Corrected: This story has been updated to reflect that a private school hosted events with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, not the school’s accrediting agency.
Private school choice programs have boomed across the country in recent years.
But a case in Texas has surfaced a potential fault line in the private school choice movement over whether all types of private schools should be able to receive public funds. It’s also resurrecting a tension over public funding for religious schools that drove changes in American education funding policy more than a century ago.
Texas was sued this spring for excluding Islamic private schools from its massive new Texas Education Freedom Accounts program, which gives school students roughly $10,500 a year—and more for students with disabilities—to put toward tuition, tutoring, books and other approved private education costs. The state has since reversed course and allowed those schools to participate, but litigation is ongoing.
But it was the impetus for the exclusion—state officials’ concern that a school hosted events with a Muslim group that Gov. Greg Abbott designated a foreign terrorist organization—that has some school choice watchers wondering if this is only the beginning of policies barring some types of schools from otherwise lightly regulated private school choice programs.
In Florida, where private school choice has flourished for years, Gov. Ron DeSantis has also declared the same Muslim rights advocacy organization a terrorist group, and lawmakers this spring passed a bill barring private schools from affiliating with Florida-designated terrorist groups.
Other states may follow, said Matthew Ladner, a senior adviser for K-12 policy implementation at Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He was also part of the team at the Goldwater Institute in Arizona that came up with the idea of education savings accounts—a policy alternative to school vouchers that allows parents to use state money on a range of educational expenses and not just private school tuition.
“Would it surprise me if additional states do what Florida and Texas have done thus far? No, it would not surprise me,” he said. “We’re just going to have to see how it plays out.”
But if more states move to exclude Islamic schools from their choice programs, it will put their lawmakers at odds with longtime advocates for educational choice. Several private school choice proponents told Education Week they do not support categorically excluding Islamic or any religiously affiliated schools.
“It is absolutely a bedrock value of the school choice movement to embrace a pluralistic system of schools and tolerance,” Ladner said.
Texas has since admitted Islamic schools to its program. But the episode raises a potentially thorny political questions. As anti-Muslim rhetoric increases among some conservatives in Texas and beyond, will there be a growing pushback to state funding flowing to Islamic schools? How will that affect the broader private school choice movement, especially at a time when it’s ascendant?
It’s a debate taking place beyond private school choice programs, said Preston Green, a professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut.
Green pointed to a case that made it to the U.S. Supreme Court last year over whether the state of Oklahoma could fund a Catholic charter school. The state’s Republican governor and education superintendent supported its creation, while the state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, did not, arguing that “the inevitable result will be taxpayer-funded public schools teaching Sharia law, Wicca—even the Church of Satan.”
“This just shows that there has always been this tension” among conservatives, Preston said. And when it comes to disagreements over funding Islamic schools, “I totally agree that this could be a major fissure in the school choice movement.”
Texas excluded Islamic schools as it launched its school choice program this year
Thirty states and the District of Columbia have at least one private school choice program, according to an Education Week analysis. And about that many have also indicated they plan to participate in the new, first-of-its-kind federal private school choice program, which will use tax credits to incentivize donations to organizations that award scholarships to private school students. (The program can also fund some costs for public school students.)
Texas was slower to pass a private school choice law than many other red states. But when it did, with the help of an aggressive political push by Abbott and Christian conservative activists, Texas launched the biggest program at its inception to date. State lawmakers set aside $1 billion, and around 95,000 students will participate starting next school year.
This is a big deal to school choice advocates who have been fighting to expand public funding to private schools and homeschooling families for years, and saw Texas, with around 5.5 million K-12 students, as the ultimate prize.
But here’s where things get complicated.
As Texas private schools started applying to participate earlier this year, the state comptroller’s office, which is charged with administering the education freedom accounts, moved to bar private schools accredited by the nonprofit group Cognia after it said a Cognia-accredited school hosted events with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In November, Abbott issued a proclamation designating CAIR a foreign terrorist group, a move that’s facing a separate lawsuit.
CAIR is not labeled a terrorist organization by the federal government and is generally considered a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group. But with guidance from the attorney general’s office, the comptroller said it could bar schools that otherwise meet eligibility requirements to accept education savings account money.
Cognia says it has no association with CAIR.
The exclusion sparked at least two lawsuits from parents and Islamic schools accredited by Cognia.
A spokesperson with the Texas comptroller’s office declined to comment because of the ongoing litigation.
In addition to effectively banning Islamic private schools, the move also affected Christian and special education private schools accredited by Cognia.
“We don’t want school choice funds going to radical Islamic indoctrination with historic connections to terrorism,” Abbott said in a March 12 post on X.
All of this has been happening against the backdrop of Texas primaries that have leaned heavily into anti-Muslim messaging. That’s including a bitter Republican U.S. Senate primary battle between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton—both of whom have accused the other of being weak against Muslim immigration and combating Sharia law. A recent post for a political ad for Paxton dubbed the state’s senior senator “Caliphate Cornyn.”
Meanwhile, in Florida, a bill DeSantis signed in early April gives state officials the power to designate foreign and domestic terrorist organizations. It also explicitly bars private schools in the state’s popular private school choice programs from affiliating with those organizations. Some Florida Democrats have raised alarm that the law will be used to justify excluding Islamic schools.
At an April 6 bill signing, DeSantis said the law is meant to bolster the executive order he signed in December declaring CAIR a terrorist organization.
“If there is a school that’s allied with CAIR, should you have any of your money going to things like that? I think not,” he said.
A fracture in the school choice coalition?
If more states adopt similar policies, it may present a challenge to the political coalition that has propelled private school choice into the mainstream this past decade.
It’s a coalition that includes libertarian-leaning policymakers and advocates who have long championed school choice and conservative Christian families who are taking advantage of these programs, said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education policy think tank.
“Everybody in the private school choice movement believes in pluralism, and would defend that principle, and also understands that there’s not much wiggle room on that front constitutionally,” he said. “It may divide the Republican coalition, but I don’t think it divides the school choice movement.”
Republicans can’t pick and choose which types of schools they want to fund, Petrilli said.
“I think courts are going to see through this effort to try to have this pretext around terrorist organizations,” he said.
However, state policymakers are tapping into some constituents’ fears that America’s openness and freedoms can be exploited by terrorist groups and adversarial nations, said Ladner.
But states concerned about school choice money flowing to terrorist groups cannot presume schools are guilty of something nefarious just because they teach a certain religion or language, Ladner said. They must also consider the capacity of the agencies tasked with administering private school choice programs.
“Imagine yourself in the comptroller’s office in Austin trying to deal with this, right? The ability of people in a central office in Austin, Texas, to discern whether school X has ties to CAIR or the Chinese Communist Party is limited,” Ladner said. “There still needs to be some due process.”
Ladner thinks the best policy option is to have participating schools to sign a form attesting that they do not have ties to groups flagged by the state.
Light school choice regulation leaves states little latitude to dictate what schools teach
Most private school choice programs don’t have many rules for participating schools—at least compared to public schools.
In Texas, schools must be located in the state or, if they’re a virtual school, have an office there. Schools must be accredited and have been in operation for at least two years. And they must annually administer a nationally norm-referenced assessment to students in grades 3-12.
Generally, the argument has been that too much government regulation will strip private schools of what makes them unique and appealing to families and that parents and their choices serve as the quality control lever.
But that leaves states with little control over which schools participate in their programs and what they teach.
The approach in U.S. states stands in stark contrast to many European countries, said Ashley Berner, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and an associate professor of education. These European countries, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium, have a long history of funding many different types of schools, including religious schools, she said.
But those schools tend to be a lot more regulated, said Berner. The Netherlands funds schools that teach creationism, for example, but students must also learn and demonstrate understanding of the theory of evolution, she said.
“You don’t have to believe [evolution] is true, you’re not compelling belief, but you have to know what it is,” she said. Many European countries “require comparative religion and ethics in all the schools. So, you might go to a Jewish day school, but you have to learn what Muslims believe, for example.”
The United States funded a variety of religious schools in the 19th century, said Berner. The move away from that was driven largely by an influx of Catholic immigrants and anti-Catholic prejudice, she said. Many states reacted by amending their constitutions to bar public funding of private, religious schools.
“When I look at the antipathy to Muslim schools, that reminds me of the fears about Catholic schools,” she said. “That Catholics had loyalty to a foreign power. That they did not have the freedom and individualism in their DNA as it were. They were considered a different race.”
These debates all get down to what may be an uncomfortable reality of private school choice policies for politicians.
For those politicians, and the parents who want public money for private schools, Berner said, “the bottom line of educational pluralism is that we will fund schools that we wouldn’t send our own kids to.”
