This story has been updated.
While Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has touted the concept of school choice for months, amid his re-election campaign in 2022 and in stumps throughout the state this year, his mandate to the Legislature to make the policy law appears to be on shaky ground.
Last week, the Senate voted mostly along party lines to approve a sweeping bill that would allow parents to spend public dollars on private school tuition. The move was at odds, though, with a budget amendment passed in the House hours earlier that would ban such policies, setting up a showdown between the two GOP-majority chambers.
The school vouchers struggle is all too real for residents in the Edgewood Independent School District, which has been involved in a political tug-of-war of sorts over the years in the evolving debate over the subject.
Teachers, principals and the superintendent of the Westside district were caught off guard in 1998, when a multimillionaire and a nonprofit announced a new scholarship program that would pay for any Edgewood student to attend a private school with a voucher.
As state officials continue to make their case for school choice, the experiment that shocked the Edgewood community in the 1990s hardened into anger for many. It also galvanized an organizing movement by parents and fueled a bitter fight that lingers to this day.
The experiment was intended to be a proof of concept that would garner public support and make the case for publicly funded voucher programs. But in the initial years after the program ended, that support and validation didn’t materialize.
Rural Republicans have long been opposed to school vouchers since there are few education options from which parents can choose. Advocates are hopeful this year, however, that they’ll win hearts and minds with a renewed focus on the issue by Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has reignited the debate through the lens of “parent empowerment.”
The debate will return to a very different Edgewood on Thursday, when Abbott holds a “Parent Empowerment Night” at Holy Cross of San Antonio, a Catholic school, to rally support for voucher policies. The private voucher program bolstered enrollment at the school from 1998 to 2007.
Some teachers say the legacy of the program at Edgewood, which drew students equalling more than 15% of the district’s enrollment at its peak and cost the district more than $75 million during its nine-year existence, is one of low academic outcomes and inequity layered upon an already unjust system.
Teachers and officials who were with the district when the program was in effect see the impacts of the experiment as a cautionary tale of what could occur if educational savings accounts or other vouchers pass statewide.
But proponents of the program point to a comprehensive analysis that found that many of the feared consequences touted by voucher opponents never materialized. Graduation rates went up, more people moved into the neighborhood and businesses followed.
More than 100 parents interviewed as part of that study, released in 2009, said they were satisfied with the results.
Proponents of voucher-like programs — including Brother Stanley Culotta, president emeritus of Holy Cross — have pointed to the nine-year period as a success story and blueprint for how vouchers could turn around low-performing public schools across Texas.
While more than two decades have passed since the program was first introduced, the same debates over school quality and equity remain.
Edgewood a symbol of inequity
For many, the name Edgewood is synonymous with educational inequity and the fight to remedy the imbalance in Texas. A student-led walkout in 1968 ignited a movement for equitable learning conditions, qualified teachers and higher academic rigor. Later, a legal fight sparked by Edgewood ISD v. Kirby challenged the funding system that allowed the inequity to exist, resulting in a more equitable system that operates today after a lengthy legal battle.
Schools in Texas are funded largely based on property values in the surrounding area, meaning property-rich areas are at a greater advantage and property-poor areas are left with few resources to educate children.
Diana Herrera was an Edgewood student during the time of the ’68 walkout and experienced firsthand the lower quality of education offered at the district, which she would find did not prepare her for college. But she went anyway, against the advice of her teachers and counselors, and returned years later to teach in the district that she said left her behind.
When Herrera returned in 1974, the district was beginning to transform itself. As a special education teacher and advocate, she saw no failing schools by 1998, and plans were in place to expand network access and renovate buildings. Added funding made available after the “Robin Hood” funding decision allowed the district to hire, for the first time, physical education teachers and librarians, she said.
“We were still behind,” she said. “But we were struggling and we were fighting.”
Herrera was also the president of the Edgewood teachers association, which would become a key organizer against voucher legislation in the 1990s and 2000s. That fight, like the walkout, shared the goal of ensuring equitable access to education for everyone, she said.
It was Edgewood’s fame and notoriety, Herrera said, that caught the attention of the Children’s Education Opportunity Foundation (CEO) and San Antonio businessman James Leininger, who made his multimillion-dollar fortune founding medical devices company Kinetic Concepts, which focuses on wound care.
Leininger, who along with his wife had funded various levels of scholarships for 15,000 students across the state, saw an opportunity to conduct the largest experiment on vouchers in the country at the time.
The plan for the Horizon Scholarship program was simple: $50 million contributed by a number of donors including the Walton Family Fund, USAA , the San Antonio Express-News and Leininger, among others, would pay the tuition of any student enrolled in the Edgewood ISD to attend a school of their choosing for a 10-year-time period. Some donors, including the Express-News and USAA, later pulled their funding, according to news articles.
Mary Havel, who worked part time writing newsletters for the now-defunct CEO, was featured in a student video project that was shared with the San Antonio Report.
In the video, she said the district was chosen for its size and socioeconomic conditions.
“We couldn’t do a full city,” she said. “San Antonio is a very large city, but it also, (complicating) matters, has 13 school districts represented in the city boundary,”
The district was also chosen for its percentage of low-income families, she added.
The $50 million experiment aimed to look at school outcomes, she said.
Herrera thinks the reason was more sinister.
“There’s like 1,000 school districts … and out of every school district in the state of Texas, Edgewood was the one selected. And once again, we had zero low-performing schools,” she said. “So why did they come to Edgewood? The word was because they wanted to destroy us.”
Impact of the program
According to an analysis of the program, 770 students left Edgewood in the first year. By 2003-04, halfway through the pilot, 2,042 students were in the CEO program, almost 16% of the district’s enrollment.
However, the analysis also found that some voucher users would not have attended EISD schools anyway, and many moved to EISD or falsified their addresses to become voucher users. That means the enrollment loss may have occurred regardless of the voucher experiment.
Five schools enrolled the majority of the voucher users: El Sendero, Holy Cross, Christian Academy of San Antonio, St. John Bosco and St. John Berchmans.
Out of 177 schools in the CEO Horizon database of private schools, many were too far from Edgewood to be relevant, and some no longer exist. After an initial dip, the district recovered students and grew slightly before declining again as the program went on, according to Texas Education Agency data.
An analysis by the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), found that the program cost the district more than $75.2 million in the first seven years. Of that amount, $7.3 million was federal funding and $67.9 million was state funding.
Herrera remembers the district cutting resources, expanding class sizes by combining smaller classes and cutting positions as the program expanded.
Students from all 23 campuses used vouchers, according to Aurelio Montemayor, an educational specialist for IDRA, which opposes voucher programs.
“What was happening at Edgewood was very painful,” Montemayor said. “You had larger classes and they couldn’t shut down a school or hire more teachers. It was very difficult.”
Havel, who now works as a desktop publishing consultant, said in the video that while districts were losing money, they also weren’t having to teach as many students.
“They don’t have the expense of that child,” she said.
During the program’s run, the Edgewood area experienced growth in both residential and business areas.
According to the 2009 analysis, the property value per student increased by 142% from 1998 to 2008, which was better than similar control districts over the same time period.
Due to the loss of state per pupil funding, EISD revenue growth and revenue per pupil growth were slightly below those of the control districts. EISD’s net growth in graduation rates from 1998 to 2007 was 13.9%. Only one control district saw an increase in graduation rates between 1998 and 2007.
Academic fears unfounded
Despite the financial losses, the academic collapse feared at the outset of the program never materialized.
In fact, academic scores increased in the first years of the program, something Leininger held up as proof of the value of voucher programs during testimony before a Senate committee in 2015.
“It is very clear that the only thing that caused them to bring up their standards was the competition,” he said. “We took 10% of their students and they didn’t want to lose any more students and they worked hard to improve their schools.”
Leininger could not be reached for comment, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the conservative think tank he founded, did not return requests for comment.
Leaders of the school in the first years of the program decried the notion that it was responsible for the uptick in scores.
“This year and last, we were [rated] exemplary, and it didn’t happen overnight,” Perales Elementary Vice Principal Dolores Mena said in a 2000 Express-News article.
Fifteen years after the program ended, some teachers and advocates look back at that period as the beginning of a shifting culture that has worsened enrollment declines and fostered a lack of respect for public schools.
That decline, which has led to school closures and a tightening budget in Edgewood, has also been blamed on charter schools, another type of open enrollment school that is publicly funded and doesn’t charge tuition.
Charter schools aren’t private, so vouchers would not have compelled students to attend them, but looking back, Mena told the San Antonio Report that the voucher experiment “opened the door” for the thousands of students who left the district.
But enrollment in the district has been declining since the late 1980s. In 1987-88, 15,423 students were enrolled in the district. At the program’s start, enrollment had fallen to 13,000, and by the end of the program, it had decreased to 11,600 students. As of the 2021-22 school year, 8,393 students were enrolled.
The voucher program came into focus at the same time charter schools first started to gain prominence in the region, serving a double whammy on the small district surrounded by other districts.
According to a school district report shared with the Government Accountability Office in 2001, only 137 students within the district left Edgewood to attend a charter school.
By 2011, just over 1,000 students had withdrawn from EISD. In the 2022-23 school year, 3,656 students in the district are attending charter schools, according to TEA data.
In the years since the program ended in 2007, a year earlier than planned, the district has been through cycles of change with a rapid turnover of superintendents and intervention by the TEA due to governance issues. Enrollment has continued to fall, and the district’s accountability rating is a C. Seven schools were “not rated” under the last ratings, meaning they would have received a D or F but for a reprieve by the Legislature due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The democratically elected board of trustees was replaced with a board of managers in 2016, which hired the district’s current superintendent, Eduardo Hernández, in 2018.
Since then, the district has made strides and returned to local control, but many say the legacy of that 1998 program still haunts Edgewood.
Mena, who is retired but returns to help out at some schools, said she had seen a noticeable decline in students’ ability to grasp concepts, even before the pandemic compounded those issues. Proponents of the program argue that the losses took place due to the program ending, not the vouchers being offered in the first place.
Vouchers save struggling Catholic schools
While public schools in Edgewood were grappling with the impact of the voucher programs, Catholic schools in the region were brought back from the brink of closure by the sudden influx of students.
Culotta, the president emeritus of Holy Cross, told the Report he doesn’t know if the schools would still be around if not for the program.
In written testimony submitted to a state Senate education committee in 2006, he said the program was a saving grace for struggling students.
Of the 516 students enrolled in 2006, 150, or 29%, were using vouchers, he said in the submitted testimony.
Manuel Garza, a well-known education advocate who also played a key role in the 1968 walkout, was on the Edgewood school board from 1996 to 2000.
He said when the voucher program first began, it wasn’t that disruptive, but he arranged a meeting with Archbishop Patrick Flores of the Archdiocese of San Antonio to ensure the issues didn’t drive a wedge between the community.
“I sat down with him and said, you know, this argument that’s going to occur, should not involve Catholic schools. It’s not Catholic schools versus public schools. That’s not what it’s about,” he said. “We agreed that we would not let that be a wedge.”
Just as the voucher program was a boon for the struggling Catholic schools at the time, the end of the program led to a drop-off in enrollment.
Some students tried to continue but were left with piles of debt that, according to a 2010 Express-News article, kept them from getting diplomas.
Catholic schools have been key supporters of vouchers in the renewed debate over the measures.
Teachers say some students left out
One of the main concerns that has come up during the voucher debate, which has been broached every other year for the last several decades, is the possibility of students being left behind.
Over the course of the CEO program, many parents and teachers said schools were not accepting students with vouchers if they had special needs or behavior problems, leaving the school district to educate those students with fewer resources.
One mother featured in the student video spoke in Spanish with English translations by Albert Picon, the then-Edgewood spokesman. She said she felt discriminated against by the program due to her daughter’s disability.
In the same video, Yolanda Molina, a principal for the Christian Academy, said the school did remove two students since they couldn’t have their needs met.
“Our school does not have a special education, per se, funded from the state,” she said. “We do have children here that have mild disabilities. … However, if there is some major learning disability … we could definitely not take that child because we couldn’t help them.”
Culotta echoed that, saying that Holy Cross would have given students the specialized care if they were provided the resources given to public schools to pay for it.
In some cases, according to reporting from the time, Edgewood ISD would provide those therapy services, and the student would then return to the private school — essentially subsidizing the CEO program.
Havel, the former CEO employee, said the program itself never limited vouchers for any parent who wanted to have one.
“Horizon didn’t limit who could take part in the program based on special needs,” she said. “The difficulty that parents would have is finding a school where they could use the voucher that would address the needs of their child.”
Under federal law, public schools are required to provide free, appropriate education and care for all students, including those with disabilities. Such requirements do not exist for private schools.
Quality of voucher schools questioned
The quality of the programs students left Edgewood for was also concerning to teachers in the district.
Martha Pacheco, a retired Edgewood bilingual teacher, said students were not getting proper bilingual education at their new private schools.
“A lot of them didn’t offer proper bilingual services for the children,” she said. “They were maybe in a makeshift bilingual program for one or two years, and then they were exiting the program. So that developed a huge learning gap because they weren’t allowed to properly learn the English language.”
When students returned to the district, Pacheco and other teachers had to remedy those gaps in learning.
Some of those schools, which teachers said had subpar curricula, were store-front schools that popped up shortly after the voucher program launched, according to news recordings and interviews.
One school, Herrera said, was in an old beeper store, and another, Pacheco said, was set up in a closed bar. Yet another school was founded by the same people who ran a carnival, according to a news spot by the former head of the Texas Freedom Foundation.
Havel said a number of schools that popped up during the program closed once there were no more vouchers.
“There were a few church-related schools that were nondenominational that seemed to pop up overnight,” she told the Report. “They didn’t necessarily have educators. They didn’t necessarily have an administrative staff that knew how to run a school.”
Havel said those “anomalies” closed shortly after the Horizon program ended.
Abbott has said that the state should trust parents to evaluate programs and make their own choice.
In defense of public schools
Many parents were able to have their children attend dream schools as a result of the vouchers.
Of 156 parents interviewed for the 2008 analysis of the program, 100% said the voucher program had “positively impacted the development of their voucher-using children a lot (emphasis added).”
Another option was offered that allowed parents to say there was a “little bit” of a positive impact, but no parents chose that, according to the study.
Those respondents said academics and safety were the main reasons they moved their children to other schools.
But a slew of parents organized against the voucher concept. Many rode buses to Austin to testify against proposed laws in the first years of the program, and many more began flocking to neighborhood school meetings.
According to school documents obtained by the Report, the number of parent volunteer hours in Edgewood ballooned from 4,626 in 1999 to 13,336 in 2001, the first years of the program.
Other parents gave up their vouchers after the first semester since they “couldn’t afford extra expenses at private schools — such as uniforms, registration fees and textbooks,” according to an Express-News article.
Jaime Aquino, superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District, has made this argument regularly, saying that a public voucher system would benefit only a middle class that could afford to bridge the gap.
“[For] a low-income family, that’s not going to be enough to pay the entire tuition at a private school,” he said during a recent panel discussion.
The current debate
The same concerns are being raised now during marathon committee hearings in the Legislature, where government-funded vouchers have been proposed.
House Republicans and Democrats are both hesitant to adopt a private school choice policy, which has been introduced in some form or another in 31 states, with mixed results.
More recent studies have produced a mix of positive, negative and neutral results from different types of voucher programs.
In Arizona, where parents are able to receive funds in lieu of sending their children to a public school, parents were found to have used the money for a wide range of purposes including kayaks, trampolines and SeaWorld.
Proposals in Texas would have funds go into an educational savings account and only be eligible for current public school students.
The debate comes as Edgewood and many other area districts are forecasting continued declines in enrollment.
Diana Herrera said the fight is the same as it was 50 years ago — for a quality education for everyone.
Garza said that no good can come of the voucher programs.
“We don’t have enough money as it is,” he said.
Hernández, the Edgewood superintendent, said the spirit of social justice on display during the walkout has become part of the district’s social justice DNA.
“A lot of what the original walkouts did was really bring attention to … the difference between what they were receiving on this side of San Antonio, versus other parts of the city, which … was a microcosm of what’s happening across the state, across the nation.”
As the current school board looks to make decisions, Hernández said much more than academics is at stake.
“I think what it does also is that it continues to break down the fabric of communities,” Hernández said. “I think while you may be helping one area, you end up hurting the system over another’s.”
