Senate Bill 2 and House Bill 2 – colloquially, the Senate’s ESA/voucher and the House school finance bills, respectively – are on the House Calendar for this Wednesday. While the oddsmakers in the Capitol are leaning heavily toward a final triumph for “school choice” crusaders, the House and Senate have not yet agreed upon a final bill, and, of course, nothing has been presented to Governor Abbott, who spent the 2024 primary election bankrolling the defeat of incumbent House Republicans in an effort to engineer a GOP caucus with at least 76 votes for legislation that would direct state dollars to subsidize alternatives to public education.

The basic configuration of public opinion before, during, and now in the wake of millions spent on advocacy and campaigning has been fairly apparent in University of Texas/Texas Politics Project polling over the last few years. While the wording of survey questions on “school choice”  influences the patterns in responses (as on all subjects of any significant complexity), the basic configuration of public opinion toward state-funded subsidies for private K-12 education since the pandemic can be summarized in three points:

1. In any more or less even-handed wording of poll questions, somewhere between a plurality and a slim majority of Texas voters support the establishment of some kind of school choice program.
2. Republicans are much more supportive than Democrats.
3. (1.) and (2.) notwithstanding, very few Texas voters attach urgency to establishing a school choice program, when considered either in a global context (i.e. the most important issues overall) or even in the more limited context of priorities for the state’s education system.

Plenty of Texas voters either express support for some kind of school choice option — or at least an openness to it. But Texans aren’t hankering for it, and, when it comes to competing issues, place a lot more priority on a lot of other issues and policies, including in the K-12 education space.

There will be plenty of time to parse both the public attitudes and the brutal politics surrounding the issue over the last two years after we see the final destination of the long journey this legislation has taken. For now, we’ve compiled recent UT/Texas Politics Project polling on school choice, along with Texans’s view of other educational priorities that will certainly be part of the debate over SB 2 and HB 2 this week. (If some of this rings a bell, we’ve borrowed freely from the summary post for our February poll and others among the many posts on the subject.)

 

A plurality of Texas voters support “using state funds to establish an education savings account, voucher, or other school choice program in Texas.”

That’s exactly how the question was worded after experimentation with contrasting wordings resulted in just a few points difference, which we’ve written and talked about a lot about on the Second Reading Podcast. Here are the results overall, by party ID, by geography, and by major ethnic/racial groups.

 

Issue salience: School choice doesn’t move the needle much — even with Texas Republicans.

In an open-ended item in the February 2025 UT/TxPP Poll asking voters what issue they think the legislature should prioritize this session, only 2% of voters offered educational savings accounts, vouchers, or school choice as the legislature’s top priority, significantly less than expressed a desire for the legislature to prioritize some other aspect of the public education system (12% of all voters).

Asked more specifically about the potential public education agenda before the legislature in 2025, 20% of voters said it was “extremely important” for the legislature to address “Educational savings account (ESA), voucher, or other ‘school choice’ legislation” during the current legislative session, fewer than said the same about 9 other priorities. “Expanding the number of charter schools" (15%) was the only proposal to receive a lower priority assessment from Texas voters. 

As in prior years, “school safety” topped the list, with 63% saying this should be an extremely important priority, followed by curriculum content (49%), teacher pay and retention (46%), public school financing (42%), parental rights (42%), public school library materials (35%), facilities and school infrastructure additions or improvements (34%), and the role of religion in public schools (21%).

Republican voters prioritize the establishment of a school choice program significantly more than do Democrats, but it’s still a lower priority for those voters than one might expect given the bloody battles fought among Texas Republicans in 2023 and 2024. Only 22% of GOP voters said that establishing an ESA program is an “extremely important” education priority for the legislature compared to 17% of Democrats (however, 29% of Republicans say it is “very important” compared to only 17% of Democrats). Nonetheless, when asked what should be the top priority, only 8% of Republicans said the establishment of an ESA program (consistent with earlier results), less than said the same about five other issues: school safety (28%); curriculum content (21%); teacher pay and retention (15%); parental rights (11%); and public school financing (9%).

 

Texans’ good-ish judgment of Texas’ public education system.

In February, only 7% of voters rated the state’s K-12 public education system as “excellent,” with a plurality rating it “good” (44%), and another 37% rating public education in Texas as either “not very good” (28%) or “terrible” (9%). These results are in line with historical trends, which, while showing some slippage in the aftermath of the pandemic (the lowest “good” rating occurs in August 2022), don’t show the bottom dropping out of assessments in any significant way.

 

Education Spending

December UT/TxPP Polling asked voters to assess spending levels by the state in a dozen different areas — before the onset of messaging around the budget from state leadership, among others. In that poll, 49% of Texans said that the state spends “too little” on public education, less than only electric infrastructure (50%) and healthcare (55%; mental health services, 58%). While nearly two-thirds of Democrats, 65%, said the state was spending too little, the plurality of Republicans, 37%, agreed, with only 14% saying the state is overspending on public education, and 35% saying the state is spending about the right amount.

 

Other priorities: Partisan differences abound, but…

School safety continues to top the list of education priorities for Texas voters since the Uvalde massacre in 2022. Nearly two-thirds of voters, 63%, said it was an “extremely important” priority for the legislature to address in the K-12 public school system (unchanged from when the question was last asked in August of 2024), and 31%, the plurality, said this should be the top priority in February polling. This included 71% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans, both of whom attached more importance to school safety than any other issue.

Curriculum content was also high on the list of legislative priorities for Texas voters, with 49% saying it is an extremely important issue to address, and 16% saying it is the most important public education issue in February polling, third behind school safety, and teacher pay and retention.

Teacher pay and retention was cited by nearly one in five voters, 19%, as the top public education priority for the legislature, trailing only school safety. Overall, 46% of Texans said this was extremely important for the legislature to address, including 63% of Democrats, but only 34% of Republicans.

Given the role of teacher pay, and already outlined attitudes towards funding, it’s not surprising that public school financing rounded out the top four public education priorities. Overall, 42% of voters said it was “extremely important” for the legislature to address financing, along with 13% who said this should be the top public education priority. However, attention to school finance appears to be much greater among Democrats and Republicans (despite the issue’s inextricable link to property taxes, and property tax reductions), with 60% of Democrats saying public school finance is an extremely important priority compared to only 29% of Republicans.