This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this in your inbox as soon as they’re published.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s vision for education was finally coming to fruition.
This year, the state launched a voucher program that allowed about 110,000 of Texas’ more than 5 million schoolchildren to receive private education using taxpayer dollars. Abbott’s stalwart appointee at the Texas Education Agency, Commissioner Mike Morath, was leading the state’s largest acquisition of public schools in recent history. And the Texas State Board of Education, with Abbott’s support, helped pass a controversial new social studies curriculum that required the teaching of Bible stories and moved away from world history to focus on Texas and the United States.
On Tuesday night, as Democrats clinched nearly every statewide office, everything started to fall apart.
In a speech after denying Abbott a fourth term, Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa called for a reversal of his education agenda. She pledged to fire Morath and end public school buyouts.
Perhaps most importantly, she doubled down on her campaign promise to erase one of Abbott’s greatest achievements: school vouchers.
“We will work tirelessly to repair the damage caused by the Texas voucher scam,” said Hinojosa, who did not respond to interview requests.
It’s unclear how Hinojosa will deliver on that promise. Even if Democrats have the ability to restrict parts of the program, eliminating it would require legislative action.
But Hinojosa will have help.
Democrat Sarah Eckhardt, a former state senator who voted against vouchers and will now lead the state office that manages the program, said she would encourage changes to increase accountability and transparency.
Eckhardt, however, acknowledged the limits of his mandate, saying any major overhaul must come from lawmakers.
Democrats won back the Texas House for the first time in 24 years, but Republicans retained the majority in the Senate.
Rep. Diego Bernal, Democratic vice chairman of the House Education Committee, seemed convinced there is a path to eliminating the program, at least as it currently exists.
Bernal, whose district is in San Antonio, said some Republican colleagues have already told him privately that they have reservations about the voucher program but are limited in what they can do because of pressure from leaders who have now been ousted.
“I guarantee you that this program will not be spared and will probably be unrecognizable, if not extinct, by the time we are done,” he said.
Rural Texas pushes back
Abbott spent years trying to pass a statewide voucher program. By 2024, he had become furious with rural Republicans who repeatedly blocked such legislation because, they claimed, public schools were a vital part of their communities. So Abbott spent millions of dollars to oust them from office and elect pro-voucher Republicans instead.
He succeeded. And the following year, these Republicans helped pass the billion-dollar state bond program. This week, at least 13 Republicans that Abbott previously supported or helped finance through his voucher campaign lost to Democrats or trailed in close races.
Abbott’s office declined an interview request, referring ProPublica and The Texas Tribune to his campaign office, which did not respond.
His optimism about vouchers has turned off some Republican voters in rural communities that have historically been strongholds of his party, education experts and politicians said.
A Texas Tribune analysis found that Democrats made striking gains in rural and semi-rural areas of the state, where concerns about vouchers, as well as issues such as data centers, ran high. In rural counties, Abbott’s margin over Hinojosa fell 16 percentage points from his 2022 margin over former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, and it fell 20 percentage points in peri-urban counties.
Former state Rep. Dewayne Burns, an anti-voucher Republican from a mostly rural district south of Fort Worth who was defeated by an Abbott-backed primary challenger in 2024, said many of his constituents feel betrayed by the governor’s pro-voucher push. “This is the first time I think rural Texans are really taking a step back and saying, ‘Are you really supporting us?’” he said. “I think they overestimated the loyalty of Texans, especially rural Texans, to the governor.”
Former state Rep. Steve Allison, who represented a suburban San Antonio district before losing his seat in the 2024 primary, said he remains convinced his constituents never wanted the voucher system. Pro-voucher groups targeted him in a series of ads that attacked him on issues such as border security and property taxes but said little about school choice. Polls at the time showed Texans had complicated views on school choice, with a University of Houston poll showing that while two-thirds of Texans supported voucher legislation, an equal number believed vouchers would divert money from already struggling public schools.
“I know what I saw when my staff was very carefully taking note of phone calls, emails, text messages and visits,” he said in an interview. “It was clear that the entire district was opposed to vouchers.”
Concerns about vouchers have become crucial this year in several rural and suburban Texas districts, where candidates selected by Abbott won two years ago. One of those races was for Allison’s old seat, which pro-bon candidate Marc LaHood won in 2024 after Abbott spent at least $700,000 supporting him.
Another was in Bell County in central Texas. There, the Abbott-backed incumbent, Rep. Hillary Hickland, conceded a close race Wednesday morning. She did not respond to an interview request. His Democratic opponent, Amelia Rabroker, a former teacher, said Republicans’ strong push for vouchers prompted her to challenge Hickland.
“A lot of money went into her campaign to make this happen, and she handed out these vouchers, and it was very upsetting for the people of Central Texas,” Rabroker said. “I think that was a huge concern. The biggest.”
Similarly, LaHood, who did not respond to requests for comment, faced a wave of questions about his support for vouchers during a candidate forum for the District 121 race in October. His opponent, Democrat Zack Dunn, said vouchers and public education were second only to affordability in the minds of voters he met. On Tuesday night, Dunn defeated LaHood with 54 percent of the vote.
“Overall, the sentiment was overwhelmingly, ‘We need to fully fund our public schools,’” Dunn said in an interview. “The voucher scam, the voucher system, the voucher voting that was done is hurting us. It’s really hurting us statewide, but it’s hurting us in 121. Yes, we’ve heard that over and over again.”
What’s next?
Dunn said he would support measures to ensure more transparency in how taxpayer dollars are used for private schools.
But ultimately, he wants the program to be repealed.
Some changes may result from administrative actions by Eckhardt, the new state comptroller. At a news conference the day after her election, Eckhardt said she plans to rigorously audit how taxpayer dollars are spent and release more information about the program to the public.
Under his Republican predecessors, the comptroller’s office withheld information that included data detailing the amount of public funding some private schools received and the number of students most public schools lost to the program. The office argued that it protected students’ privacy.
“As comptroller, my job is to vigorously track the money and report to the Legislature if their investment is not paying off,” Eckhardt said. She added: “This is part of the rigorous auditing and performance evaluation of this program that any controller should carry out, and I certainly will. »
One of the leading supporters of vouchers in the Senate, the state’s last Republican stronghold, is taking a more measured approach to the program’s future.
Houston Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt, who led the effort to approve vouchers that failed in previous years, said the Legislature will need to review the results from the 2026-2027 school year and weigh the benefits and concerns of families. He noted that vouchers were being returned by some parents whose children needed special education services.
“I think it has helped students in many other states,” Bettencourt said. “We need to look at what happened here with this first cohort, and we need to make sure that we’re not debating the emotionality before a bill passed, but the facts of what happened after a bill passed.”
Scott Schneider, an attorney who represents private schools participating in the voucher program, said the midterm results shocked private school leaders. Some relied on state funding to support their businesses. He said private school leaders could launch a lobbying effort to grandfather in families already benefiting from the program, but schools are also planning what they will do if state funding disappears entirely.
“It’s going to be an absolute disaster,” Schneider said.
Chris Essig and Alex Ford of the Texas Tribune contributed research.
Disclosure: The University of Houston has financially supported the Texas Tribune for the past five years. The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that is funded in part by donations from its members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial support plays no role in our journalism. Find a full list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.
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