400 million a year. The estimate was off by a factor of eight.
Indiana spent $346 million on vouchers in 2019. Five years later it was spending $970 million. It did not grow because Indiana gained children. It grew because eligibility grew, and every time the door opened wider, more public money poured into private schools.
North Carolina is the one that reads like a script for what comes next. It started with income limits, the way Texas did. Then the limits came off. Nearly ninety percent of the families in the expanded program were already enrolled in private school, and the households collecting public money earned close to twice what the typical North Carolina family earns.
Three states. Three starting points. One destination.
This is not a flaw in how these programs get run. It is how they are built. Vouchers grow because demand grows, and demand always grows, because every family already in private school is a future applicant and every dollar added to the award makes the program more attractive to families who never needed it.
Texas did not repeal any of that. It imported all of it.
The Design
Two features of TEFA turn the other states from a warning into a blueprint.
The first is that the program never has to justify itself again.
Most major programs in Texas carry a sunset date. It is a built-in deadline that forces lawmakers to look at what a program actually produced and vote, on the record, to keep it or kill it. It is the one routine moment when a program has to prove it works.
TEFA has no sunset. None. It was written into the Texas Education Code as permanent law and exempted from the single mechanism Texas uses to make programs earn their keep. It does not expire. It does not get measured against one promise made on the floor in 2025. It just runs, forever, until somebody with the votes decides to make it bigger.
The second feature is that making it bigger takes exactly one thing. An appropriation.
The Legislature writes the check each session. That is the entire lever. And it sits in the hands of the precise coalition Greg Abbott assembled. You know the one he made by spending a fortune to primary out the Republicans who voted no and install the ones who would vote yes.
So let’s follow the money to the end of the road.
The state's nonpartisan budget board projects the program climbs to $3.3 billion by 2028 and $4.8 billion by 2030. The fiscal note stapled to SB 2, before a single vote was cast, said it could pass $6 billion in the next biennium. The people who wrote this bill knew the trajectory. They wrote it anyway.
And every dollar added does two things at once. And here’s the meat of the kickback.
It fattens the check to Odyssey, the private company running the program's back end.
The one staffed with Abbott's former chief of staff and his former communications director.
The one Idaho caught approving a gun holster, a pickleball set, and a camera drone as educational expenses before it was shown the door.
Odyssey's cut is capped at five percent of program spending. Five percent of $1 billion is $50 million. Five percent of $4.8 billion is $240 million. The vendor gets richer the bigger the program grows, and the people who decide how big it grows are the same people Odyssey hired Abbott's friends to lobby.
And it widens the pipe of public money flowing to private schools that are allowed to turn children away. Roughly eight in ten participating schools are religious. Roughly a third have written policies that discriminate against LGBTQ+ students. Not one of them answers to a civil rights requirement, because SB 2 was written to make sure they never would. Scale the program and you scale that, too. More public dollars, to more schools, each one legally free to decide a child does not belong there and to keep the taxpayer money anyway.
That is the design. Start small enough that the price tag looks reasonable. Write it so it never has to prove a thing. Hand the checkbook to the people who built it. Then let demand do the rest, while the money runs uphill to a politically wired vendor and to schools the public is forbidden from holding to account.
Texas did not stumble into this. It followed instructions.
The Waitlist
By June, more than 102,000 students had been funded. About 145,000 were still on the list, and that list has barely moved since spring.
Here is the part that matters.
That waitlist is not being treated as proof the program overpromised. It is being treated as ammunition. Lawmakers have already signaled that when they return in 2027, those 145,000 families will be the case for making the program bigger. Hundreds of thousands of applications. A six-figure line of families still waiting. The demand, they will say, is right there.
More money for vouchers. No sunset to evaluate its efficacy. Abbott’s coalition is set. They’ll continue to take more.
Everything required to walk Arizona's road is already in place. The only thing left is the next vote. And that’s why I plan to be in the room at that next vote.
What I Know
I have taught middle school in Collin County for fourteen years. I have watched decisions made in Austin land in a classroom in ways the people who made them never bothered to picture.
I have seen a school lose a position it could not refill. A program vanish mid-year because the budget did not hold.
I know what this program is, because we have spent this series taking it apart piece by piece.
It passed only after the votes against it were bought and replaced. It hands families a check and not a seat. It funds families who were already paying private tuition while a majority-Hispanic, majority-public-school state watches its own children stay underrepresented in the numbers. It does not reach 150 of our counties. It pays the governor's former staff to run it. And it was sold strapped to a school finance bill that delivered fifty-five dollars a student, then called the whole thing historic.
We know where it is going. Three states told us. The budget board told us. Hancock told us, and he was proud of it.
The program will grow. The question is who pays when it does, and what gets pulled out of the public schools that nine out of ten Texas children still walk into every morning, so the private system can be built up around them.
That bill is coming due. Not this year. But it is coming.
This series set out to explain one program. The program is not finished revealing itself. The litigation is unresolved. The first public dollars reach private schools in July. The school year starts in August. The Legislature returns in 2027 with that waitlist in hand.
We will be here for all of it.
