The $8,474 gap Texas just wrote into law

The $8,474 gap at the heart of Texas TEFA

The Texas Education Freedom Account closed its first application window on March 31. More than 100,000 families applied for roughly 90,000 funded seats across a $1 billion budget (educationfreedom.texas.gov). By any headline measure, the largest state ESA in the country had a strong launch.

Read the fine print, and a different story emerges.

A private-school student in Texas will receive up to $10,474 for tuition and approved expenses in the 2026-27 school year. A homeschool student in the same program will receive $2,000. The gap is $8,474 per child, per year, and it was not an accounting accident. It was written into SB 2 during the 2025 session and signed into law by Governor Abbott in May of that year.

The policy logic, as framed by bill authors, is that private-school tuition is a larger fixed cost than the materials, co-op fees, and curriculum a homeschool family typically purchases. The political logic is that $2,000 was the number that kept the homeschool caucus from breaking with the coalition. Both are true. Neither fully defends the spread.

Here is what $2,000 actually buys a Texas family in Year One. A full-year boxed curriculum from a mid-market publisher like Memoria Press or My Father's World runs $650 to $1,100 per grade level. A co-op membership in the Dallas or Houston metros is typically $1,200 to $2,400 for a school year of weekly classes. Outschool, Art of Problem Solving, and dual-enrollment community college courses each run several hundred dollars per semester. One child can exhaust the allotment on curriculum and a single co-op. A second child in the same family cannot.

The Odyssey marketplace, which Texas selected as its approved-vendor platform in November 2025, went live for account holders in April. Early reports from families who have logged in describe a catalog still filling out. Curriculum publishers are listed. Many local co-ops and tutors are not yet credentialed. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar's office said in a December press release that onboarding would continue "into summer 2026," which in practice means families approved in the first round may not see their full vendor options until after the school year has already started.

Our take. The $2,000 homeschool tier is a floor, not a ceiling, and it will be litigated politically as soon as the second application window opens. Watch for an amendment in the 2027 session that either raises the homeschool amount or ties it to a percentage of the private-school figure. In the meantime, Texas families who missed the March 31 window should treat the 2026-27 year as a planning year: document expenses, join a co-op that is actively pursuing Odyssey credentialing, and watch educationfreedom.texas.gov for the second-round window, which the statute requires to open no later than January 15, 2027.

The gap is a policy choice. It can be changed the same way it was made.

The Cathy Duffy problem, and what replaces her

For fifteen years, if you wanted a serious review of a homeschool curriculum, you read Cathy Duffy. Her 101 Top Picks book and the companion site at cathyduffyreviews.com were the closest thing the sector had to Consumer Reports. Publishers sent her review copies. Parents planned their years around her verdicts.

The site has been substantially dormant since roughly 2018. New reviews appear rarely. The front-page "recent additions" still surface titles from the Obama administration. Duffy is in her seventies and has earned her retirement, but the vacuum she leaves behind is real and growing.

In the same seven years, the curriculum market has roughly doubled. Masterbooks, BJU Press, and Abeka remain, but they now compete with Blossom & Root, The Good and the Beautiful, Gather 'Round, Wild + Free, Torchlight, Build Your Library, and several dozen smaller publishers selling directly through Shopify. Video-first products like Outschool and Night Zookeeper did not exist in their current form when Duffy's last major update shipped. Neither did the AI-tutor wave now represented by Khan Academy's Khanmigo, MagicSchool, and Synthesis.

The families we hear from are not short on options. They are short on trustworthy signal. A five-star Amazon review of a $400 boxed curriculum tells you nothing. A blogger's affiliate-linked "10 best" roundup tells you less.

What we're doing about it. Every Homeschool will publish one curriculum review every week, using a published rubric: scope, rigor, time-to-teach, parent load, secular/faith framing, cost per child, and resale value. Reviews will name what the product is bad at, not only what it is good at. We do not accept affiliate commissions, and we will disclose review copies when publishers send them. Our first full review, shipping next Monday, is The Good and the Beautiful Level 3 Language Arts against Logic of English Foundations. Send a note to reviews@everyhomeschool.com if there is a curriculum you want us to prioritize.

West Virginia becomes the best ESA state you aren't watching

While the Texas story dominates headlines, the most consequential ESA change this spring happened in West Virginia, where the Hope Scholarship opened to universal eligibility on April 1 (hopescholarshipwv.gov).

Through 2025, Hope required that a child have attended public school for at least 45 days in the prior year, or be entering kindergarten. Starting with the 2026-27 cycle, that prior-public requirement is gone. Any West Virginia student of compulsory-attendance age can apply, including children who have been homeschooled their entire lives.

The award is $5,435 per student for 2026-27, indexed to state per-pupil funding. That is nearly three times the Texas homeschool tier for a state with less than a fifth of Texas's population. The application window opened March 2 and runs through June 15 for full 100-percent funding. Families who apply between June 16 and the late-September cutoff receive a prorated amount, stepping down roughly 25 percent per quarter.

Uses are broad: curriculum, tutoring, therapy, approved online courses, and a narrow set of technology purchases. Reporting is receipt-based, submitted quarterly through the Hope portal. The program is administered by the State Treasurer's office rather than the Department of Education, which has historically meant faster reimbursement turnaround than comparable state programs.

Our take. West Virginia has quietly built the cleanest homeschool ESA in the country: single tier, universal eligibility, reasonable paperwork, and a funding level that actually covers a curriculum plus a co-op. The cap on total enrollment has not yet been a binding constraint, but that may change in 2027. If you live in West Virginia and have not applied, the June 15 full-funding deadline is the one to hit.

Charlotte Mason, for families who have never heard the name

Charlotte Mason was a British educator who died in 1923. Her six-volume Home Education Series outlined a method built around short lessons, living books, narration, nature study, and the idea that children are born persons deserving of a feast of ideas rather than a diet of worksheets.

A century later, her method is among the fastest-growing pedagogies in American homeschooling, largely because three modern publishers have made it accessible without requiring parents to read 3,000 pages of Victorian prose. Ambleside Online is the free canonical implementation, with a book list organized year-by-year at amblesideonline.org. A Gentle Feast (Julie Ross) and Simply Charlotte Mason (Sonya Shafer) offer paid, parent-friendly curricula that translate Mason's principles into weekly lesson plans.

The distinguishing features in practice: lessons are short, often 15 to 20 minutes for younger children and rarely more than 45 for teens. Subjects rotate rather than pile up. Narration, in which a child retells what was read in their own words, replaces most comprehension worksheets. Copywork and dictation do the work that separate spelling and handwriting curricula do elsewhere. Nature study is a weekly outdoor practice, documented in a notebook, not an enrichment add-on.

The method is compatible with both secular and Christian framings. Ambleside is explicitly Christian; A Gentle Feast is Christian; Simply Charlotte Mason is Christian. Wildwood Curriculum and Blossom & Root represent the secular Mason-adjacent wing.

What it is not. Charlotte Mason is not unschooling. It is a structured, subject-rich method with high expectations for written and oral output. It is also not a fit for families who want an open-and-go boxed curriculum with a scripted teacher's guide. The method asks the parent to read ahead, choose books, and lead a discussion. The payoff, families who use it consistently report, is children who read widely, write clearly, and retain what they learn past the test.

Dispatch

Johns Hopkins estimate updated. Johns Hopkins's Institute for Education Policy released its 2026 homeschool-population estimate in late April, putting the US figure at 3.6 million children in the 2025-26 school year, up from 3.1 million in 2022-23 (edpolicy.education.jhu.edu). The growth rate has slowed from the pandemic spike but remains positive year-over-year in every census region except the Northeast.

Illinois HB 2827 post-mortem. Illinois House Bill 2827, which would have required annual notification, a portfolio of instruction, and standardized-test reporting for homeschool families, died in the November 2025 veto session without reaching a floor vote (hslda.org/post/illinois-house-bill-2827). The coalition that defeated it was unusually broad: HSLDA, Illinois Christian Home Educators, the secular Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and three regional co-op networks jointly organized a March 19 witness-slip campaign that logged over 40,000 opponents in 72 hours. Sponsoring Rep. Terra Costa Howard has said she plans to refile in the spring 2026 session. Watch the Education Policy committee calendar.

Great Homeschool Conventions, spring wrap. The California stop in Ontario (April 9-11) and Cincinnati (April 23-25) closed the first half of the 2026 GHC circuit, with Round Rock, Texas (June 18-20) and Greenville, South Carolina (July 16-18) still ahead (greathomeschoolconventions.com). Vendor-hall attendance at Ontario was reported up meaningfully over 2025, according to a GHC staff interview with Practical Homeschooling, a pattern consistent with the ESA-driven expansion in the Texas and Arizona markets. If you have not attended a convention and are curriculum-shopping, Greenville is the most vendor-dense of the remaining stops.

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Every Homeschool Weekly is published every Monday at everyhomeschool.com. Forward this to a friend. Reply with news tips, policy updates, or curriculum you want us to review: editor@everyhomeschool.com.