This story was originally published by The Houston Chronicle by David DeMatthews and David S. Knight on October 11, 2018, found here.
Texas is a prosperous state, but lawmakers are failing to adequately finance public education, and communities and students are suffering the academic, physical and economic consequences.
The upcoming legislative session provides a unique opportunity for our state’s elected leaders to right past wrongs, but a preliminary budget request from the Texas Education Agency projects a $3.5 billion decline in state funding over the next few years.
Put differently, in 2008, the state contributed about $17.1 billion toward education for about 4.7 million students. However, in 2017, Texas public schools enrolled more than 5.3 million students. The state’s contribution was only $19.3 billion. Despite the 13.7 percent growth in the total student population, the proportion of funding the state contributes declined by 12.6 percent per pupil.
Advocates for the state’s current system naively suggest it is existing law that requires the state to use the expected growth in property taxes to fund public education before factoring in state funding. Legislators are elected to ensure state laws benefit its citizens, and this law has not protected public schools. At the very least, it ought to be amended.
Texas has a long history of inadequately funding public education and placing undue burden on local districts. It is time voters demand a new finance system that addresses the significant disparities across districts and regions. A study by the Center for Education Research and Policy Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso found that the highest-poverty districts in Texas receive about 11 percent less state and local funding per student than wealthier districts.
With additional funding, lawmakers could expand professional development opportunities for principals and teachers, which can improve student achievement and lifetime outcomes for students in districts serving higher proportions of low- and mid-incomes families.
The state also has to remedy an illegal cap that delayed or denied special education to eligible students for a decade, which will require districts across the state to invest in identifying previously denied but eligible students and hire additional special education teachers. With more money, districts could hire the additional special education teachers and ensure all students with disabilities receive a high-quality education.
More of us need to understand the flaws in our state’s school finance system. We also must hold our elected leaders more accountable for making substantial improvements in the next legislative session. Inadequate and inequitable state funding does harm to schools.
Texas public schools receive both state general revenue and local property tax revenue. State revenue is intended to help increase overall funding and addresses the inherently inequitable system that arises from funding schools based on local property taxes. But the state revenue has been declining. Ten years ago, the state contributed 48.5 percent of the cost of education, but in 2017 that declined to 42 percent.
