The 9-0 ruling from the all-Republican court was a surprise defeat for the 600-plus school districts that waged more than four years of costly legal battles, The Associated Press reported.
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“Despite the imperfections of the current school funding regime, it meets minimum constitutional requirements”, Justice Don Willett wrote for the court.
“There are different pockets of money that school districts can tap into and it comes at the expense quite frankly of school districts like ours that have these needs for English language learners”, Rodriguez said.
Texas’ approximately 5 million school students are majority minority, with more than half being Hispanic and about 13 percent African American. “Whether or not they fit us is really the point”, she said.
“The Texas Supreme Court has spoken, ruling school funding as adequate and equitable”, Denton ISD Superintendent Jamie Wilson said Friday in a statement.
Courts must defer to legislative decisions unless they can be shown to be arbitrary and unreasonable, Friday’s ruling said.
“The Supreme Court’s decision ends years of wasteful litigation by correctly recognizing that courts do not have the authority to micromanage the state’s school finance system”, Abbott, who initially led the state’s defense in the case as attorney general, said in a written statement.
Abbott did not personally argue the case, which featured a lower court judge twice saying the funding system violated Texas constitutional requirements for a fair and efficient system providing a “general diffusion of knowledge”.
The Texas Supreme Court’s finding that the state’s deeply flawed public school finance system is constitutional is disappointing and a blow to Texas public school education.
In its decision, the all-Republican court reversed a lower court’s ruling that had called the funding set by the GOP-controlled legislature unconstitutional and said the school funding scheme was unfairly distributed among wealthy and poor parts of Texas.
Gov. Greg Abbott is hailing the Texas Supreme Court’s declaring the state’s complicated school finance system constitutional as “a victory for Texas taxpayers and the Texas Constitution”.
For West Texas, this means the rich school districts will continue to ship money back to the state.
“Good enough now… does not mean that the system is good or that it will continue to be enough”, Justice Guzman wrote in in the court’s decision, as reported by the Texas Tribune.
District Judge John Dietz, an Austin Democrat, ruled in 2013 that the state’s school finance system was unconstitutional.
Another fast-growing district, Northwest ISD near Fort Worth, is running a $7 million deficit on its $176 million budget, Superintendent Karen Rue said.
At issue were the massive cuts to public education and related classroom grant programs that the Legislature approved in 2011, when the state’s economy was still reeling from the Great Recession.
But if that happens, then lawmakers need to ensure that money stays with the local school district instead of diverting it to other purposes statewide.
“In the state there is target revenue if you lived here you get $7000 per student if you live in Penelope you get $4000 per student so the equity issue, it should not matter where you live you should have equal funding”, Cain said.
Now the state’s highest court has handed down its opinion. There are still gains that need to be made, and they will be best achieved by improving teacher compensation, expanding school choice, and keeping more local dollars in the community.
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“It’s the people’s representatives in the legislature”, said Scott Keller, the Texas Solicitor General in September.
