Opponents of School Choice Lose Texas House Primaries

I n a time when Republican primary challengers often enter races for petty reasons, it was nice to see some challengers run on conservative policies and win yesterday.

Texas governor Greg Abbott wanted to pass school choice last year, and Republicans control both houses of the Texas legislature. The senate passed school choice no problem, but the house did not. In November, 21 out of 85 house Republicans voted with Democrats on an amendment that removed school choice from an education-funding bill.

Opposition to school choice among Texas Republicans comes primarily from rural areas. They fear that allowing state education funding to follow the student instead of allocating it to schools would result in less money for them. That fear is especially strong in small towns dependent on the boom–bust cycles of the energy industry. Public schools are usually the biggest employer in a small town, and they are the center of the community, especially for all-important Texas high-school football.

This opposition has so far prevented Texas from joining the school-choice wave of the past few years. Especially after the Covid pandemic, support for school choice has grown. Seventeen states passed some form of school choice last year, with Iowa, Florida, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Utah passing universal school choice. Arizona and West Virginia passed universal school choice in 2022. In total, according to EdChoice, 32 states have some form of school choice, and 770,000 students participate.

Abbott wants universal school choice in Texas, with education savings accounts similar to those in Iowa and Arizona. The state’s portion of per-pupil funding would be deposited into an account associated with the student, and parents could then decide whether to use that money to keep the student in the same school or move to a different one, public or private.

It’s not as though school choice can’t work in a state as big as Texas. Florida is also a big state, with lots of rural areas, and it succeeded where Texas has so far failed. West Virginia is a rural state with one of the lowest median incomes in the nation, and before 2019 it had almost no school choice. Between 2019 and 2022, Republicans there introduced charter schools, open enrollment, learning pods, micro-schools, and universal school choice.

After his defeat in the legislature last year, Abbott decided to go after anti-school-choice house Republicans in primaries this year. Of the 21 Republicans who voted to remove school choice from the 2023 education bill, 16 ran for reelection, and Abbott endorsed ten of their primary opponents.

Groups close to Abbott and groups that support school choice spent millions of dollars backing the pro-school-choice challengers. Abbott even took the extraordinary step of appearing at campaign events with many of the challengers and explicitly calling out anti-school-choice incumbents.

Of those ten Abbott endorsees, five won last night, and three were forced to a runoff election because no candidate in their race won a majority. Of the five anti-school-choice Republicans who didn’t run for reelection, three of them will be replaced with pro-school-choice nominees, with the other two races going to runoffs. The runoff elections will be held on May 28.

All told, once the runoffs are complete, only between six and ten of the 21 anti-school-choice Republicans will return to the Texas house of representatives next year. That has to be considered a success for Abbott, as he will now likely have enough support in the house to pass school choice when the new legislature is sworn in.

There were other dynamics at play in the house primaries. Attorney General Ken Paxton also made endorsements in many races, some of which overlapped with Abbott’s. Paxton’s endorsements had to do with revenge for the house’s impeachment of him last year on charges of corruption. The senate acquitted him, so he has remained in office and sought to remake the legislature with his own allies. A Paxton-backed challenger to house speaker Dade Phelan, who led the impeachment effort, forced that race to a runoff.

Yesterday nonetheless proved that opposing school choice can hurt Republican primary candidates. Especially in a time when other GOP-led states are winning with school choice like never before, conservative voters appear to want representatives who will stand up to the public-school monopoly and the teachers’ unions that support it.