Opinion: Texans are Demanding Universal ESAs

The debate about school choice is over. What matters most now is the integrity of the education savings accounts (ESAs) program that the legislature will create during the 89th session. 

The debate is over for three essential reasons. First, the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker all support school choice. In 2024, Governor Greg Abbott spearheaded a fierce political campaign to unseat House Republicans who torpedoed ESAs in November 2023 during the fourth special session. The new class of Republicans features some amazingly talented people – Katrina Pierson, Hillary Hickland, Joann Shofner, Janis Holt, Shelly Luther, Brent Money and Marc LaHood to name a few – who campaigned on school choice and will help lead passage of the bill.  

Lt. Governor Dan Patrick has been a stalwart on the issue for years. As a senator in 2013, he authored SB 23 to create a school choice program and successfully passed the bill out of the Education Committee. Since then, the Texas Senate has passed no less than six bills to empower parents with educational choices, including several universal ESA bills. Dan Patrick is chiefly responsible for those victories.  

Speaker Burrows voted for ESAs at least three times in 2023, twice supporting Chairman Brad Buckley’s work on an ESA bill and opposing former Rep. Abel Herrero’s decade-long budget amendment to prohibit funding for any type of school choice program.

Second, President Trump is solidly for school choice. Any Republican who opposes school choice now risks the ire of the President, who has made it de rigueur to expose wayward Republicans on social media and recruit candidates in primaries. Relatedly, every right-of-center think tank that engages in education policy supports school choice led by TPPF and TCCRI and Families Empowered in Texas; AFC, Yes Every Kid, EdChoice and Heritage Foundation nationally. There’s no daylight between President Trump and these organizations on the issue of school choice.

Third, the respective education committee chairmen, Sen. Brandon Creighton and Rep. Buckley, have done the spadework with their colleagues to establish credibility for an ESA bill. In 2023, Chairman Creighton passed out of the Senate a universal ESA bill three times. At the same time, Chairman Buckley sponsored SB 8, a parent’s bill of rights which included an ESA, and authored a nearly universal ESA, but neither was enacted.

The political debate is done.

Now, the legislature must fashion a bill that learns from best (and worst) practices in other states. A sound ESA plan would include several key provisions.

1. Universal eligibility with appropriations mechanisms to fund demand. Like the public school system that will accept any student, the ESA program should not exclude any school-aged child. While appropriations will ultimately cap how many children can enter the program in the first year, every child should be eligible. In future years, the program should fully fund an ESA for every eligible applicant. This will avoid the current situation in Texas public charter schools, where 76,000 children sit on waitlists as their parents seek, but are denied, educational opportunity. As a parallel, Florida has more than 500,000 students in its ESA and has 3.8 million school-age children. Because Texas has 6.4 million school-age children, we expect our ESA student population to quickly eclipse Florida’s. 

2. A payment system that is trusted, ubiquitous, fast, and secure. Other states have online plus out-of-pocket systems using a single online web portal through which parents purchase educational expenses from approved vendors. However, a state-approved web portal cannot include all approved expenses from all approved vendors, which leads to a stop-gap solution in which states encourage parents to pay out-of-pocket for approved educational expenses and then seek reimbursement. As Arizona shows, this is a mistake that has caused transactions to take months to process. Texas can do better by designing a payment system that should meet four criteria: 

1. Allow parents to conveniently pay providers for educational expenses

2. Complete transactions almost instantaneously

3. Maintain privacy, and 

4. Prevent fraud and theft.

If these criteria are met, a Texas ESA will earn the trust of parents and schools. A model already exists in Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).

3. Support for parents is essential. Marketing research from other states shows there is a remarkable lack of awareness about ESAs: 46% of parents in Florida and Arizona are not aware of their state’s ESA program despite Arizona’s launching in 2011 and Florida’s in 2019. The Texas program should support participating parents:

1. Select a provider chosen by the parent

2. Complete an application for a provider such as a school

3. Manage a student account, including payment planning

4. Comply with program requirements, including deadlines, and

5. Appeal a program decision.

4. Protect religious liberties and guard against regulation of families and schools. This could be achieved by making the program entirely opt-in for both students and providers and holding the money in an account for the benefit of the student and not a provider or vendor. The law should also clearly protect educational creeds, practices, admissions policies, curricula, performance standards, and employment policies. The only substantial requirement would be for program participants to take a nationally norm-referenced test or the STAAR exam to track performance. 

5. Allow public institutions to serve ESA students. One of the least known provisions of the 2023 ESA bills was that any accredited public or private school could serve ESA students. This would allow visionary public school leaders to serve key groups that they know need support, including pre-kindergarten children or students who are especially vulnerable to summer slide. They could also offer programs of study to homeschooled high school students - and this is only the beginning. 

The Covid-19 pandemic was eye-opening for many parents, with 60% reporting that their educational preferences and expectations changed and 80% now saying that their child’s learning could and should happen anywhere. Remarkably, half (48%) of parents are interested in new or different learning pathways. As a result, ESAs expanded rapidly. In the 2018-19 school year, just under 20,000 children participated in ESAs. Preliminary data for the 2024-25 school year shows that there are currently about 860,000 ESA students. 

Texas families want educational opportunity, and they elected lawmakers who will deliver it.

John Colyandro and Michael Barba

Colyandro Public Affairs

John Colyandro served as Senior Advisor and Policy Director for Gov. Greg Abbott and his policy director on three statewide campaigns. Colyandro also served as Director of the Texas Conservative Coalition, a legislative caucus. Barba most recently served as the Policy Director of K-12 Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Prior to this, he served as a specialist on the System of Great Schools (SGS) team at the Texas Education Agency.

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