On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court reversed a finding by District Judge John Dietz, shown here hearing the case, that the state’s public school funding system was unconstitutional.
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“While we disagree with the Court on the constitutionality of the Texas school finance system, we agree with them that the system is broken, and it is wrong”, he said.
“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.
Still, Willett wrote, schoolchildren deserve better, and the court advocated “transformational, top-to-bottom reforms that amount to more than Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid”.
The ruling settles the 6th major court case since 1984 over how Texas funds public schools.
“Essentially, you know, it will be up to the Legislature to still act because that dismal state of education in Texas has not changed and will not change because of this ruling”, Hinojosa said.
But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who was attorney general when the case was first filed in 2011, called the outcome “a victory for Texas taxpayers and the Texas Constitution” that “ends years of wasteful litigation”.
Lower courts had previously declared the system unconstitutional. “Our schools must be adequately and equitably funded to meet the high standards that all Texans have for them”.
The state is still trying to recover from massive public education cuts in 2011.
The court determined the “Robin Hood” school finance system that has wealthy school districts share local property tax revenue with those in poorer areas is constitutional. “Texas’ school finance system, while imperfect, is constitutional”.
Guzman explains that, though she fully joins in the court’s opinion, she chose to write separately “to further emphasize that there is much work to be done, particularly with respect to the population that represents the majority of the students base – economically disadvantaged students”.
It also means the GOP-controlled Legislature won’t have to devise a new funding plan.
Ector County ISD is one of the schools on the list, Public Information Officer, Mike Adkins said this decision is not what they were expecting.
“MALDEF will not stop fighting until all Texas students, regardless of the neighborhood in which they happen to live, have an equal opportunity to a high-quality education”, said Marisa Bono, MALDEF Southwest Regional Counsel and lead counsel in the case.
In fact, during the legislative session in 2015, some lawmakers tried to reform how Texas pays for public schools. It is worrisome that, given lack of a mandate from the court and the current political climate in Austin, those decisions may not be in the best interest of the state’s children. But school district attorneys told the Supreme Court in oral arguments last fall that it still wasn’t enough to cover the hole left by the 2011 cuts when adjusted for enrollment growth and inflation. State lawmakers then restored more than $3 billion back to the schools and cut the number of standardized tests required to graduate from 15 to five. The AISD board of trustees is set to approve the proposed $1 billion budget for FY 2016-17 in late June. “The Court’s ruling affirmed that the current system needs to be revamped, but the Court also said the system is meeting the “minimum requirements” of educating students”.
But the state argued that money is not “pixie dust” that would magically fix schools and that the state outperforms neighboring states.
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Texas lawmakers are said to discuss this issue again sometime next year.
