Josh Cowen testified to the Texas House about vouchers and managed to predict a few things about the Texas taxpayer-funded voucher program.
Look. No one likes “I told you so.” But last spring, Texas did pass its voucher bill despite my testimony, and despite the fact-based opposition of folks like Talarico and Hinojosa. And those facts matter now even though they didn’t seem to matter then.
Because now we’re learning that exactly what school voucher research and the experience of other states predicted would happen is, indeed, happening in Texas.
Since vouchers began rolling out in red states at an unprecedented rate 4 years ago, it’s been clear that they overwhelmingly fund children who were already in private school—or were at least never enrolled in public school at all.
Researchers have actually known this since at least 2007.
And sure enough, despite promises from Texas Republicans and the right-wing billionaires using those legislators to push vouchers by claiming they’d save kids in “failing” public schools, that’s what’s happening in Texas.
I testified that only 1 in 4 voucher users come from public school, at least at first. Last week, we learned that almost exactly 3 out of 4 new voucher applicants in Texas have never been in public school.
We also learned that the vast majority of voucher applicants are coming from suburban areas of the state—and among the wealthiest communities.
This is again something we know from other states, both by media reporting and by non-partisan research at the Brookings Institution and other outfits. In fact, it’s gotten so bad in places like Florida that one-quarter of all voucher spending is going to the top income bracket of families in that state alone.
One of the things Republicans pressed me on repeatedly in testimony was whether the Texas program’s on-paper prioritizing of lower-income families and special needs student applications would avoid some of these troubling patterns.
The answer was—and is—no.
The reason is this: Texas vouchers let the private schools choose their students. That’s true for all state voucher systems these days—even though the designers of earlier programs recognized this could cause problems for student access.