What Vouchers Will Cost Austin ISD

Austin ISD is running a $181 million deficit while sending $821 million a year in local property taxes back to the state through recapture, a Robin Hood mechanism where property-wealthy districts send their surplus tax revenue to the state for redistribution to poorer ones. The per-student funding allotment has been stuck at $6,160 since 2019. Enrollment has been declining steadily as families move from central Austin to suburban districts (both within Travis County and to adjacent counties like Williamson and Hays), while charter schools and private options draw from AISD’s remaining zone. AISD’s share of Travis County’s school-age population has dropped from 47% to 38% since 2013. (For the full breakdown of how those forces interact, including Census and IRS migration data, see our earlier analysis.) Now there’s a new variable: in 2025, Texas signed SB 2, creating the Texas Education Freedom Account (TEFA) program, vouchers worth roughly $10,000 per student deposited into parent-controlled spending accounts, $1 billion in funding for the first two years, launching fall 2026. 274,000 Texas families applied in the first window. Three-quarters were already in private school or homeschool.

Texas doesn’t have to guess what happens next. Florida passed an almost identical law, House Bill 1, in March 2023. Florida is two full school years into its experiment. The data is in.

The same policy, different state seal

Line them up and the overlap is hard to miss:

The cost trajectories track each other too. Florida’s voucher spending now runs about $4 billion a year. Texas’s Legislative Budget Board projects TEFA will grow from $1 billion in year one to $4.7 billion by 2029-30, with at least $805 million in annual lost public school funding by that point.

What happened to Florida’s enrollment

Florida’s public school enrollment grew steadily from 2016 through 2023, recovering fully from the COVID dip and hitting an all-time high of 2.87 million in 2023-24, the year HB 1 took full effect. Then it reversed. In two years, statewide enrollment dropped by 79,355 students, back to 2020-21 pandemic levels. The timing tracks with HB 1’s launch, though charter growth, migration, and housing costs also accelerated in the same period.

The kindergarten numbers are a leading indicator, because those students never entered the public system at all. They started their education outside it, many funded by the state for the first time under HB 1’s universal ESA. Kindergarten enrollment dropped 9.3% in just three years:

The losses concentrate in Florida’s largest urban districts. Broward County (the 6th-largest district in the US) lost 10,360 students in a single year and is now evaluating 34 schools for closure, with 58 schools operating below 70% of building capacity. Duval County eliminated over 700 positions and plans to close up to 18 schools over five years; four of the six schools slated for immediate closure have student populations that are over 90% non-white.

Projecting the math onto Austin ISD

SB 2 limits total TEFA spending to $1 billion in the first two years. At $10,474 per voucher, that’s roughly 95,500 vouchers statewide. AISD represents about 1.3% of Texas’s 5.4 million students, so a proportional allocation yields about 1,200 Austin-area vouchers. With only 25% of TEFA applicants coming from public schools, that’s roughly 300 AISD students leaving in year one. The cap is the binding constraint, not demand.

After year one, the cap ramps fast. The LBB projects total TEFA spending reaching $4.7 billion by FY2029-30. At those levels, Florida’s urban district experience becomes the better model. Hillsborough was stable through 2023-24, then lost ~2.4% per year once HB 1 took full effect. Miami-Dade lost 4% in a single year. Across comparable urban districts, the post-HB 1 acceleration runs roughly 1-3% per year above pre-existing trends. Applied to AISD’s ~72,000 students, that’s 700-2,100 per year once the program reaches scale.

These projections model only the voucher-driven acceleration, but AISD is already losing students to charter schools and that pressure isn’t going away. Statewide, charter enrollment has grown to nearly 500,000 students, and charters now absorb 15.3% of state K-12 funding, nearly double their enrollment share. AISD’s enrollment dropped from 86,000 to 72,000 over the past decade, with charter growth as a significant driver. Voucher exits are additive to that existing trend, not a replacement for it.

What each lost student actually costs

The enrollment projections are only half the story. What matters is what each departure does to AISD’s budget.

The state sets a “formula entitlement” for each district: basic allotment ($6,160/student, stuck since 2019) multiplied by a cost-of-education index (~1.12 for Austin) and weighted student counts for special ed, bilingual, and economically disadvantaged students (~1.20 average). That works out to roughly $8,300 per student for AISD.

Here’s the catch. AISD collects far more in local property taxes than its formula entitlement. The difference goes to recapture. When a student leaves for a voucher school, the district’s entitlement drops by ~$8,300, but Austin’s property values don’t change. Local tax revenue stays the same. So the $8,300 that would have funded that student’s education is instead swept directly into the district’s recapture payment to the state. The loss isn’t a theoretical drop in a state ledger; it’s real money leaving the district’s operating budget through a higher recapture bill.

Meanwhile, the expenditure side barely moves. When a student leaves, the school building doesn’t get cheaper to heat or insure. Bus routes don’t shrink by one seat. AISD has already closed 10 schools and cut hundreds of positions to address its pre-TEFA deficit. Voucher exits add to that pressure, and the revenue drops faster than costs can follow. Florida is two years ahead on this timeline and already making those cuts: Broward is evaluating 34 schools for closure, Duval has eliminated over 700 positions, and Miami-Dade imposed a hiring freeze after losing 13,000 students in a single year.

Stack the voucher-driven losses on the existing deficit, and the picture gets worse every year:

These projections are also linear. They don’t model what happens when the losses start feeding on themselves: funding drops, programs get cut, schools close, the district becomes less attractive, and more families leave. Florida is already showing early signs of that acceleration.

The accountability gap

Texas has built expensive infrastructure to measure whether public education spending works: STAAR testing, A-F accountability ratings, state interventions for chronically failing campuses. Charter schools get the same treatment. SB 2 spends roughly $10,000 per student in the same public money, then exempts recipients from every one of those systems except a commercially available standardized test (like the MAP or SAT) reported to the Comptroller.

A private school producing terrible test results keeps receiving $10,474 per student, because the state has chosen not to collect the school-level data that would tell it otherwise. Florida proves this isn’t theoretical: two years in, FLDOE stopped publishing annual reports on participating private schools, and the Florida Auditor General found compliance failures even within the minimal oversight that exists.

Who actually gets the money

The headline number is the one to sit with: 75% of Texas TEFA applicants were already in private school or homeschool. Before universal vouchers, the state spent $0 on these families. Now it’s paying $8,000-$10,000 per student for kids who were never in the public system. Austin’s top-tier private schools generally operate at capacity and several are opting out of TEFA entirely, so the program functions more as a subsidy for families already in those seats than a mechanism for public-to-private shifts.

The 25-30% who do leave public schools are the direct threat to districts. Each exit costs AISD roughly $8,300 in lost entitlement through the funding formula. That’s the enrollment cliff modeled above.

There’s a second-order effect to watch. With top-tier schools opting out, the market segment most exposed is mid-tier and parochial schools charging $9,000 to $15,000, right where the ~$10,000 voucher closely matches current tuition. In Iowa, a Princeton study found kindergarten tuition jumped 21-25% after vouchers launched, while pre-K students (ineligible for vouchers) saw zero increase at the same schools. In Arizona, the Hechinger Report found nearly half of 55 surveyed private schools raised tuition by 10% or more after ESA expansion. If tuition inflates to absorb the voucher, the families who can’t afford the gap between the voucher and the new sticker price are left in a system with fewer resources per student.

The feedback loop

These projections are also linear. They don’t model what happens when the losses start feeding on themselves: funding drops, programs get cut, schools close, the district becomes less attractive, and more families leave. If this cycle takes hold, exits accelerate as the system degrades, and the curve steepens beyond what a linear model captures.

For Austin ISD, there’s an additional layer that makes the cycle worse than anything in Florida. In November 2024, Austin voters passed Proposition A, explicitly raising their own property taxes to fund Austin ISD. 76% of those new Prop A dollars go straight to recapture. Under SB 2, those recaptured dollars enter the same state general revenue fund that now finances TEFA vouchers at schools exempt from the accountability system Austin’s public schools are graded on. Through recapture, Austin taxpayers are directly funding a state pool that subsidizes private school tuition statewide, while several of Austin’s own private schools are opting out of the program and AISD is closing campuses.

What the data does and doesn’t prove

Florida’s public school test scores have held steady so far, and proponents point to competitive effects. But two years isn’t enough time to read much into that. The kindergarten cohorts shaped by post-HB 1 closures and cuts won’t reach testing grades until 2027. The students currently being tested went through a fully staffed, fully funded system. And voucher students take different tests on different scales, so direct comparison is impossible by design. (Iowa requires both groups to take the same state test, proving this is a policy choice.) Longer-term research from Brookings found large-scale voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and D.C. produced negative impacts on math and reading. A Florida State University evaluation of Florida’s own program found no significant gains.

This article can’t tell you whether every voucher student is worse off, that public schools would have spent the money better, or that the competitive effect isn’t real. Satisfaction surveys among voucher families are positive, and for some students trapped in chronically failing schools, a voucher may genuinely be the better option right now. SB 2 prioritizes 80% of slots for low-income students and students with disabilities, but private schools aren’t bound by the federal IDEA and can legally deny admission based on special education needs. The state can prioritize these students for funding; it can’t compel the private market to accept them. Public schools will continue to serve the highest concentration of students requiring specialized, cost-intensive services, even as per-student funding falls. The math doesn’t care about any of that. What the data does show: Florida’s voucher costs landed where independent analysts predicted (not where legislative proponents said they would), enrollment losses accelerated in urban districts, the accountability gap is structural, and the primary beneficiaries are families already in private education. Texas is about to spend $4.7 billion a year on a program it has deliberately chosen not to measure, and AISD’s structural crisis gets materially worse under every scenario the data supports.

Why this article exists

I started pulling on this thread because the AISD article ended with a “wait and see” on SB 2, and then 274,000 Texas families applied for TEFA vouchers in the first window.

I went looking for voucher outcome data and hit a wall. Florida doesn’t publish voucher student test scores, doesn’t track private school tuition, and the Auditor General was denied access to scholarship organization records. FLDOE stopped publishing annual reports on participating private schools after 2022-23. There is no dataset that would let you compare voucher student outcomes to public school outcomes in Florida, because the data was never collected.

That gap is the story. When public schools underperform, you know immediately: STAAR scores, A-F ratings, intervention reports. When $4 billion a year flows to private schools through vouchers, you get nothing. Iowa requires voucher students to take the same state test, so measurement clearly isn’t the obstacle. Florida and Texas chose not to.

The Florida data that does exist was scattered across state agencies and advocacy group analyses on both sides. We loaded the FLDOE data into OpenData so the comparison could at least be made with the numbers available. Every chart above links to its source data. If you disagree with a conclusion, you can run the same query and check.

SB 2 reports voucher test scores to the Comptroller, not TEA, and doesn’t require school-level publication. In three years, someone will try to write this same article about Texas, and they’ll hit the same wall I did with Florida. The reporting structure is already law.

For district-level breakdowns, complete funding mechanics, and detailed source methodology, see the full analysis.