Your Tax Dollars. Private Schools.

Ask a Texas conservative what they believe about money and you'll usually hear the same thing: don't waste it, don't hand it out, and don't spend tax dollars on things that don't serve the people paying the bill. Then look at what Dan Patrick spent years fighting for.

A subsidy with a mission statement attached

Vouchers — rebranded as "education savings accounts" — take public tax dollars and route them to private school tuition. Patrick made passing them one of the defining crusades of his time as Lieutenant Governor, pushing session after session until he got his way.

The pitch is "school choice." The reality is a public subsidy for private institutions that answer to no voter, publish no transparent results to the taxpayer, and can turn away any student they please.

The rural problem nobody wants to talk about

Here's what makes it worse for huge swaths of Texas: in much of the state, there is no private school to "choose." Drive an hour out of the metros and the public school isn't one option among many — it's the only one. It's the Friday night lights, the biggest employer in town, the place every kid goes.

A voucher does nothing for those families except one thing: it pulls money out of the only school they have and ships it toward private academies in cities they'll never enroll in. Rural Texans pay for a program built for somebody else's zip code.

You pay for those schools either way

This is the part that should bother every fiscal conservative. You already paid for the public schools. Your property taxes built them and staff them. Patrick's voucher scheme doesn't lower that bill — it adds a second one, draining the system you're still funding so the money can chase tuition elsewhere.

That's not saving money. That's spending it twice and getting less.

The contrast on the ballot

State Rep. Vikki Goodwin is running for Lieutenant Governor on the opposite premise — that Texas should fully fund the neighborhood public schools nearly nine in ten Texas kids actually attend, instead of bleeding them to subsidize private tuition. Her platform leads with it.

You don't have to be a Democrat to do that math. You just have to want your tax dollars to fund the schools your own community depends on. In 2026, Texas gets to decide.