Texas Built the Nation's Largest School Voucher Program. Then It Tried to Lock Out Muslim Schools.

When Texas launched its $1 billion Education Freedom Accounts program in early 2026, Republican leaders celebrated it as a triumph for parental choice and religious liberty. Within weeks, that promise collided with a glaring contradiction: not a single accredited Islamic private school had been approved to participate, even as hundreds of Christian schools sailed through the process [1][3]. The resulting lawsuits, a public feud between two top Republican officials, and a federal judge's intervention have exposed a fault line within the conservative school choice movement — between those who see vouchers as a universal right and those who would treat them as a privilege for preferred faiths.

The Program and the Pattern

Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 2 into law in 2025, creating one of the most ambitious school choice programs in American history [5]. The Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) program provides approximately $10,000 per student — up to $30,000 for students with disabilities and $2,000 for homeschooled students — funded by a $1 billion allocation over two years [3]. With nearly 1.5 million students nationally now using private school choice programs, up from 1 million just 18 months earlier, TEFA was positioned to be the largest such program in the country at launch [3].

Private school applications opened on December 9, 2025. Parent applications followed on February 4, 2026. By the time families began enrolling, more than 290 schools had been approved — over 90 percent of them affiliated with religious or faith-based organizations [8]. The breakdown tells a stark story:

Source: Texas Comptroller / Texas Observer / Religion News

Data as of Mar 20, 2026CSV

Among the approved schools: 170 Christian institutions, 26 Catholic schools, and 12 Jewish schools [8]. Zero Islamic schools. Texas has 34 accredited Islamic private schools serving 7,077 students statewide [10]. None appeared on the eligible list when the enrollment window opened [1][3].

The CAIR Pretext

The mechanism for exclusion centered on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights organization. In November 2025, Governor Abbott designated CAIR a terrorist organization — a label CAIR is challenging in court and one the U.S. State Department has not applied [1][5]. Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock then announced in January 2026 that "no schools or organizations with ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations" would receive "Texas tax dollars" through the TEFA program [2].

Hancock had requested a legal opinion from Attorney General Ken Paxton, asking whether schools could be excluded based on connections to groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations or foreign adversaries [1]. Paxton's January 2026 opinion stated that the comptroller could exclude schools under anti-terrorism statutes if they violated laws banning material support for designated organizations [4]. Hancock used this to exclude schools accredited by Cognia, a nationally recognized accreditation body, on the grounds that Cognia had hosted events organized by CAIR [1].

The breadth of the exclusion was notable. The CAIR connection was not that individual schools had partnered with or funded CAIR, but that their accreditor had hosted CAIR at events. By that logic, roughly two dozen Islamic schools were blocked — along with some Christian schools and disability-serving institutions that used the same accreditor [3]. A CAIR official responded that "the law does not permit the comptroller to scrutinize Muslim schools because of their religious identity" [4].

The Lawsuits and the Judge

In March 2026, the exclusions reached federal court. Mehdi Cherkaoui, an attorney whose children attend Houston Qur'An Academy Spring, filed the first suit against Paxton, Hancock, and Education Commissioner Mike Morath, alleging religious discrimination [3]. Additional suits followed from four Muslim parents and three Islamic school operators across four campuses [6].

The complaints alleged what one suit called "religious gerrymandering" — the selective construction of eligibility criteria to achieve a religiously discriminatory outcome without explicitly naming Islam [9]. U.S. District Judge Alfred Bennett expressed concern that the state had "exclusively blocked all Islamic schools from registering for the program while allowing hundreds of other schools, including those with a religious focus, to participate" [1].

Bennett ordered the comptroller to provide the suing schools an opportunity to register and extended the parent application deadline by two weeks [7]. Hancock's office subsequently accepted five schools cited in the lawsuits [7]. But advocates noted that the majority of the state's 34 Islamic schools remained outside the program, and the approvals came only after litigation forced the issue — not through the normal application process [1][6].

Paxton vs. Hancock: A Republican Feud

The case produced an unusual spectacle: Texas's attorney general publicly turning on the official he was supposed to be defending. In March 2026, Paxton moved to withdraw his office from representing Hancock's comptroller office in the voucher litigation [11]. The reason was a public letter from Hancock alleging that one of the plaintiff schools, Houston Quran Academy, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — a claim Hancock made without submitting evidence to the court [1].

Paxton's response was blunt: "Your public letter made brand-new and incendiary claims without providing any confidence that diligent investigation supported them" [1]. Paxton also called Hancock a "loser" and urged his removal from office [11]. A Houston federal judge approved the withdrawal on April 2, 2026, conditional on Hancock securing new legal representation [15].

The feud laid bare competing strategies within the Texas GOP. Hancock appeared to favor an aggressive, publicly confrontational approach to excluding Islamic schools, wielding terrorism allegations as a political weapon. Paxton — no stranger to anti-Muslim rhetoric himself — nonetheless recognized the legal liability of making unsubstantiated claims in federal court [11][15].

What the Law Actually Says

The constitutional landscape strongly favors the Islamic schools' position. The U.S. Supreme Court has issued three landmark rulings in recent years establishing that states cannot discriminate against religious institutions in public benefit programs:

• Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017): Missouri could not deny a church school access to a secular playground resurfacing grant based on its religious identity [13].
• Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020): States that subsidize private education cannot disqualify religious schools solely because of their religious status. The Court applied strict scrutiny [13].
• Carson v. Makin (2022): Maine's exclusion of sectarian schools from a tuition assistance program violated the Free Exercise Clause [13].

The trilogy establishes a clear principle: if a state creates a program that funds private education, it cannot exclude schools because they are religious. The Texas situation raises the question of whether the state can achieve through indirect means — accreditation-based exclusions tied to a contested terrorism designation — what it cannot do directly.

Legal scholars have noted that some states may have a legitimate interest in excluding schools whose practices violate civil rights law, regardless of religious affiliation. But that argument requires a neutral, generally applicable standard — not one constructed to target a specific faith community. The fact that Texas applied its CAIR-based exclusion to Islamic schools categorically, before any individualized compliance review, undercuts the claim of neutrality [3][6].

Iman Academy: A Case Study in the Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality

Iman Academy, a 30-year-old Islamic school in southwest Houston, illustrates the disconnect between the state's terrorism framing and the actual institutions being excluded. Founded in 1996 with three core values — "Love America. Respect self, family and American institutions. Be a positive, contributing American citizen" — the school enrolls approximately 1,500 students across two campuses [12].

Iman Academy uses the same lessons and standardized tests as public schools. Its teachers in core subjects are experienced and certified. It is accredited by a state-recognized entity and has operated well beyond the two-year minimum required for TEFA participation. Tuition runs about $8,000 per year — well within the program's $10,500 voucher amount [12].

Rather than joining the lawsuits, Iman Academy called publicly for the chance to be evaluated on its merits and track record [12]. The school was eventually accepted into the program in late March 2026 — but only after a federal judge intervened [12]. For the families who depend on it, weeks of exclusion meant weeks of uncertainty about whether they could access a program explicitly designed for them.

Texas's Muslim Community: Size, Demand, and Political Geography

Texas has the eighth-largest Muslim population in the United States. The population concentrates in the same major urban centers — Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio — where Islamic schools operate [10]. Dallas alone has an estimated 110,000 to 130,000 Muslim residents [10]. Houston, home to the largest Muslim community in the state, is where most of the excluded schools are located [10][12].

The 34 Islamic private schools in Texas serve 7,077 students at an average tuition of $7,157 — roughly half the statewide private school average of $14,078 [10]. The lower cost suggests these schools serve families with fewer financial resources, precisely the population voucher programs claim to help.

The Republican legislators and officials driving the exclusion — Abbott, Paxton, Hancock — hold statewide office, but the political dynamic is revealing. The districts with the highest concentrations of Muslim residents are overwhelmingly represented by Democrats. The exclusion carries minimal political cost for its architects while delivering a clear signal to a Republican primary electorate where anti-Muslim sentiment has become a mobilizing force [2].

Florida: The Same Playbook, Different Stage

Texas is not acting in isolation. Florida has pursued a parallel strategy. In late 2025, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson — all Republicans — publicly questioned whether the state's universal school voucher program should extend to Hifz Academy and Bayaan Academy, two Islamic schools in Tampa [16].

Uthmeier went further, claiming on social media that "Sharia law seeks to destroy and supplant the pillars of our republican form of government and is incompatible with the Western tradition" [16]. Neither school's website mentions Sharia, and no evidence was presented that either teaches or practices it [16]. Despite this, Hifz Academy had received $15.7 million in state scholarship funds since 2015, with $3.7 million in 2024 alone, demonstrating years of participation without incident [16].

Florida's legislature passed a bill in March 2026 that would strip voucher eligibility from schools tied to designated terrorist organizations — a measure widely understood to target Islamic institutions through the same CAIR mechanism Texas employed [17]. A federal judge temporarily blocked Florida Governor DeSantis from designating CAIR as a terrorist organization [17].

The pattern across both states is consistent: Republican officials who championed universal school choice programs are retroactively seeking to exclude Islamic schools from those programs, using terrorism designations that lack federal backing as the legal vehicle.

The School Choice Movement's Identity Crisis

The Texas controversy has forced a reckoning within the broader school choice movement. The Cato Institute's Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom, has been among the sharpest critics of the exclusion from within the right. "This violates a fundamental purpose of school choice: enabling diverse people to access the education they think is best without having to pay once for public schools and a second time for the education they want," McCluskey said [7][14].

McCluskey argued that "unless a school is found guilty in a court of law of criminal activity, that school should be something that people can choose" [14]. His position represents the libertarian wing of the school choice coalition: vouchers should follow the family, period, regardless of the school's religious orientation.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), the conservative think tank that helped design and advocate for the TEFA program, took a different line. Senior fellow Mandy Drogin defended the state's actions: "The governor and the comptroller's team have made it abundantly clear, as has the attorney general, that in no way will the state of Texas be providing funding to entities tied to foreign terrorist groups" [3].

The split reveals a structural tension. Organizations like TPPF sold the voucher program as a universal benefit — a way for all Texas families to choose the best education for their children. But when "all families" included Muslim families choosing Islamic schools, parts of the coalition balked. The question the movement now faces is whether school choice is a principle or a preference — whether it applies to educational pluralism broadly or functions as a subsidy for a politically favored set of religious communities.

Source: Texas Tribune / Religion News / The Hill

Data as of Apr 3, 2026CSV

What Happens Next

The legal trajectory favors the Islamic schools. The Supreme Court's trilogy of Free Exercise cases makes religious discrimination in public benefit programs constitutionally untenable. The state's reliance on a governor's unilateral terrorism designation — one that contradicts federal classifications and is itself under legal challenge — is unlikely to survive judicial scrutiny.

But the political dynamics may outlast the legal ones. The Texas and Florida cases demonstrate that even when courts compel inclusion, the process of exclusion itself achieves a political objective: signaling to a base that views Islam with suspicion that their leaders share that suspicion. The weeks of uncertainty, the stigma of terrorism allegations, and the cost of litigation all fall on Muslim communities regardless of the eventual court ruling.

The TEFA program has surpassed 130,000 applications [18]. Five Islamic schools have been admitted after judicial intervention [7]. Twenty-nine others remain in limbo. For the 7,077 students in Texas Islamic schools and their families, the nation's largest school choice program has become a test case for whether religious liberty in America is a universal guarantee or a selective grant.