Trump signs order on school choice and funding
President Donald Trump has signed two executive orders on school funding that fulfill promises he made on the campaign trail.
Fox – 32 Chicago
Families in Texas are now among a growing number of states who can use public funds to pay for a nonpublic education, including private schools and homeschooling.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on May 3 signed a school choice bill into law, allocating $1 billion for about 100,000 students to use for alternative schooling tuition or other educational purposes. The money can be used to pay for textbooks, academic tests, transportation to school, computers and meals during the school day.
Students who apply for and receive a scholarship will get about $10,500 to pay for tuition at an alternative school and students with disabilities will receive up to $30,000.
Texas’s universal school choice program comes months after President Donald Trump directed multiple federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Education to prioritize school choice programs.
The passage of universal school choice in Texas marks the end of a three-decade-long saga in which state Republicans have repeatedly rejected the idea of using public funds to pay for alternative schools, said Luis Huerta, a professor of education and public policy at Teachers College, Columbia University.
From a national lens, Huerta, who researches school choice across the U.S., doesn’t consider the change of heart in Texas to be a “watershed moment” for popularity in the school choice movement because voters in three states rejected school choice measures in the Nov. 2024 election before Trump re-entered federal office.
But Texas’s switch up on school choice could mean the Trump administration’s growing pressure on states to implement the idea gains some momentum, Huerta said. Trump congratulated one of the authors of the bill, Lieutenant Gov. Don Patrick, for what he called “the biggest launch of a school choice program in American History.”
“What is important nationally is the direct lobbying that came from the federal government and directly from the Trump admin in threatening many Republicans who were reluctant to vote for this,” Huerta said. Huerta referred to news reports of Trump and Elon Musk pressuring the Texas House to pass the program.
Longtime school voucher program opponents argue that universal school choice programs benefit wealthy families who are already enrolled in private or other alternative schools, and who already can afford them. Kids whose families receive state funding for school through choice programs are given additional resources, which, they say, can widen the achievement gap with low-income communities or students with disabilities. Others argue that school choice programs strip crucial state funding from public schools that need it.
Advocates for public schools in Texas’s rural areas have argued that state funding should stay with public schools. They say school choice programs don’t benefit families who live in rural areas like they do families who live in urban areas. They say other school options are often inaccessible. Homeschooling group often reject the idea of state-funded subsidies because they fear it invites government regulation on homeschooling.
Nevertheless, supporters are calling the Texas law a major win for the school choice movement.
School choice in Texas and beyond
Texas is part of a growing number of Republican-led states that have passed school choice programs since the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, some parents withdrew their kids from their neighborhood schools and put them in private schools, charter schools homeschooling and other alternatives when their campuses closed and pivoted to remote learning. Many families kept their kids enrolled in alternative schooling options after neighborhoods public schools reopened and returned to in-person learning.
Supporters of the national school choice movement are now touting Texas as another win.
At least 35 states and Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico have some school choice program, according to a national school choice dashboard from the group EdChoice. These programs include education savings accounts, charter schools and vouchers specifically for private schools.
School choice existed in Texas before the passage of this latest bill through charter schools and district-to-district transfer options. The expansion of school choice in Texas is reminiscent of school choice wins in GOP-led states like Tennessee and Wyoming, said Shelby Doyle, a vice president of public awareness for the pro-school choice organization National School Choice Awareness Foundation. Both states passed universal school choice laws this year, allowing families who live there to use public funds for nonpublic schools.
School choice expansion in the Lone State will give current and future generations of students more options on where they go to school, she said.
“When I think about this new private school choice program, it’s really the end of the debate on whether school choice is going to be the new normal,” Doyle said.
It’s still unclear whether there will be enough spots in private schools or other schooling options for kids who aren’t already enrolled, said Huerta from Teacher’s College, Columbia University.
There’s often a problem with supply and demand on the logistics end of universal school choice programs, he said.
“The fear then is that when a voucher comes along, all of a sudden this becomes an attractive option for families,” Huerta said. “There’s a flood of people who want to leave public schools and go to private, but there’s not enough capacity.”
‘Texas has long been one of the largest holdouts’ in school choice movement
School choice proponents argue that Texas’s pivot to universal school choice is a win for the movement. They predict the state’s program will be especially influential on the nation because of the number of families it will be able to reach given the large pot of money the state has allocated to help kids move from neighborhood public schools.
Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, called Gov. Abbott’s signature of the bill making the universal school choice program official “a monumental step forward for parental empowerment and student opportunity—not just for Texas, but for the nation.”
“Texas has long been one of the largest holdouts on educational freedom, offering no school choice programs—until now,” Enlow said.
Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.