Excluding Islamic Schools Defeats the Purpose of School Choice

Neal McCluskey

I have received many news alerts and press releases over the last several weeks about the ever-growing number of applications to the new Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) program. 42,000! 100,000! 200,000! Clearly, there is much demand for funding for families’ preferred education. But it all feels a bit hollow when, at the same time, the state is excluding a whole category of institutions: Islamic schools. 

If freedom to choose excludes an entire religion, it is not really freedom, and it is hard to be enthusiastic about it.

The immediate argument for excluding Islamic schools in Texas, as laid out by the state’s comptroller, is that they are either connected to an accreditor—Cognia—that accredited institutions at addresses where the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) held publicly advertised events, the schools themselves are at such addresses, or both. In a November 2025 executive order, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) designated CAIR a “foreign terrorist organization” and a “transnational criminal organization.” As a result, the comptroller appears to have determined that Cognia-accredited Islamic schools may not participate in the state’s new school choice program.

If a school were supporting terrorism, it should be ineligible to receive students using TEFA funds. But none of the schools being excluded have been legally charged, much less found guilty, of such support. Neither has CAIR. And the connection to addresses where CAIR held public events is extremely tangential.

Unfortunately, while it is impossible to know the motives of other people, this situation might be connected to an emerging argument that Islam is fundamentally at odds with American society and our system of government, justifying government discrimination to quash it. This argument seems wrong on both factual and principled grounds.

First, research not only suggests that Islamic schools in the United States are not radicalizing kids, but they are producing graduates with strong civic dispositions and American identities. Second, we cannot logically save our governmental system based in liberty and equality under the law by blatantly violating those bedrock tenets.

The good news—just in!—is that given lawsuits over the exclusion of Islamic schools, a federal judge has ordered Texas to allow Islamic schools to apply to participate in TEFA and extended the family application deadline from what had been today at noon to March 31.