After 50 years of struggle, Texas school finance faces new challenge
Fifty years ago, on March 21, 1973, the United States Supreme Court decided the San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez case. The opinion highlighted the terrible disparities in education between low-wealth and highwealth Texas school districts.
Unfortunately, for political reasons and to keep the Supreme Court from dealing with other contentious issues, the justices upheld the Texas school finance system.
The Supreme Court recounted the inequities of the system, though it held that the system did not violate the U.S. Constitution. To understand some of the ongoing issues in school finance, we should review some of the disparities in the system in 1973, the strained and political reasoning of the U.S. Supreme Court at that time and the Texas Supreme Court in 1989 holding that the system did violate the Texas Constitution.
Much of the Rodriquez case was a comparison of two Bexar County school districts: Edgewood ISD, one of the lowestwealth districts in Texas and Alamo Heights ISD, one of the highest-wealth districts in the state.
Alamo Heights had a significantly lower tax rate than Edgewood ($.85 to $1.05) but had almost twice as much money per child ($594 to $356) to spend on its students.
Alamo Heights had a higher percentage of teachers with master’s degrees (40 percent to 11 percent), a lower percentage of teachers teaching without certification (11 percent to 47 percent), better buildings, richer curriculum, higher teacher salaries and
benefits, and five times as many counselors.
Yet, despite these disparities, and similar disparities all across Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court held that plaintiff families had no U.S. Constitutional right to challenge the system. Education is not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, and the Texas system, though certainly flawed and inefficient, had some vague relationship to state interests in local control and taxation.
The U.S. Supreme Court admitted that if the court applied the strict scrutiny applied to cases involving privacy or
speech, the Texas system would surely fail.
In 1989, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously held that the Texas school finance system did violate the Texas Constitution. In effect, the Texas Supreme Court in Edgewood ISD v. Kirby, composed of Texas judges who knew the system, reversed the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion.
Edgewood ISD v. Kirby noted the same egregious facts that the U.S. Supreme Court had acknowledged but ignored. The Edgewood ISD v. Kirby case focused on the pattern that wealthy districts had lower tax
rates and twice the per-student funding for their students.
The Texas Court also found that a fair system would increase local control and stop the cycle of poverty that the system forced on low-wealth districts.
Now, after 50 years of struggle in the courts, the system is closer to equity and adequacy than it has been in the past. But many of our Texas political leaders want to weaken the system with vouchers to take money out of the school finance system and send it to religious schools and for-profit schools.
We should learn our lessons from the mistakes of the U.S.
Supreme Court in San Antonio ISD v. Rodriquez and hear the call of our Texas educators, legal representatives and community members to give our students a fair chance in education. In a phrase generally attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Al Kauffman is a professor of law at the St. Mary’s University School of Law and a former Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund lawyer who worked on the Texas school finance cases. This article is his opinion and does not necessarily reflect the position of St. Mary’s University.