The Texas frontier has once again been won, this time by the school choice movement. It wasn’t easy. Anti-school-choice lobbyists and teachers unions fought fiercely for years to keep the bill from passing, despite declining schools, chronic absenteeism, and barely half of Texas students meeting proficiency standards.
But pass it finally did, and once implemented, its ripple effects will be felt far beyond the borders of Texas. While the victory is already one of the most consequential things to happen in education in decades, the real impact will be years in the making.
Texas is one of the most active hotbeds of education innovation in the nation, home to many independent schools, and an inspiring number of educators and founders building alternatives to public schools.
Texas is already an education mecca, and its new school voucher program is about to give it a capital injection the likes of which no state has seen.
Texas Vouchers Will Give Tens of Thousands of Families The Gift Of Choice
Texas’s school vouchers are slated to go live at the start of the 2026-2027 school year, with 100,000 available in the first year. Each voucher is worth $10,000 per year towards tuition at a private school, or $2,000 per year towards approved resources and activities for homeschooling students.
That $10,000 is less than the ~$13,000 per student per year Texas spends on public education, but it’s a sizable sum for parents trying to bring private school tuition into reach. Having direct access to $10,000 already earmarked for their child’s education (and perhaps more for siblings) is arguably life-changing.
If you have a school-aged child in Texas right now, it’s a great time to be a parent. The educational options now available to even low-income families would’ve made history’s elite swoon.
While this first wave of vouchers will be available to just 100,000 students, the Lone Star State is home to more than 10 percent of America’s school-age children (~5.5 million K-12 students), so its school choice adoption could hugely tilt the ratio of American kids with access to publicly funded education alternatives.
Just as importantly, $10,000 across 100,000 students — $1 billion in funding every year — was just injected into the Texas market for educational innovation. Those unlocked taxpayer dollars will be directed away from stultified models, and toward some of the highly qualified entrepreneurs and ordinary educators currently reimagining what K-12 learning can look like.
Texas is a Hotbed for Education Innovation
Austin, Texas is the home of Willie Nelson and Matthew McConaughey, land of hippies and honky tonks and brisket and bluebonnets and — perhaps unsurprising for a city known even in Texas for its independence — the epicenter of this education innovation.
Whatever type of innovative, effective school you might be interested in, you can find it in Austin: democratic schools, Montessori schools, Waldorf schools, classical schools, Christian schools, forest schools, living-room-based microschools. At any community event, you’re likely to meet a parent who sends their kids to a different and unique school — and some to as many schools as they have children.
And new schooling models have a history of emerging in Austin.
In the early 2000s, Acton Academy, one of the first alternative school networks, was born in an old house in a quiet Austin neighborhood — originally a tiny mom-and-pop school focusing on student self-direction and each child’s unique hero’s journey through their childhood. Branching out from Austin, Acton now has over 250 affiliated locations worldwide, in 30 states and 20 countries.
The 2010s saw the launch of Alpha School, now taking social media by storm with its radical teacher-free approach to learning (where kids study independently using AI tools rather than sitting in lecture-style classes). Alpha is now getting national press for its highly innovative education model and its students’ consistently off-the-charts academic performance.
In the 2020s, Green Beret and mixed martial arts fighter Tim Kennedy (famous for serving in the Secret Service and appearing on Joe Rogan numerous times, as well as being the only person to be active in both the military and the MMA at the same time) launched a network called Apogee School based out of Cedar Park, just north of Austin. Originally a singular school, it ballooned to 50 locations across the country in the fall of 2024. His program places a heavy focus on the family’s responsibility for a child’s education, and has a reading list not just for the students but for the entire family.
Famous memoirist Tucker Max — most famous for his bestselling book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell — launched his own Waldorf-inspired school outside of Austin.
Guidepost Montessori relocated its headquarters from California to Austin during the COVID era, and expanded Montessori’s program, typically reserved for young children, into middle and high school years.
This pioneering energy isn’t just in K-12. In the fall of 2021, Joe Lonsdale and Bari Weiss made waves with the announcement of the launch of University of Austin, a school incepted to defend the shrinking on-campus right to free speech. Its campus is in the heart of downtown Austin, six blocks from the Capitol building, and is welcoming its second freshman class this fall.
Austen Allred, one of the original influencers of the skip-college-build-skills movement of the 2010s, relocated to Austin to launch his new career accelerator, Gauntlet AI, which trains (often young) people to be AI engineers with the promise of $200,000/year starting salaries upon their successful completion of the program.
Born in Texas, but All-American
Austin is, to hazard a cliché, the Silicon Valley of the education movement. There are other hotbeds around the country — Miami and San Francisco being frontrunners — but the amount of energy centered in Austin is unparalleled.
Nearly all of these school networks started in Austin have expanded far beyond the borders of Texas — and these are only a handful of the models being built in Austin and across Texas at large.
This billion-dollar-a-year bank opened up for education innovation — larger than the funds of most education-focused VC firms — is a huge funding infusion for Texas’s education entrepreneurs. And that sum is poised to expand each year as the state’s voucher program grows.
Just by weight of its student numbers and spending, Texas already affects our education discourse on a national level. Now, some of that energy will be moving into alternative programs — which have a far better shot at solving America’s educational woes than the public system does.
The particular beauty of a voucher system is that it veers in the direction of a free market (still far from an Austrian economist’s utopia, but far closer than the public school mega-monopoly). Parents vote with their feet and with their dollars. In a place like Austin, with so much innovation happening in a small place, parents have myriad options — and if they aren’t happy with the product they’re getting, they can pull their kid out and enroll them somewhere else.
The schools that escape the state’s borders will be the ones that win out, competing to become the best places parents have found and educators have imagined for kids to learn. They’ll be measured by outcome, both superficial and tangible: How happy are the students? How do they score on proficiency tests? How do unusual subjects, from art to AI to entrepreneurship, fit in? How likely are the graduates to meet later milestones? Even public schools, where students are stuck by zip code or lack of alternatives, are improved by competition: absenteeism goes down and achievement goes up, even for those who stay in public schools when other students start leaving.
Austin may become for education what San Francisco was for the internet, what 1920s Paris was for the novel, what Renaissance Florence was for humanism and art: a wellspring of innovation that entirely invents or overhauls a field of endeavor, inspiring all to reimagine what could be.
Even beyond its import for the state’s own children, Texas’s school choice expansion may prove to redefine education entirely in this century.
