Future of Texas’ children is not a game of hot potato
Lawmakers are abdicating duty by failing to fix school funding
After severe budget cuts worth $5.4 billion in 2011, 600 school districts sued the state for inadequately funding our schools. Since then, the Legislature used the pending litigation as an excuse to hold off making any decisions to fully restore the funding or fix the way the state funds public education.
With the Supreme Court’s recent ruling of the school funding system as constitutional, the Legislature is officially off the legal hook. In filing suit against the state, hundreds of school districts — both rich and poor districts — and charter school systems expressed their dissatisfaction with the way the state funds schools.
Their main argument: Our state’s funding for schools is not enough to guarantee even a bare minimum education for all kids, and this spells trouble for Texas’ future. The court’s ruling hasn’t changed the outlook: Texas’ schools still need an appropriate level of funding to ensure student success.
I graduated from high school just last year. My classmates and I were freshmen when the 2011 budget cuts first rolled in. By the time we graduated, we had spent more than 16,000 hours in the public school classroom — and 4,000 of those hours in underfunded schools. So a few of us came together to give students a voice in this lawsuit.
As members of the Houston ISD Student Congress, a student-run, student-led organization that represents the 215,000 students of our school district, we authored a 35-page amicus brief explaining the importance of adequate school funding. We used student stories to put names and faces to the dry legal facts the court system was used to, and we submitted our brief.
But the Texas Supreme Court was unmoved. On May 13 (Friday the 13th, mind you), the court announced a unanimous ruling. Rather than directing the state to fix our broken education funding system, the elected justices opted instead for a punt, arguing that school finance is almost always a responsibility for the Legislature and not for the court system.
In a lengthy footnote on Page 24, the court opinion stated that the HISD Student Congress had “filed an excellent amicus brief” and, on page 100, the justices acknowledged that our state’s school system is an “ossified regime that is ill suited for 21st century Texas.”
Yet, they still lacked the judicial integrity to do anything about it, asserting in multiple references that the court should be “very deferential” to the
Legislature.
The Texas Supreme Court insisted it should not interfere in school finance if Texas’ public schools satisfy “minimum constitutional requirements” for adequacy. In other words, according to the court, our schools are currently “minimally adequate.”
Incredibly, after five years of the Legislature waiting for the court system to make a ruling before lawmakers take action, the court deferred back to the Legislature.
Meanwhile, students have been stuck in “minimally adequate” schools, and apparently will continue to be as the court ruling likely means the Legislature is not compelled by law to make things better.
Come the next session in 2017, the Legislature, with its history of reluctance to tackle this issue unless shoved by the courts, will likely take the stand that school underfunding is exclusively a bureaucratic fiscal mismanagement problem, pushing the onus back to local school districts, bringing the problem full circle without improving a single thing.
My classmates and our younger peers still in school are worth more than the “minimally adequate” effort our leaders are putting in. Showing just enough interest to demonstrate that they care, but not enough to effectuate any real change is dismissive of students and an abdication of legislators’ official and moral duty.
Texas students are extraordinary and worth more than some lawmaker’s minimally adequate attention. In Houston, those students include a girl who dealt with anorexia for four years before learning what it was. She’s now a sophomore at Westside High School. They include a student who wakes up every morning remembering her best friend who committed suicide because of bullying in sixth grade. The student is now a junior at Yates High School. And they include a kid who grew up with a single father and six siblings, none of whom spoke English when he started elementary school. He’s now a senior at Austin High School. But they wake up every morning and go to school, determined to graduate and to put forth their best contribution to our great state.
In Texas, where 60 percent of public schoolchildren are now economically disadvantaged, these students’ struggles are commonplace. Theirs are the kinds of names and faces we presented to the court — the kids the Texas Supreme Court has declared only require a “minimally adequate” education.
The 5 million public schoolchildren in Texas deserve better than this. If they can work that hard, why can’t lawmakers? We owe it to our extraordinary youth to act upon our conscience and do our best to improve their lives.
Our leaders must consider the voices, stories and lives of my classmates and our 5 million younger peers. We cannot collectively punt our shared responsibility. The future of Texas’ children is not a game of hot potato. Tameez is the founding speaker of the HISD Student Congress and a Posse Houston Scholar at the University of Virginia.