Texas’ school funding ranked “worst” in the country

One of these weeks the Texas Supreme Court will rule on the latest school finance suit. We don’t know if the court will uphold a lower court order for significant improvements in education funding, or if justices will merely wink at the state constitution and endorse the fiction that great public schools don’t require adequate and equitable resources.

The latter, of course, is the fiction still being peddled by our governor, lieutenant governor and legislative majority, and it is the reason that several hundred school districts filed the lawsuit in the first place.

Now, we have another national report – Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card — about how lousy a job Texas does on paying for our children’s education. In the report by the Education Law Center and Rutgers University, Texas is at or near the bottom on four school funding fairness issues. It gets an F in funding effort, a D in funding distribution among poor and wealthier districts and scores in the lower half of the funding level and coverage rankings.

Based on this report, the Intercultural Development Research Association calls Texas’s funding system the “worst in the United States.”

Educators and other public school advocates already knew it was bad. Now, we have more evidence.

Will the Texas Supreme Court agree?

http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/National_Report_Card_2016.pdf