The Truth About Texas Education Funding

October 6, 2026

Mandy Drogin

Mandy Drogin is one of Texas’s foremost education reform leaders, bringing extensive experience in grassroots organizing, public policy, strategic communications, legislative advocacy, coalition-building, and statewide campaigns.

Mandy founded the Parent Empowerment Coalition, a statewide alliance of parents, educators, policy experts, and community leaders dedicated to expanding educational opportunity for Texas families. She traveled across Texas speaking to thousands of parents and community leaders, including alongside Governor Greg Abbott during numerous Parent Empowerment Nights, helping build the grassroots movement that secured passage of SB 2 creating Texas Education Freedom Accounts. The coalition played a major role in enacting the nation’s largest Day-One universal Education Savings Account (ESA) program, serving more than 100,000 Texas students in its first year.

Mandy also led broad coalitions that successfully advanced two landmark reforms to Texas’s academic standards. Her work helped secure the nation’s first required statewide K–12 literature list, ensuring every Texas student reads many of the Great Books. The list includes foundational biblical stories and texts for their historical, cultural and literary significance, giving students a deeper understanding of the ideas, symbols, language, and references that have shaped Western civilization, America’s Founding, and the literary canon.

She also led that coalition in advancing Texas’s new K–12 social studies TEKS standards, creating the nation’s first comprehensive chronological history framework. The new standards restore history as a coherent narrative centered on the development of Western civilization, the American Founding, constitutional government, and the principles of liberty that shaped both Texas and the United States.

Before joining the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mandy spent nearly eight years with the American Federation for Children, where she led statewide campaigns to help families access these new educational opportunities, advancing school choice and parental rights legislation during the 2021 legislative session. Including the creation of Texas’s first parent-directed education funding program for students with disabilities, Parent-Directed Special Education Services (PDSES), and the Learning Pods Protection Act.

As President of the Texas Federation for Children PAC, Mandy led one of the state’s most successful education advocacy political efforts, compiling a strong win-loss record during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles and helping elect numerous pro-school choice candidates to the Texas Legislature.

A dynamic and sought-after speaker, Mandy has testified before the U.S. Congress and the Texas House and Senate, appeared on Fox News and other national and state media outlets, spoken at major conferences across the country, and hosts the weekly podcast Parent Empowerment with Mandy Drogin.

Mandy lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, John, and their three young children.

A recent story in the Houston Chronicle misleads readers about Texas education funding. Let’s set the record straight. School choice doesn’t take a single dollar from public schools. The Texas Education Freedom Accounts program, or TEFA, was funded completely separately through an appropriation from General Revenue.

Public school funding is at an all-time high of more than $90 billion a year. Last session alone, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation allocating $8.5 billion in new public education funding.

School districts always receive less attendance-based funding when a student leaves—for any reason. But just because the money doesn’t go to their previous school does not mean it leaves the public-school system. It is 100% false to say those dollars are being used to fund school choice. Texas is funding public schools while giving families more choices.

Meanwhile, 80% of funded TEFA students come from households at or below 200% of the federal poverty level; that’s less than $66,000 per year for a family of four. And nearly 25% have a disability. These are families seeking an education that meets their children’s needs.

The Chronicle’s focus on district revenue ignores those families and their reasons for leaving their assigned public school.

The article cites two organizations that oppose Education Savings Accounts, estimating that 28,200 students leaving public schools could reduce district funding by $227 million. But that money is not being transferred into TEFA, as implied by the Chronicle.

It is common sense that has been used for decades—a district does not receive money for a student it no longer serves.

The scale matters, too. Texas public schools spent approximately $104.9 billion in 2024–25, or $18,972 per student. The estimated reduction equals about 0.22% of that total. These are different measures: Statewide spending includes facilities and debt service, while the article estimates lost state funding. But the comparison helps readers understand the scale.

Small districts face real challenges when enrollment changes, and expenses cannot always fall immediately. Still, protecting a district’s budget cannot mean requiring parents to keep children in classrooms that are not meeting their needs. Education funding exists to educate children, not to guarantee any particular school a fixed number of students.

The Chronicle, and the two lobbying firms cited in opposition to Education Freedom Accounts, completely ignore the more than 274,000 families who applied for TEFA—and the 116,000 utilizing it.

The Comptroller’s July snapshot proves that the program is reaching lower-income families and children with disabilities. The Chronicle highlights higher-income applicants on the waitlist, but those applicants should not be confused with families actually receiving funding.

Nor does prior private-school attendance establish wealth. A family may have stretched its budget to find a suitable education long before receiving assistance. Its child’s needs do not disappear because the parents acted first.

For families still searching for an appropriate placement, today’s supply of schools need not be tomorrow’s limit.

Dr. Tracy Hanson is the founder of Oak Creek Academy in Killeen, which serves students with special needs. So many private school leaders have asked her how to start similar programs and schools that she started a consulting service to help them grow.

Many students attending Hanson’s school for students with special needs come from surrounding areas of Belton, Killeen and Temple.

And we should acknowledge funding and school capacity are separate challenges, while ensuring we expand options to educational providers accountable for delivering promised services. District spending deserves accountability as well. A Texas Public Policy Foundation analysis reports that nonteacher staffing grew 238% since 1992, compared with 54% enrollment growth and 73% growth in the number of teachers. Nonteacher roles include essential personnel, but the disparity warrants examination, alongside superintendent compensation packages exceeding $400,000.

Before suggesting that departing families will cost teachers their jobs, school boards should explain how they are protecting classrooms and controlling overhead. They should also be asking themselves, Why are parents choosing to leave schools that receive significantly more funding per pupil than the TEFA awards?

Public schools remain vital to Texas communities, and most families will continue choosing them. Those schools should have every opportunity to succeed. So should children whose needs call for something different.

The reality is that parents are leaving because another school can better meet their kids’ needs. Our first question the Chronicle should be asking is whether those children are learning and thriving in their new schools?

We should never sacrifice a child’s future to protect a line item in a school district’s budget.

Mandy Drogin

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