Déjà Vu All Over Again

Leaving office, back in 1990, I told a reporter that things hadn’t changed much in 18 years. When I was elected the first time, the courts had tried the school finance system and found it wanting. Just before I left office, the State Supreme Court again found the system unconstitutional.

And once again, in 2004, a state district judge ruled that the state’s method of financing public schools is so niggardly it does not pass constitutional muster. The Texas Legislature spent much of the 2005 session wrestling with unattractive alternatives.

A solution will be found and we can fearlessly predict that it will not resolve the inequity among school districts, it will not adequately fund public schools and it will require that school districts impose more tests and file more reports.

The first time the Texas school finance system got upended, Rodriguez v. Edgewood Independent School District, the challenge came from the property poor schools, doomed to fall behind their wealthy brethren because the state did not do enough---or much of anything—to close the gap. That lawsuit, filed in 1971, traveled to the US Supreme Court, which declined to rule but opined that the state should fix its problem.

The second ruling, Edgewood Independent School District v. Kirby, was filed in 1984. It was a continuation of the first, contending that the school finance system was intrinsically unequal because of the wide variation of wealth in local school districts. It was filed because state remedies over the decade since Rodriguez proved inadequate.

The third lawsuit was a twist. Decided in 2004, the East Orange School District case came from wealthier school districts tired of watching their tax dollars siphoned off in increasing amounts to poorer districts under the state’s “Robin Hood” plan. With their taxing capacity maxed and the state’s share cleverly designed to decrease as local property values increased, these districts faced a growing fiscal bind.

It wouldn’t matter much how the state pays for education or even whether it does at all, except that education is so critically important not just to a civilized society but to a productive and prosperous one.

Look around…how many jobs do you see that don’t require a college degree? Jobs we once had that could be done with a high school or associate degree have gone abroad where labor is cheap. Even those high-value jobs we thought we owned—coding software—have gone to countries with highly educated, low wage talent. Think Bangalore.

Add to that the great shift in our population that has been documented so well by State Demographer Steve Murdock. Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group in Texas. The Anglo population is rapidly losing majority status. Hispanics and African-Americans do not succeed in education as well as Anglo children. In 2004, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board reported that the number of Hispanic high school graduates entering higher education was not increasing despite a concentrated effort called “Closing the Gap” begun in 2000.

Hispanics particularly tend to be concentrated in property-poor school districts. As Ross Perot said back in 1984, when he headed a school reform commission, “What are we going to do with those people—send them to Arkansas?”, his point being that we had better figure out how to close the performance gap or suffer the consequences. Twenty –one years later, we haven’t figured it out, but the state’s failure to finance education has created more uniform suffering.

When State District Judge John Dietz found the school finance system unconstitutional in September 2004 he noted that the state’s share of school funding has dropped from 80 percent in 1949 to 38 percent in 2004. About 88 percent of Texas children lived in districts that get payments from other school districts.

Every time the subject comes up, you will hear about how complex the school finance system is, how difficult to understand. Really, school finance is quite simple. Either the state pays, or local districts pay. If the state pays less, local districts pay more. For district, read taxpayers.

You can have a high degree of equity and it will not impact local budgets if the state pays its share. In recent years, as with higher education, the state has not paid its share and school districts like Austin have been shipping one-fourth of their tax revenue ($136 million in 2004-05) to poor districts. Out of whack? You bet.

Former Lieutenant Governor Bill Ratliff, called Obi Wan Kenobi for his wisdom, wrote the 1993 school finance bill. “I don’t see anything wrong with the current school finance system, had the state continued to fund its proportionate share,” he said in August 2004.

When I was in office, school finance occupied a great deal of time and effort, yet the steps toward equity and adequate funding were small and grudging in proportion to the problem and the time spent trying to solve it.

In 1975, we fought out a $638 million compromise bill that softened local tax impact by limiting local fund assignments, created a new market value property value index and an enrichment fund for poor districts.

In 1977, we passed a property tax reform bill that gave us a uniform way to look at property values across the state. That year we were able to add $1 billion in education funding and make more reforms. That bill increased state aid to most school districts and allowed up to 800 districts out of 1,100 to decrease taxes. Even so, editorial writers opined that the state was now so diverse that it was almost impossible to create a system that would serve a huge metropolitan district like Houston and a small rural district like Spring Lake equally well.

In 1984, after a blue ribbon commissioned headed by Ross Perot took a hard look at public education, we decided some changes were in order. House Bill 72, the education reform bill was a historic piece of legislation, but in retrospect, it didn’t move the ball very far. In the end, Texas still had the shortest school year of all the states and our students spent less time than others on task with mathematics and science.

But that bill set statewide standards—uniform tests that would be given in the third, sixth and 12^th grades. It tested teachers and beefed up teacher education. And it introduced the radical idea that students would have to pass their courses to play sports or participate in extracurricular activities.

Is that really controversial? Students go to school to be educated. If a student fails a course and is engaged in extracurricular activities, the student is obviously not spending enough time on the course. Had local school boards realized the function of public education was to educate and not entertain, House Bill 72 would not have been necessary.

The “No Pass No Play” rule was the most controversial part of the 1984 reforms (although teacher testing ran a close second and may have left more scars—Gov. Mark White, champion of HB 72, was defeated for re-election two years later and disaffected teachers got some credit for that.)

Just as with equitable funding, education reform is revisited nearly every session. The bar has been raised, correctly, on testing. An exit exam is mandatory for graduating from high school. The curriculum has been toughened with a healthy helping of math and sciences, so Texas teenagers no longer graduate not knowing what calculus means. Texas schools have very public report cards that parents can use to choose where their children are educated.

Those reforms were needed, but the taste for reform, accountability or just plain harassment has gotten out of hand. In Texas, every recent attempt to address school funding ends up punishing school districts by making them administer more tests, file more reports and submit to more financial scrutiny.

President George W. Bush used the Texas model in his No Child Left Behind legislation. I would be applauding except that in Texas and in Washington, the plan attempts to raise standards for public education while reducing the means to meet those standards. Maybe that’s why states are protesting, legally and otherwise, with such diverse participants as Utah and Connecticut. Even Texas, Bush’s home state, is out of compliance and faces sizeable fines.

It’s as if these plans intend to make public schools fail, and when they do, waiting in the wings will be voucher programs—public funding of a private education.

You’ll hear no quarrel from me about private education, since that’s where I received my learning. The Texas tuition equalization program that funds education at both public and private universities and colleges works just fine. But the suspicion lingers that vouchers are a subterfuge for draining public dollars from public education to finance what are mainly religion based private schools.

Charter schools—the mid-step that Texas Republicans passed because they could not get the votes to approve vouchers—are a demonstrable failure. Most have statistics that make urban public schools look good. They are not graduating a higher percentage of students, teacher turnover averages more than 40 percent per year, and they have had a ghastly record of abusing the public trust, mainly by spending public money in highly inappropriate ways.

Would vouchers improve education? I doubt it. It will make it much easier for many people to add religion to the education mix at state expense. It will trample on the First Amendment guarantee against establishment of religion.

Perhaps we need to change our attitude and stop blaming public schools for everything that’s wrong in society. It’s not us v. the schools. The schools are us. Schools succeed admirably well, despite new challenges. They have performed incredibly well in educating and assimilating immigrant populations—for we were founded by immigrants and we will forever be a nation of immigrants—and in preparing a workforce.

We don’t do as well as some other first world countries, but we don’t put nearly as much into it as many of those nations either in time or in dollars. We don’t have universal pre-school education. Our children don’t have a track record of studying science and math and putting academics ahead of extracurricular fun.

So once again, and forever into the future, it is imperative to enter the labyrinth of school finance, even if the result falls short of ideal or even adequate. The alternative is too grim, too short-sighted and total disaster for a nation founded on the principle of free public education.