School funding reform sputters
Texas legislators find few incentives to deviate from the status quo
Wayne Pierce was the 37-year-old freshman superintendent of a tiny school district south of Waco when his mentors convinced him to join a lawsuit against the state.
He was green, scared and, frankly, clueless about what was happening at the state level as he juggled new and daunting responsibilities of running a school system with some 800 kids.
Relying on the people he trusted most, he decided the Rosebud-Lott Independent School District would lock arms with other school districts and take Texas to court, fighting for money he hoped would flow through his schools and into his classrooms.
He did not know he was joining a legal battle that would wind up at the state Supreme Court a few years later, and again and again years after that. School districts have dragged the state of Texas to court seven times since the mid-1980s, arguing for more money in a seemingly endless loop that goes something like this: lawsuit, Texas Supreme Court ruling, action by the Legislature, wait to see what happens, repeat.
More than 30 years later, Pierce still is fighting.
“The reason we’re still in court like this is because the Legislature never fixes the underlying causes of what leads people to go to court in the first place,” says Pierce, now executive director of the Equity Center, the largest school finance research and
advocacy organization in the country. “(Legislators) don’t fix school funding because it’s something they think needs to be done. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a trial. They ‘fix schools’ or do what they do because the Supreme Court forces them to do something.” Not this time. The Texas Supreme Court on Friday declared the state’s school finance system meets “minimal constitutional requirements.” While hardly a resounding endorsement of the Texas education system, the high court expressed its reluctance to get involved in policies better set by the Legislature but stressed that lawmakers should work on improving the system.
Ensuring the money used to educate 5.3 million public school children meets the needs of districts rich and poor is anything but settled as the more than 600 school districts and education gurus who sued lick their wounds and figure out how to turn the legal defeat into a possible win in the 2017 legislative session. Plentiful challenges
In spite of the high court’s ruling, Texas’ decadeslong struggle with education funding shows no sign of abating. Hours after the court ruling, Republican and Democratic lawmakers sounded ready to take the justices up on their urging to fix it. Can they? The myriad challenges facing public schools are well-documented: Growing numbers of low- income, non-Englishspeaking students who need more attention; the gulf between rich districts and their poor peers fighting to hire quality teachers and afford modern technology; the growth of charter schools and a home-schooling movement, which undercut traditional education funding; the struggle to rewrite the narrative — sometimes voiced by the very lawmakers who control the state’s purse strings — that public schools are failing while being expected to excel on state tests; and pressure from Republican leaders to cut the property taxes that fund the local share of school districts’ costs.
None of those, experts say, compares to the political courage it takes to make people unhappy by tearing up a patchwork system they say protects some districts more than others.
“Making hard choices is seldom the best political road to travel, given that someone will not be happy,” Pierce says. “Also, it has gotten complicated over time because, instead of making a real fix when it was simple ... it just gets more complex and less easy to know the right thing to do.”
The current state of education funding in Texas has left more teachers taking money out of their pockets to pay for materials and fewer tools or technology in the classroom, said Zeph Capo, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers union. The shortage of funds makes it harder to cut through the poverty, childhood trauma, special needs or language limitations that make some students a challenge to teach, experts say.
“People need to walk into our schools and, unfortunately, will see the need all over our kids’ faces,” said Capo. ‘A Band-Aid approach’
Texas ranks low among states for education spending, coughing up $9,561 per student this year compared to the national average of $12,251, according to calculations from the National Education Association, which represents teacher unions across the country. On average, Texas spent two dollars more per student this school year than the previous one, a figure the Texas State Teachers Association called “shameful” for a state ranked No. 38 in the nation for education funding.
For education experts on the right, left and everywhere between, the reason Texas cannot get education funding right boils down to a lack of political courage to make significant change instead of patchwork repairs.
“Anything that you do that is destructive, you’re going to have people mad at you. Politicians don’t like to have people mad at them,” says Ken Grusendorf, a former Texas legislator and director of the Center for Education Freedom, a right-leaning think tank. Speaking from experience, he adds, “It’s a lot easier to try to try to make everybody happy.”
The conundrum of Texas’ education financing is enough to put most people to sleep. Few in the state fully understand the funding formulas that weigh students with special needs as deserving of additional education dollars, that assumes various funding levels for districts based on their urban to rural settings, and a multitude of additional factors complicating the final calculations. It is far more complex than writing a check to give each school the same amount of money per student.
The majority of dollars that find their way into the classrooms, school buses and libraries of Texas’ schools largely come from a mix of local property taxes and state revenues. It’s the touchiest issue of all.
The state’s wealthiest areas benefit from robust property tax collections from residential or commercial property, injecting millions of dollars into their local school systems while poorer districts, often with a greater number of challenging students, struggle to make ends meet.
“So long as you use a Band-Aid approach to solving the problem, I think you’ll have continued litigation,” Grusendorf says. “They’ve been various size Band-Aids, but they’ve all been Band-Aids.” A nudge and a shove
Applying bandages to a layer of existing bandages has failed to fix the flawed system, experts say. One such repair, coined “Robin Hood,” requires the wealthiest districts to hand money back to the state to give to poorer school systems, a fix that shifts pres- sure off the state and on to financially healthy districts clamoring to keep locally raised money.
Take the Houston Independent School District, which could for the first time give the state an estimated $165 million because it is considered propertywealthy despite the fact that three-quarters of its students are considered economically disadvantaged.
This year, it will cost $47 billion to fund Texas’ public schools, far more than it takes to finance entire state governments elsewhere in the country. Add nearly $5.8 billion in construction projects like football stadiums or additional classrooms and $3.2 billion in interest payments on bonded debt, and Texans are footing the bill for $56.6 billion this school year in state and local property tax funding.
Meanwhile, the state’s student population is growing by more than 70,000 per year, according to the Texas Education Agency, akin to adding a new Fort Worth school district every year and demanding the state keep pace while lawsuits from school districts clamor for more money.
The governor and those in the Texas Legislature have the power to break the cycle, but the political realities look dim as financially conservative lawmakers strive to keep promises to keep taxes low and to inspect government spending, says Clay Robison, spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association and a longtime political observer. The result is smaller patchwork solutions, he said.
“Even under Democrats, the Legislature has always needed a nudge. Under the Republican majority, they needed a shove,” he says. Maintaining advantages
In many cases, school districts are an impediment to solving funding problems because they do not trust the system or are afraid to lose the upper hand, says Scott Hochberg, a former southwest Houston state representative who left the Legislature a respected expert on education funding.
“No wealthy district wants to give up an advantage that it has,” he says. Legislators, school board members and other leaders often are unwilling to force wealthy districts of influential people willing to contribute to their political campaigns to cede ground, nor are they willing to commit sufficient state funds to bring the rest of Texas to the same playing field, says Hochberg who lectures on the topic.
“It’s similar to the question of why certain sports leagues have salary caps when others don’t,” he said. “The ones that don’t, the owners that can spend more want to continue to have that advantage.”
The Texas Supreme Court may have ruled the state’s education funding system is constitutionally sound, but 30 years later, the once-novice superintendent Pierce struggles to see an end to the fight.
“I’m not green, I’m brittle,” he says. “I’m not scared anymore. It’s a battle that needs to be fought.”