A half-million Florida students in January were homeschooled or enrolled in private schools, but using public tax dollars. They use school vouchers to pay some or all of their tuition.
Those numbers could be higher for the start of the 2025-26 school year as more families take advantage of the vouchers, but that data won't be available until later in the fall.
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The state has been a pioneer in allowing parents to shift tax dollars from traditional public schools to private schools, and now, Texas is following Florida’s lead.
This spring, Texas became the latest state to approve taxpayer school vouchers. The program begins next year. It becomes the biggest state to do something Florida has allowed for a while.
Tom Hudson of "The Florida Roundup" joined Celeste Diaz Schurman and Ernie Manouse from Houston Public Radio;s “Hello Houston” for a simulcast Friday afternoon to discuss the impact those vouchers have had in Florida and what might be in store for Texas.
Florida’s voucher program
Florida’s slow burn approach dates to the 1990s, when specialized vouchers, called scholarships, were created under then-Gov. Jeb Bush, with more restrictions. They were only available to students at underperforming schools and to students with disabilities.
In 2023, the Florida Legislature passed a law that removed these restrictions, and “now you have the ability of, really, any parents of a school-aged children, a school-aged child in Florida, to access what would be the public funds that would go to the traditional public schools and instead redirect those to private school tuition and parochial schools,” Hudson said.
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Florida families, regardless of income level, can apply for scholarships for their children to attend private school. It funnels billions of dollars away from the public school system.
The most popular option is called the Family Empowerment Scholarship, and the average scholarship amount for that is around $8,000, varying case-by-case.
“Those who use an option like the Family Empowerment Scholarship for students with unique abilities, on average, gets a couple thousand dollars more. That's for students with disabilities,” according to Your Florida reporter Douglas Soule.
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With no income cap on who can receive voucher,s and an expansion of ways in which the funds can be used, critics of the program point to the possibility of misuse.
For example, some Florida voucher money can be used for homeschooled students to visit Disney World and Universal theme parks. All they have to do is file an education benefit form that has one question, “What is the educational benefit of this item?”
Texas’ voucher program
In May, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed sweeping $1 billion school voucher legislation that creates Education Savings Accounts, giving parents around $10,000 to pay for' private schooling.
“It's kind of part of that conservative momentum that's sweeping the country, and it was also an election strategy very much pushed by our Republican governor, Gov. Abbott,” Manouse said.
Now Texas families can take advantage of a voucher program that follows in Florida’s lead but costs, on average, $2,000 more a year than it costs per Florida student, said Diaz Schurman.
“I think Texas kind of skipped a lot of the buildup that Florida has done with more narrowly defined scholarships through the years to this kind of essentially unrestricted dollars funneled through the parents to the education system,” Hudson said.
Callers to the show pointed out that Florida’s lack of an income cap on these kind of vouchers means a lot of lower-income and working-class families still can’t send their children to private schools because it often doesn’t pay the full cost of tuition.
Families in Texas could face a similar hurdle.
The future of school vouchers
In July, President Donald Trump signed into law the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which, in part, includes a first-of-its-kind federal school voucher program. Sort of.
The program uses the federal tax code to offer vouchers to attend private schools and cover certain education expenses. But states have to opt into the program.
Advocates for voucher programs say they give families “school choice” and “all the talk was that this would lead to improvement of public schools because there would be competition,” Manouse pointed out.
Proponents argue vouchers allow funds to follow students from failing public schools to private ones — yet in Florida, that hasn’t happened, the Florida Policy Institute found.
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An analysis of school vouchers by FPI this year shows that 69 percent of new voucher applicants are students who were never in public schools. The analysts also call vouchers "an illusion" when it comes to parental choice.
Critics of school vouchers point out that they are draining millions of dollars away from school districts already. Some are worried the program legalizes using taxpayer dollars to fund education at private, religious schools.
And as to whether vouchers could equate to better graduation rates or higher enrollment at colleges or universities, as advocates of the program tout? Well, time will tell.
This story was compiled from interviews conducted by Tom Hudson for "The Florida Roundup."
