Texas still ranks in the bottom third of states in spending per pupil in the U.S., with essentially no change in either amount or standing, a new study shows.
The finding doesn’t help, and could undercut, the state’s position in a long-running school finance case.
Figures compiled by the National Education Association and released Friday show that Texas schools are spending an average $9,561 per student in the current school year. That is well under the national average of $12,251 and ranks Texas 38th among the 50 states and District of Columbia.
Of neighboring states, only Oklahoma spends less, said Clay Robison, spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, the state NEA affiliate.
Last year, Texas also was 38th in the comparisons, based on numbers furnished to the NEA by state education agencies. In the 2014-15 school year, Texas spent $9,559 per student in grades K-12, based on average daily attendance. The national average was $12,061.
In recent years, Texas has fallen about $1,000 per child further below the national average, said Noel Candelaria, president of the state NEA affiliate. This school year, Texas is $2,690 below the national average. Five years earlier, in 2010-11, it was $1,685 behind, he noted. Back then, Texas spent $9,462 per child. The 2010-11 academic year was the last one before the Legislature whacked $5.3 billion from public schools.
“At a time when the Texas Supreme Court is considering a lower court ruling that found the state’s school finance system unconstitutional, these figures tell a shameful story,” Candelaria said in a statement.
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Combining budget writers’ decisions in the past two legislative sessions, the Legislature put an additional $6 billion into public schools, Solicitor General Scott Keller noted.
But former Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, who appeared as a private lawyer for Dallas, Fort Worth and dozens of other districts suing the state, said lawmakers have put the districts in a straitjacket by raising expectations of student performance while lowering the state’s share of the total tab.
Meanwhile, the Legislature effectively has imposed an unconstitutional statewide property tax because “once again local districts are without meaningful discretion over their rates,” he said.
Even if one accepts Keller at his word, that barely takes Texas back to where it was before the 2011 cuts, and that’s without accounting for enrollment growth or stricter accountability standards. I don’t expect Texas to be at the top of a list like this, but we do have an awful lot of students who live in poverty, and an awful lot of students who come from homes where English is not the primary language spoken. We also don’t do much in terms of pre-kindergarten, meaning that not only do we have a lot of high-need students to educate, we let them fall farther behind by not preparing them for school ahead of time. Yet we demand more of our districts and our students. It makes no sense.
The argument stated by former Justice Jefferson is basically what the Supreme Court found in the last school finance lawsuit, in 2005. That led to the 50-cent cut in local property tax rates, which was supposed to be made up by the state in the form of the business margins tax and other sources. We all know how that has gone. Having the state pay a higher share of the public education budget is the right idea – local districts have been shouldering an ever-increasing about of the burden in recent years – but it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t allow the state to shirk its responsibilities. I hope that’s what this Court has in mind, and if so I wish them luck in writing an opinion that will get the Lege to do what it needs to do.
You wouldn’t know there is a school funding problem at HISD. A quarter million dollars a throw to rename schools? Heck yeah, make it rain, school board.