We’re still two weeks away from most classrooms welcoming back students but there’s already renewed momentum for altering how Texas funds K-12 education. According to a new poll released Monday by the University of Houston and Texas Southern University, most Texans support some form of school vouchers.
Allowing parents to take taxpayer dollars with them for private education, including religious schools, has more support, with polling suggesting most Texans across the political spectrum support some form of the program.
Mark Jones is a political science professor at Rice University and one of the authors of the poll gauging voucher support.
“Support for vouchers was a little stronger than we had expected to find,” Jones said.
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Among the more than 2,000 adults polled in late June and early July, 73% of Republicans and 65% of Independents back the idea. Among Democrats, the group most closely associated with voucher opposition, 55% support some version of the plan.
“You still have roughly two-thirds of Texans support the idea of school vouchers for all parents,” Jones said.
The polling was the fourth in an installment released this month as part of Texas Trends 2024. This latest snapshot also provides stronger political steering currents for Abbott, who tried multiple times to get vouchers through last year and failed, largely over disagreements between Republicans in the House and Senate.
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Those dynamics are changing, too.
"There were about 20 Republicans in the House that opposed school voucher legislation last session,” Jones said. “A majority of them are now gone.”
The new polling is expected to boost Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's efforts to pass some form of the school vouchers bill in Austin during the next legislative session.
Abbott has recently said turnover in the House means he has enough votes to pass what he calls ESA’s, Educational Savings Accounts, in both chambers in 2025.
Jones said this would shift the debate from if to how the ESA plan will get approved. The same poll finds varying views on whether the ESA program should be available for all Texas families or selected based on income criteria.
