When Texas passes legislation to create education savings accounts, it will be the largest launch of a school choice program in America’s history. Families of roughly 100,000 students will have more options than the current system allows to choose the best education for their child. And while Texans like to brag that we do everything bigger in Texas, it’s not lost on Governor Greg Abbott that the key will be implementing the program responsibly.
“In all the sessions we’ve been trying to do this, this is by far is the best legislation that I’ve seen,” Abbott told TPPF CEO Greg Sindelar on a recent podcast. “It is a well-honed, well crafted piece of legislation that benefits from prior sessions, but also benefits from seeing what’s happening in other states.”
“There have been some very large school choice programs in some other states where they did the best job they could to make sure that they had it work as well as possible,” Abbott explained. “But yet there was still an aberrational example, here and there, about, let’s say, a misuse of funds. But remember this there are stories every school year about misuse of funds in public education, and so perfection may never exist.”
“What we constantly do is we look for examples of missteps or problems that arose in some other states and we calibrate for that in our legislation,” he added. “Perfection is something we constantly pursue…The final product is something that we can continue to hone and improve every single year.”
The experience of almost every other state is that school choice programs are wildly popular with parents and they tend to grow. Abbott recognizes that dynamic.
“Some people say. ‘well this is just going to cause the budget to blow up.’ That’s impossible. There’s no automatic increase built into the law, nor can there be because under our Constitution says we can only spend money for a two-year period.” Abbott said.
He’s right, which means only the legislature can determine the growth of the program. Abbott concludes, Texas is “ensuring that if there is demand for it, we will have the flexibility to be able to grow in a very responsible fashion.”
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