Capping a marathon day of floor debate on two of the biggest public education bills this session, Texas House Republicans early on Thursday morning passed a bill to establish a $1 billion private school voucher program in Texas, a policy that has defined the party’s state lawmakers for years. The final vote was 85-63.
Starting on Wednesday afternoon, the Legislature’s lower chamber spent more than 10 and a half hours debating the House’s version of Senate Bill 2, which would allow any student in Texas eligible for public school to instead get a state-funded “education savings account,” or ESA, that could be spent on private school tuition. (In the event that demand for the program outstrips available funding, the bill would give priority to poor families and students with special needs, but 20% of the money still would be available to any family regardless of need.)
The version approved by the House would tie the size of the voucher to the state’s spending on public schools. For students who use the program for the 2026-2027 school year — the only year for which it is budgeted — that would total about $8,500 dollars.
“This is a good day for Texas,” said Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Salado, just before the final vote early on Thursday morning, when the bill’s passage was all but assured.
Representatives approved just one out of 44 proposed amendments to the bill: a “perfecting amendment” from Buckley, who is the chair of the House Public Education Committee, that clarified some definitions and added some “guardrails that members have asked for,” he told his colleagues early in the floor debate on Wednesday.
With his amendment, private schools will only be able to accept state voucher money if they have operated a campus for at least two years. It also clearly defines what documents intermediary “educational assistance” companies will need to supply to state auditors to verify compliance.
The chamber largely supported those changes, voting nearly unanimously to adopt the amendment, 145-1. Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, one of the chamber’s most extreme conservatives, cast the only dissenting vote. (House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, and Rep. Cody Harris, R-Palestine, were present but did not vote. Democratic Reps. Sheryl Cole of Austin and. Rafael Anchía of Dallas were absent from the vote.)
Democrats spent the next nine hours of debate proposing 43 amendments to the bill aimed at limiting its scope, adding new accountability measures, renaming it and delaying its implementation.
For example, Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, proposed an amendment to prohibit the children of state lawmakers from using the program to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. That proposal was voted down 85-60.
Another amendment that would have given voucher opponents hope came up early in the debate. The third proposed amendment, from Austin Democratic Rep. James Talarico, would have put a voucher program to a statewide vote in November.
Reporting by the Quorum Report at the start of this week suggested that as many as 23 Republicans had been willing to support such an amendment, though Gov. Greg Abbott had been fighting those members on that issue, threatening to veto unrelated bills in retaliation.
And on Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump called into the House Republican Caucus meeting ahead of the vote to add pressure to those members to support the vote.
Whether those campaigns were effective, the result was the same: Just one Republican broke ranks to support that amendment, former House Speaker Dade Phelan of Beaumont.
That set the tone for the rest of floor debate on the amendments. Republicans showed no interest in making changes to the bill beyond Buckley’s amendment. By the last several proposed amendments, the majority party had found a rhythm, with quick motions to table the amendments with little elaboration and near-party line votes to kill them.
Before the amendment process, too, Democrats repeatedly grilled Republicans about why the bill was drafted in its current form. A recurring point of criticism was the program’s openness, which would allow millionaires and billionaires in Texas to use public money to subsidize private school tuition for their children.
Republicans dismissed those as extreme examples, because the bill is really aimed at helping poor and middle-class families — “a struggling family that’s, you know, currently in a private school, kids with special needs, in Killeen, Texas, that are working two or three jobs to do what they are,” Buckley retorted to a question from Rep. Erin Zweiner.
“Well, Representative Buckley, could we limit it to those types of families then?” she asked.
“Absolutely not,” Buckley answered, to laughs from the House gallery and Democrats. “Because I don’t presuppose to know what income level there is and the circumstances of families. And so, this bill is prioritized in a way that will certainly match the needs of those vulnerable Texans and finally give parents an option.”
That frustration manifested in some of the final proposed amendments. Wu proposed the 37th, which would have renamed the bill to the “Siphoning Classroom Assets for Millionaires (SCAM) Act.”
In the final vote on the bill at about 2:10 a.m., two Republicans broke ranks to vote against the bill: Phelan and Rep. Gary VanDeaver, who represents rural towns in Northeast Texas, including Texarkana and New Boston. House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, read the vote to cheers and applause from the room.
It marks a huge win for Republicans and Gov. Greg Abbott, who has been campaigning to establish such a program in Texas for years. The governor hailed it as “an extraordinary victory for the thousands of parents who have advocated for more choices when it comes to the education of their children” and vowed to sign it into law when it is transmitted to him.
With the bill approved in the lower chamber, the House next will send it back to the Senate to resolve the differences between the Senate’s originally approved draft of the bill and the committee substitute version that the House amended and adopted early on Thursday.
