Revised School Bills Would Mandate Citizenship For Vouchers

The proposed committee versions of a pair of bills dealing with vouchers and teacher pay would increase funding for public schools and require that anyone who enrolls in the state’s private school voucher program prove that they are a U.S. citizen.

Though the Texas House Public Education Committee rescheduled its Tuesday meeting at which it would have considered changes to the school funding bill, House Bill 2, and the Senate’s version of a private school voucher bill, Senate Bill 2, the committee posted the proposed changes on its website.

School funding changes

One provision in the original school funding bill drew outsized scrutiny from teachers and school districts: an increase to the basic allotment, the number that determines how much money each district receives for every attending student.

The basic allotment hasn’t been raised since lawmakers set it at $6,160 in 2019, just before several years of high inflation dramatically reduced schools’ spending power. Last session, advocates asked the state for a $1,000 increase to reverse those inflationary pressures, but the proposal died as a casualty in Gov. Greg Abbott’s campaign to pass a voucher program.

Under the original draft of HB 2, the state would increase the basic allotment by $220, or about 3%, which drew some pointed criticism from members of the House Public Education Committee. The bill’s author argued that other provisions in the bill would support that figure with more targeted spending aimed at giving performance bonuses for teachers.

The latest committee substitute would nearly double that increase to $395, a bit over 6% of the current amount, but still less than half of what advocates had requested two years ago. In order to keep up with inflation from the end of 2019, the allotment in February of 2025 would need to be about $1,489 higher than its current amount, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s consumer price index calculator.

It also would tie the size of the basic allotment to the growth of property values, which pay for schools, with the aim of stabilizing funding and making it more predictable for districts.

Those changes would come without significantly increasing the cost of the bill. The original version would have cost about $7.6 billion over the next two years, while the substitute is just a hair over that, at $7.7 billion, according to the summary of changes.

Voucher changes

In February, the Texas Senate passed its flagship school voucher bill along party lines, sending the measure to the House for review. The House Education Committee received that version, but is proposing its own substitute version that incorporates many of the provisions from the House’s own voucher bill, House Bill 3.

For example, the original Senate bill set each voucher amount at $10,000, which could go toward tuition, books and uniforms. Special education students would get an extra $1,500 on top of that amount.

But the House substitute adapts the chamber’s existing approach as laid out in House Bill 3, tying the voucher size to 85% of the combined local and state funding per student. Some critics of vouchers favor that approach over a flat amount because it would force future legislatures to increase public school funding in order to boost voucher sizes.

For the current year, that would yield vouchers of about $8,925, according to an analysis by the Austin American-Statesman.

Other changes were not lifted from the House version of the bill. The substitute version would require that recipients of the vouchers be legal U.S. citizens, a provision not present in the Senate or House versions of the bill, according to the summary of the substitute.

Another change attempts to respond to a criticism about the future costs of the $1 billion program. Opponents of vouchers have referred to fiscal analyses of both the original House and Senate proposals that forecast the cost of vouchers exploding in the next five years to nearly $4 billion dollars annually, based on an assumption that lawmakers would fund the program to meet demand from families.

But the Republican sponsors of those bills, including Abbott, have dismissed those projections because funding will not increase automatically, only if lawmakers ultimately codify them in the next session’s budget.

Accordingly, the committee substitute establishes a “statutory” $1 billion cap on the voucher program’s cost for the next two years. (The voucher program would be offered starting in the 2026-2027 school year as budgeted.)

That cap doesn’t impose any limits on how much lawmakers could spend on the program next session.