Vouchers, STAAR tests, school safety. What’s on the agenda for the Texas legislature?

When Texas lawmakers return to the state Capitol this month, they’ll take up dozens of bills dealing with education, including some that would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private schools.

School vouchers are designed to give parents the money that would otherwise flow to a public school district to educate their child. Parents can use that money to pay tuition at a private school. Although school vouchers have been a controversial issue in Texas over the years, they appear to be gaining momentum: Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have expressed support for voucher-like programs.

School vouchers are one of several matters pertaining to education that lawmakers will take up this year, a list that also includes proposals related to the state school accountability system, content ratings for books used in schools and school security in the wake of the Uvalde shooting.

Governor supports school voucher proposals

Senate Bill 176, filed by Rep. Mayes Middleton, R-Wallisville, would establish the Texas Parental Empowerment Program, an education savings account system that would give parents state money to put toward private school tuition, online courses or private tutoring.

A separate bill, House Bill 557, filed by Rep. Cody Vasut, R-Angleton, would create a program to reimburse families for private school tuition, fees and other expenses such as textbooks or school supplies. House Bill 619, filed by Rep. Matt Shaheen, R-Plano, would give tax credits to those who donate to private school scholarship funds.

In the past, school voucher proposals have drawn opposition from public education advocates, Democratic lawmakers and Republicans who represent rural parts of the state, where public schools are often the only option.

A majority of Texans support programs that allow parents to use state money to send their children to private schools, according to a Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler poll released in September. That support crossed the political spectrum: majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans said they would support such programs.

But public education advocates say vouchers would drain support from already-struggling public school districts and funnel it toward private schools that aren’t required to meet the same standards and aren’t subject to the same oversight.

Abbott has said he supports voucher-like programs that would allow parents to use state money to send their children to private schools. During a roundtable discussion at a Dallas private school in August, Abbott said the state shouldn’t have the authority to keep students in schools that aren’t successful. Abbott has framed the question of school vouchers as part of the larger issue of parents’ rights, arguing that vouchers give parents greater power to make decisions about their children’s education.

In a statement issued after the August event, Mandy Drogin, campaign manager for the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Next Generation Texas initiative, applauded Abbott’s comments, saying parents should be empowered to play a greater role in deciding how their children should be educated.

“Students should not be stuck in government-assigned schools that don’t meet their needs,” Drogin said. “The governor’s focus on transparency, high-quality public and private schools, along with respect for parents and their wishes, will ensure Texas is the freest, most prosperous, and best-educated state in the country.”

Bob Popinski, senior policy director for the public education advocacy group Raise Your Hand Texas, said the state has worked for decades to ensure that taxpayers have ways to hold school districts accountable for how well they serve students and how they use public dollars. But that isn’t the case under many school voucher proposals, he said. Those programs could create a situation in which the public has no way to hold private schools that receive public money accountable for how their students perform academically, he said.

Popinski also noted that in some states that have already adopted school voucher programs, the majority of students who received those vouchers were already enrolled in private schools. For example, the Arizona Department of Education estimated last summer that three-quarters of the students who applied for vouchers had never attended public school, meaning state taxpayers were left subsidizing tuition for students who were already enrolled in expensive private schools.

“We have a lot to do within our public schools, still, before we start even thinking about a voucher program,” Popinski said.

The role of STAAR testing in school accountability

Raise Your Hand Texas also hopes to see lawmakers rethink the role the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, plays in the state’s school accountability rating system, Popinski said. In November, the group released a report calling for state lawmakers to stop using the exam as the only data point to rate schools’ success. The report, titled “Measure What Matters,” argues that placing too much emphasis on test scores oversimplifies the complicated work of supporting students and their families. It calls on lawmakers not to scrap the exam, but to make it one of many factors the state considers when assigning accountability scores.

If lawmakers made such a move, it wouldn’t be the first time in recent years they made changes to the state’s annual exam. In 2019, the state legislature passed legislation directing the Texas Education Agency to revamp the STAAR exam. Beginning this spring, students will see a redesigned test that replaces multiple-choice questions with more open-ended prompts designed to look more like the questions teachers ask during classroom discussions.

But even with those changes, Popinski said, the state’s A-F accountability system for schools and districts relies too heavily on a single test given to students each spring. Doing so ignores a range of other factors that can determine how successful students are in school, like chronic absenteeism, pre-K attendance rates and participation in fine arts and other extracurricular activities, he said. School districts across the state place great emphasis on those programs because educational leaders know how important they are in shaping students, not only for college and career readiness, but life after graduation, he said. He thinks the state’s accountability system should de-emphasize the STAAR exam in favor of some of those other factors.

During a Dec. 13 meeting of the Fort Worth Independent School District’s board, Superintendent Angelica Ramsey also advocated for de-emphasizing the state test in favor of a broader look at how students in each district are doing. Ramsey presented a list of proposed legislative priorities, including a more holistic school accountability system.

The state’s current system relies too heavily on how students perform on the STAAR exam, she said. While it’s important that the district has achievement data showing where students are, using test results as the main data point in Texas’ school accountability system can leave community members with an incomplete picture about how their district is doing, she said. A broader accountability system should include other ways of showing how well a district serves its students and families, Ramsey said. It should also include factors that families in the district identify as priorities, like parent outreach and access to social services, she said.

Content rating bill filed amid debate over school book bans

House Bill 338, filed by Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, would require publishers to issue content ratings for books and other written materials sold to public schools. Those ratings would be based on how pervasive sexual, violent or potentially frightening themes are in books, and the amount of profanity used.

The bill comes at a time of extensive book banning in Texas schools. Last August, principals in the Keller Independent School District received a last-minute directive to remove all books that had been challenged in the past year from classrooms and libraries. Among the 41 titles pulled for review were all versions of the Bible and “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.” Those two titles, as well as several others, were later returned to library shelves, but the district’s school board president told WFAA-TV that 10-15 of the books that were pulled may never be returned.

The Granbury Independent School District is under federal investigation after then-Superintendent Jeremy Glenn was recorded directing librarians to remove books with LGBTQ+ themes from library shelves last January. That recording was the subject of a joint investigation by NBC News, the Texas Tribune and ProPublica.

Across Texas, 801 books were banned between July 2021 and June 2022, with bans existing in 22 districts — more than any other state, according to a report released in September by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression rights.

School safety a priority in wake of Uvalde shooting

School safety is also likely to be a priority in the upcoming legislative session. Lt. Gov. Patrick has said he hopes to prioritize funding for school security in response to school shootings, including one in which a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in May.

Lawmakers pre-filed several bills related to school mental health and security, including a pair of bills filed by Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, that would require high school students to pass a course on mental health before graduation and allow school districts to partner with county health departments to offer on-campus mental health screenings that are covered by Medicaid.

Senate Bill 801 would require schools to limit public access to a single entrance that has a security vestibule. The bill, filed by Rep. Shawn Thierry, D-Houston, would apply only to new school buildings or to those that undergo renovations that include alterations to the main entrance.

In December, a Senate special committee released an 88-page report outlining policy recommendations intended to prevent tragedies like the one in Uvalde. In the report, the 11-member Senate Special Committee to Protect All Texans makes one recommendation related to gun safety: adding state penalties for anyone who knowingly buys a firearm on behalf of someone who isn’t legally allowed to own one, a transaction that’s sometimes known as a straw purchase.

The committee also noted that the idea of raising the minimum age for gun purchases to from 18 to 21 came up several times during testimony, but said there was a “strong lack of consensus” among the bipartisan committee’s members on that issue. Abbott has argued that such a move would be unconstitutional, citing a ruling issued by a federal judge in Fort Worth last August striking down a state law barring adults under age 21 from carrying handguns.

In a letter at the end of the report, Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, says he supports the straw purchase proposal, but also calls on lawmakers to enact stricter gun control measures. He cites a pair of polls conducted last summer, one by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin and the other by Quinnipiac University, suggesting that majorities of Texans support tighter gun safety measures, including mandatory background checks for all firearms purchases and raising the minimum age to buy a gun nationwide to 21.

Inspectors from the Texas School Safety Center assessed 23 campuses in the Fort Worth ISD this school year as part of a series of unannounced intruder audits at districts across the state. Abbott ordered the audits in response to the Uvalde shooting, during which the gunman entered the elementary school through an unlocked door. Four of the Fort Worth schools required “corrective action,” according to a report presented at a school board meeting in November. Details of the audit weren’t shared publicly, but a district official said those four campuses already had work orders and training in place to respond to the audit’s findings.

During a school board meeting in November, Ramsey, the superintendent, said the district hopes to see lawmakers continue to provide funding for school safety. She said it’s important that any school safety money comes with enough flexibility that school districts across the state can use it in ways that make the most sense for them.

“Every school district looks different,” she said. “Every school district has different facilities, and even within our own school district, our facilities look vastly different. And so we want to make sure that we have local control and flexibility in those dollars.”