Who Is Actually Using Texas School Vouchers
Three out of every four families who applied for a Texas voucher were already paying for private school or homeschooling their children before the program existed.
That is the most important fact about TEFA's first year.
The Texas Comptroller's office released demographic data on applicants in April and on awardees in early May.
The picture they paint together is worth walking through carefully, because who applied tells us who the program reaches, and who got the money tells us who the program was built to serve.
Let's start with the applicant pool.
| Group | Share of TEFA applicants | Share of Texas public school students |
|---|---|---|
| White | 45% | 24% |
| Hispanic | 23% | 53% |
| Black | 12% | 13% |
White families applied at nearly twice the rate they appear in Texas public school classrooms.
Hispanic families, who make up a majority of Texas public school students, applied at less than half their share of the public-school population.
Black families tracked proportionally, the only group that did.
The income picture follows the same shape. Only 36% of applicants qualified as low-income under the program's definition, a family of four earning $66,000 or less. In Texas public schools, the comparable figure is roughly 60%.
A program promoted as a way to help working families pay for private school produced an applicant pool that is wealthier, whiter, and already enrolled in private education at rates that do not match the state it was built to serve.
Then the lottery ran.
Of roughly 248,700 eligible applications, the program had funding for about 96,000 students.
| Tier | Eligibility | Awarded | Waitlisted |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Disability, household up to $165K | 44,753 | 0 |
| 2 | Household up to $66K | 51,181 | 20,383 |
| 3 | Household $66K to $165K | 0 | 65,368 |
| 4 | All others | 0 | 66,951 |
It’s important to note that the awardee pool looks meaningfully different from the applicant pool.
According to data from the Comptroller's office, 38% of awardees are white, 27% are Hispanic, and 16% are Black.
The priority tier system did pull the funded pool closer to the demographics of Texas public schools than the raw applicant data suggested it would.
But closer is not close.
White families remain overrepresented by more than 50% compared to public school enrollment.
Hispanic families remain underrepresented by about half.
And 70% of awardees plan to attend private school in 2026-27.
The program is funding a transfer from public to private education and subsidizing families who were already there.
Texas is not the first state to run this experiment.
Arizona's universal voucher program was projected to cost $50 million a year and is now running over $400 million.
Indiana's voucher spending nearly tripled in five years, from $346 million in 2019 to $970 million in 2024.
North Carolina lifted its income limits and watched the program shift sharply toward families already paying private tuition. Nearly 90% of recipients in that state were already in private school, and the families receiving public dollars earned almost twice the typical household income.
The Texas numbers are not a rollout glitch. They are what these programs do.
I’m in a classroom five days a week teaching middle school in Collin County, and I have seen what it looks like when a family fights to get their child what they need.
I know what hope on a waitlist looks like in a parent's face.
The voucher system Texas built is not a ticket for the family who couldn't afford private school. It is a subsidy for the family who already could.
In the next post, we will look at the schools your tax dollars are now funding, what their admissions policies actually require, and what they are not required to provide in exchange for public money.
photo credit: Spencer Plouzek
