Repeal would require legislative action as the comptroller-elect plans spending audits
Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa pledged Tuesday night to dismantle Gov. Greg Abbott’s education agenda, vowing to erase the $1 billion school voucher program that stands as one of the outgoing governor’s biggest accomplishments. “We will work tirelessly to repair the damage of the Texas voucher scam,” Hinojosa said in a speech after denying Abbott a fourth term. She did not respond to requests for an interview.
The pledges target the central pieces of Abbott’s record on education. This year, Texas launched a voucher program that allows roughly 110,000 of the state’s more than 5 million schoolchildren to attend private school using taxpayer dollars. Mike Morath, Abbott’s appointee as commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, is leading the state’s largest takeover of public schools in recent history. And the Texas State Board of Education, with Abbott’s support, approved a new social studies curriculum that requires teaching Bible stories and shifts instruction away from world history toward Texas and United States history.
It is not clear how Hinojosa will deliver on the voucher pledge. Democrats have the ability to restrict parts of the program, but eliminating it would require legislative action. Democrats won back the Texas House for the first time in 24 years, while Republicans retained their majority in the state Senate.
Rep. Diego Bernal of San Antonio, the Democratic vice chair of the House education committee, expressed confidence that there is a path toward killing the program, at least as it now exists. “I guarantee that program is not going to be untouched, and it will be probably unrecognizable, if not extinct, by the time we’re done with it,” Bernal said. He said some Republican colleagues previously told him privately that they had reservations about the voucher program but were limited in what they could do by pressure from leaders who have now been ousted.
Hinojosa will also have an ally in the office that runs the program. Comptroller-elect Sarah Eckhardt, a former state senator who voted against vouchers, has said she will push changes to increase accountability and transparency. At a news conference the day after her election, Eckhardt said she planned to rigorously audit how taxpayer money is spent and to release more information about the program to the public.
Under Eckhardt’s Republican predecessors, the comptroller’s office shielded data showing how much state funding certain private schools received and how many students most public schools lost to the program, arguing that it was protecting student privacy. “As the comptroller, my job is to vigorously follow the money and report back to the Legislature if their investment is not panning out,” Eckhardt said. “That is part of the vigorous audit and performance evaluation of this program that any comptroller should be doing, and I certainly will be doing.” She acknowledged that her office has limits, saying any big overhaul must come from lawmakers.
The election carried a direct cost for the voucher campaign. At least 13 Republicans whom Abbott had endorsed or helped fund as part of his push for the program lost to Democrats or were trailing in close races this week. Abbott spent years trying to pass a statewide voucher program. By 2024, he had grown angry at rural Republicans who repeatedly blocked the legislation because they argued public schools were vital to their communities, and he spent millions of dollars to oust them and elect pro-voucher Republicans instead. The effort succeeded, and the following year those Republicans helped pass the $1 billion program. Abbott’s office declined an interview request and referred questions to his campaign office, which did not respond.
A Texas Tribune analysis found that Democrats made striking gains in rural and semirural parts of the state, where concern over vouchers — along with issues like 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 exurban counties. Education experts and politicians said Abbott’s focus on vouchers turned off some Republican voters in rural communities that have historically been strongholds for his party.
Former state Rep. Dewayne Burns, an anti-voucher Republican from a mostly rural district south of Fort Worth, lost his seat to an Abbott-backed primary challenger in 2024. He said many of his constituents felt betrayed by the governor’s push for vouchers. “That’s the first time that I think rural Texans really kind of stepped back and said, ‘Are you guys really supporting us?’” Burns said. “I think they overestimated the loyalty that Texans, especially rural Texans, had to the governor.”
Former state Rep. Steve Allison, who represented a suburban San Antonio district until he was unseated in the 2024 primary, said he remains convinced his constituents never wanted the voucher system. Pro-voucher groups targeted him that year with a series of ads that attacked him over issues like border security and property taxes but said little about school choice. A University of Houston poll at the time found that while two-thirds of Texans supported voucher legislation, an equal number believed vouchers would funnel money away from already struggling public schools. “I know what I saw when my staff took very careful notice of what phone calls were coming in and what emails and texts and visits were coming in,” Allison said in an interview. “It was clear that the overall district was opposed to vouchers.”
Concerns about vouchers ran strong in several rural and suburban districts where Abbott’s chosen candidates had won two years earlier. In Bell County in Central Texas, Abbott-backed incumbent Rep. Hillary Hickland conceded a close race Wednesday morning to Democrat Amelia Rabroker, a former teacher who said the Republicans’ heavy-handed push for vouchers spurred her to challenge Hickland, who did not respond to a request for an interview. “A lot of money was pushed into her campaign to make that happen, and she delivered on those vouchers, and it was very upsetting to the people of Central Texas,” Rabroker said. “I think it was a huge concern. The biggest.”
In District 121, the suburban San Antonio seat Allison once held, Rep. Marc LaHood lost to Democrat Zack Dunn, who won 54% of the vote. LaHood, a pro-voucher Republican whose 2024 campaign Abbott supported with at least $700,000, faced repeated questions over his support for vouchers at an October candidate forum and did not respond to requests for comment. Dunn said vouchers and public education ranked second only to affordability in the minds of voters he met. “Across the board, overwhelmingly the sentiment was, ‘We need to fully fund our public schools,’” Dunn said in an interview. “The voucher scam, the voucher scheme, the voucher vote that was taken is hurting us. It’s hurting us definitely across the state, but it’s hurting us in 121.” Dunn said he would support measures to ensure more transparency in how taxpayer dollars are used for private schools, but that he ultimately wants to see the program repealed.
In the Senate, where Republicans kept their majority, one of the program’s key supporters urged a more measured course. Houston Sen. Paul Bettencourt, who led earlier efforts to approve voucher legislation that had failed in prior years, said the Legislature will need to review the program’s outcomes from the 2026-27 school year and assess both its benefits and families’ concerns. He pointed to vouchers that some parents returned because their children required special education services. “I think that it has helped students in many other states,” Bettencourt said. “We need to look at what’s happened here with this first cohort, and we need to make sure that we’re debating not the emotionality prior to passage of a bill, but the facts of what happened after the passage of a bill.”
The uncertainty has unsettled private schools that participate in the program. Scott Schneider, an attorney who represents private schools in the voucher program, said the midterm results shocked private school leaders, some of whom were counting on the state funding to support their businesses. He said private school leaders could launch a lobbying effort to grandfather in the families already benefiting from the program, but that schools are also planning for what they would do if the state funding goes away altogether. “It’s going to be a hot mess,” Schneider said.