Editor’s note: This post contains an image that includes a racial effigy.
Jennifer Lee and Kyev Tatum agree that Texas’ Black students do not receive the same academic support as their peers, that schools punish them unfairly and that recent state laws silence Black history and perspectives in the classroom.
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But the two Black Texans sharply diverge on whether the state’s new voucher program will make education in Texas better or worse for students who look like them.
Lee feels confident that vouchers, which allow families to use public funds for private school and home-schooling costs, will allow the state to drain money from a predominantly Hispanic and Black public school student population while benefiting majority-white private schools and worsening academic outcomes. That’s what she sees in other states with vouchers, often referred to as “school choice.”
“It’s impossible to research a school choice program and not come away understanding that it has been detrimental almost everywhere it’s touched,” Lee said.
Tatum, a Fort Worth pastor, believes vouchers will provide Black families who are frustrated by the shortcomings of public education the funding needed to build supportive, Black-led private schooling options.
“There’s not one person in the whole entire country who can look me in the eye and tell me that public schools have done right by Black kids,” Tatum said.
Texas families faced a March 31 deadline to apply for vouchers, which will provide home-schoolers up to $2,000 per year, private school students $10,500 and children with disabilities up to $30,000. State leaders are now deciding which students will receive funding for the 2026-27 school year, pending their acceptance to a school. Of almost 275,000 voucher applicants, 45% are white, 23% are Hispanic and 12% are Black.
As Texas prepares for its inaugural school year offering vouchers, Lee and Tatum’s opposing viewpoints on what it will mean for Black students differ as much as their perspectives on school vouchers’ discriminatory history in Texas. In 1957, Texas lawmakers proposed a voucher plan as part of a slate of bills introduced to avoid compliance with the landmark Supreme Court decision making it illegal for schools to separate children based on race.
Since that time, the Legislature has grown more racially and ethnically diverse, though it is still mostly white men.
And Hispanic students now make up the majority of public school students, surpassing white students in enrollment. Yet no other racial or ethnic group lags further behind their school peers than Black children, who make up 13% of Texas students but struggle the most academically and experience discipline disproportionately.
When today’s Republicans pitched school vouchers, they promoted them as a state-funded option for families to escape the boundaries of their local school districts. The movement achieved its crowning moment after Gov. Greg Abbott and his deep-pocketed supporters campaigned against House Republicans who opposed vouchers, helping elect new lawmakers who voted for the program.
“Gone are the days that families are limited to only the school assigned by government,” Abbott said moments before signing the voucher legislation. “The day has arrived that empowers parents to choose the school that’s best for their child.”
Vouchers became Texas law in an era when Republicans say diversity efforts have shifted schools’ focus from core academics toward political activism. They believe such efforts have effectively given people of color preferential treatment.
In recent years, Texas lawmakers have also required public schools to teach about slavery and racism in ways that ensure white students do not feel guilt. Districts can suspend a child in school for as long as considered necessary, a form of punishment disproportionately used against Black students. And campus leaders can no longer consider race or ethnicity when creating policies or making hiring decisions, despite evidence that Black educators improve academic outcomes for students.
“DEI agendas divide us rather than unite us and have no place in the state of Texas,” Abbott said in an executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion policies in state agencies. “These radical policies deviate from constitutional principles and deny diverse thought. Every Texan is equal under the law, including the state and federal Constitutions, both of which prohibit government discrimination based on race.”
Tatum is fed up. His support for vouchers is about rescuing as many Black kids as possible from public schools.
“What I’m saying is: Those who want to stay in the house and burn, stay in the house,” Tatum said. “But for those of us who don’t want to burn, open the door, allow me to leave, and give me my money so that I can give it to a house that’s not burning, but thriving.”
Lee worries vouchers will leave fewer resources for kids who remain in public schools. She also questions why Texas officials want anything to do with an initiative once proposed to derail Black children from equal opportunity.
“You might believe in parent choice and all of that,” Lee said. “But when you start talking about you, as a person, sitting in church on Sunday, are you really OK with saying, ‘Well, yeah, I do want segregation again’?”
“The best education is an investment”
Texas public schools receive funding based on student attendance, meaning they will lose money for every child who leaves to participate in the voucher program. In other states offering vouchers, a mass exodus of children leaving public schools for private options has not materialized. Still, critics worry the Texas program will grow in size and cost. And if future cuts are needed, they worry political leaders will trim public school budgets first.
Lee, a former public school teacher and a 2024 Democratic candidate for the Texas House, acknowledges public education has a long way to go in helping Black students grow and thrive in the classroom.
Majority-Black schools are more than four times as likely as majority-white schools to receive a D or F in Texas’ academic ratings. On state tests, Black students perform the worst of all racial and ethnic groups. Aside from Hispanic eighth-graders in math, Black students lag behind all other Texans on national exams, too. They graduate at the lowest rates and drop out at the highest.
But Lee contends that such inequities do not emerge by accident. It starts, she said, with inadequate resources.
“Our country has demonstrated that time and time again, we believe that the best education is an investment,” Lee said. “Private schools cost ridiculous amounts of money because parents believe that education is an investment.”
In 2023, Abbott said he would not sign sweeping education funding legislation if it excluded a voucher program. When vouchers stalled, public schools lost out on billions that could have benefited students. The 2025 legislative session marked the first time in six years that Texas lawmakers increased across-the-board money for public education.
Hundreds of districts approved budget deficits over that time. They increased class sizes, cut staffing and closed schools to save money. Last year’s nearly $8.5 billion funding boost still fell billions short of catching them up with inflation. Meanwhile, Texas ranks 31st and 46th in average teacher salary and per-student spending, respectively, according to the National Education Association.
Public education advocates acknowledge that funding is not the only reason for — or answer to — Texas’ academic shortcomings, especially for Black students who have suffered through resistance to integration, the elimination of Black educators and unequal access to quality facilities and learning materials. And Lee thinks state laws clamping down on initiatives that promote diversity exacerbate negative academic outcomes.
But the advocates see funding as the foundation.
“Teachers are being asked to do so much with so little and then being mocked because they couldn’t quite get there,” Lee said.
Private schools typically face no requirements to accept students who live in their community or make learning arrangements for children with disabilities.
On the contrary, traditional public schools generally do not charge tuition or set admission requirements. They welcome different faiths and religions. They teach students who speak different languages. They accommodate students with disabilities. They offer free lunch, health care and laundry.
In other words, public schools are a public good worth preserving, said Michael McFarland, superintendent of the Crowley Independent School District, a majority-Black school system in North Texas.
“You’re still going to have the masses of children in the public institution,” McFarland said. “If the public institution is no longer serving the public good, then it creates a definite challenge for our country, a challenge for our city and our state.”
When states expand voucher access to include virtually any school-age child like Texas has, white and more affluent families tend to benefit most. Lee fears the children of white and wealthy Texans will graduate from well-funded private schools while public school students will graduate from scraps.
“What’s going to happen is that we’re going to see a lot of Black and brown children who have schools that are broken down, very few resources, and basically feeding that pre-K to prison pipeline,” Lee said.
She refuses to allow her 9-year-old son, Brock, to grow up in a bubble where he interacts only with children of the same belief system and social class. If Brock is expected to thrive in the real world, Lee said, she wants him educated in a setting that closely resembles that world. Public schools work, she insists, because they teach children “how to be a human.”
“When we start siloing ourselves and saying, ‘I only want to be around white, straight Christians,’” Lee said, “then suddenly everyone else who doesn’t fit into that category, they’re not people, they’re problems, they’re things, they’re other.”
“They don’t love us back”
Before Brown v. Board of Education, Black schools suffered from inadequate funding, outdated textbooks and crumbling buildings. Even so, highly credentialed teachers and administrators led those institutions, and they nurtured Black children while holding them to high expectations. Students frequently met those heightened standards.
But in newly integrated schools after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown, many white leaders deemed Black teachers and administrators unfit, demoting them, firing them or forcing their resignation. So while Black and white students began attending the same schools, Black educators became rare.
“You had a system where Blacks wanted kids to do well,” said Tatum, who argues that Texas’ current teachers and administrators resent Black students’ culture and achievements.
“You don’t protect what you do not respect,” Tatum added. “Since Brown, we’ve tried to love them, but they don’t love us back.”
A civil rights activist who founded and previously ran a charter school, Tatum is the one Black families call when public schools have wronged their children. One teacher allowed a student to say the N-word multiple times during a class presentation, another poured pencil shavings into a child’s mouth. Black trauma pushed Tatum to a stark conclusion: Public schools have a culture problem.
The Texas Legislature could grant school districts access to all the money in the world, Tatum insists, but additional funding will not change school leaders who punish Black students for sporting locs or who imply that children of color are thugs for celebrating hip-hop. In the Fort Worth Independent School District, a majority Hispanic and Black district in Tatum’s hometown, only one-third of students are testing on grade level.
“Let’s be real,” Tatum said. “These kids have been traumatized in these inner-city communities, in schools.”
In Tatum’s vision, Black churches will open small schools. Black teachers will lead instruction. Students will celebrate Juneteenth and learn to read. Administrators, by fostering a nurturing learning institution, will kill the school-to-prison pipeline.
At that point, voucher advocates say, Black communities will have used the environment of “education freedom” to their advantage, reclaiming their students and prioritizing their values.
“And that’s what we should do — first of all, because Black people have never been served well by the public education system,” said Denisha Allen, executive director of Black Minds Matter, a national organization advocating to improve academic outcomes for Black children.
Noliwe Rooks, an Africana studies professor at Brown University, wrote “Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children,” a book detailing how resistance to integration decimated Black school systems and subjected many Black students to discrimination and violence from their white peers.
Rooks agrees that many Black students today still lack the support they enjoyed in schools before the Brown decision.
However, she also noted that building Black schools without deep knowledge of how to manage finances, how to develop curricula and teach, and how to assist students with varying disabilities will create similar challenges that plague other schools. Black communities possessed that knowledge during segregation, Rooks said, which is why “losing the infrastructure for Black education matters.”
“Just having some Black people say, ‘I’m going to start a school for Black kids,’ has not worked,” Rooks said. Vouchers, she added, are also not the fix.
“It further exacerbates what’s broken,” Rooks said. “The problem is the education system — the idea of it as a public good, as something that’s supposed to be shared, that’s a national priority — that’s what’s broken.”
But Tatum has heard those arguments before. The grandfather of 15 does not get consumed with the “philosophical” — how he describes evidence that voucher programs tend to benefit wealthy white families, do not significantly improve learning and were once proposed by segregationist white lawmakers trying to undermine integration.
In his mind, nothing is worse than the trauma Black families have experienced in public schools or the fact that too many students in his hometown of Fort Worth cannot sufficiently read.
Tatum views the real problem as Texas forcing Black children to exist in a toxic educational environment. If Black families want to use state resources to exert more control over their kids’ education, he said, they deserve an opportunity to do so.
“You can get philosophical with me. You can get theological with me,” Tatum said. “But I’m trying to get practical with everyone.”
“Same song, different verse”
Voucher programs, where almost all school-age children qualify, have only existed since 2022. In the decades before that, vouchers primarily served limited groups, such as low-income students and students with disabilities.
Some studies show that vouchers increase the likelihood that students graduate high school and go to college, while others conclude that they lead to small improvements in public schools. Meanwhile, some research also shows students leaving voucher programs for public schools at high rates. And while older studies demonstrate mixed effects on test scores, research in the past decade shows vouchers leading to significant declines.
Despite evidence that vouchers can harm test scores — the primary metric Texas leaders use to judge public schools — advocates are standing their ground. Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said the governor believes the program will unlock new opportunities for students to grow.
“An overwhelming majority of Texans from all walks of life support expanding school choice to all Texas families — including minorities, Republicans, Democrats, independents, and people across rural Texas,” Mahaleris said. “Texas is on a pathway to becoming number one in education, and the passage of school choice is an unprecedented victory for Texas families, students, and the future of our great state.”
The $1 billion voucher program will launch at the start of the 2026-27 school year. Almost 275,000 students applied — demand that exceeded available funding. In a state where about 53% of public school students are Hispanic and 13% are Black, nearly half of voucher applicants are white and 75% previously attended a private school or home school.
To divide the money, Texas will consider the applications of students with disabilities and low-income families first, though students are not fully approved until accepted to a private school. Families have more than 2,200 voucher-approved private schools to pick from, and those schools have the power to accept or deny students as they see fit.
Fears that the program will create two tiers of publicly funded education date back to the 1950s. Two years after the Brown decision, candidates in the Texas gubernatorial race criticized the idea of Black and white children learning together. In a Texas Democratic primary, several hundred thousand voters expressed support for school segregation. White Texans threatened Black families, hanging dolls that resembled Black students being lynched.
In a 1956 report that advocated for vouchers, a state legislative subcommittee wrote: “While showing great concern for the effect of segregation on the psyches of negro children, the Court neglected to display any concern whatsoever for the effect of integration on Southern white children and their parents.”
In 1957, lawmakers passed bills authorizing the attorney general to defend schools in desegregation lawsuits and allowing the governor to close schools where federal troops showed up to enforce integration. A voucher bill, passed by the Texas House, would have offered private school grants to families who pulled children out of integrated schools. When the bill moved to the Senate, a small group prevented passage with the help of a grueling 36-hour filibuster.
One of the opposing senators was Henry B. Gonzalez, whose son Charlie Gonzalez, a former U.S. representative, sees vouchers as a choice to divest from a state education system that serves mostly students of color while propping up majority-white private schools.
“I always say it’s the same song, different verse,” Charlie Gonzalez said.
“To me, it really is about segregation. It really is resisting diversity,” he added. “Am I wrong? I don’t think so. I don’t think my dad was wrong in 1957. I don’t think I’m wrong today.”
“We can do both”
Lee and Tatum may never find out if the voucher program worsens or improves long-term academic outcomes for Black children because participating schools are not required to administer the same tests as public schools.
Voucher supporters argue instead that parent satisfaction will determine success.
In defending the program during the 2025 legislative session, Rep. Brad Buckley and former Sen. Brandon Creighton expressed confidence that vouchers would not harm public schools or promote discrimination.
“In harmony, we can lift up our public schools and our public school teachers like never before in historic ways, and we can provide education opportunities that fit the needs and are customized for our individual Texas students,” Creighton said during a Senate debate. “We can do both of those at the same time. Those aren’t warring provisions or concepts unless we allow stakeholders to manufacture a narrative that supports such a division, such chaos, such a lack of harmony.”
The two Republicans, who co-sponsored the voucher legislation, did not respond to requests for comment. The Texas comptroller’s office, which oversees the program, declined to comment.
On the fifth day of Black History Month last year, Sen. Borris Miles occupied the same floor where Henry B. Gonzalez and Abraham “Chick” Kazen Jr. filibustered seven decades before.
Miles, a Houston Democrat who is Black, reminded colleagues that Southern states proposed school vouchers to avoid integration. He reminded them that states defunded and closed Black schools. He warned that if it happened then, it will happen again.
“I’m sure that history is going to show that this body has created a separate but unequal education structural system and made it law,” Miles said, “made it law by sacrificing the masses for the very few.”