This lesson is bit of math and history combined.
After nearly nine months of questions about whether state lawmakers would move forward on a so-called school voucher plan, the KSAT Explains team decided to look at how public schools in Texas are funded.
A key criticism of the school voucher plan has been that it would take money away from public schools.
Let’s start with the math
Public schools get money from the state and from local property owners through property tax.
The state uses a formula to determine how much money a school district receives. Within that is what’s called a ‘basic allotment.’
“That is, in essence, the funding that is guaranteed per pupil to every every district across every campus in the state,” said Northside Independent School District Superintendent John Craft.
That dollar amount is $6,160 per student.
The basic allotment does not change year after year even if costs do.
The last time the amount was adjusted by the state was in 2019.
The allotment is not given to schools based on how many students are enrolled, but rather how many students show up.
“It’s called ADA or average daily attendance,” Craft said. “It’s basically the number of students on average that come to school each and every day. That’s how school districts receive their funding.”
In addition to the basic allotment, there are weights added on top of that number that increase how much money a district receives from the state.
“Some students that have special needs cost more to educate than others. For example, there will be a career technical education weight that is a little bit more than, say, your general education weight because of the materials, the cost of equipment,” Craft said. “It’s just a more expensive program to run.”
The basic allotment in addition to various weights determined by the needs of student population is the dollar amount the state determines a school district is entitled to, also known as its “entitlement.”
Here’s the history
Before the mid-1990′s, Texas public schools were funded on property taxes.
In 1968, parents in the Edgewood Independent School District tried to change that and some 450 students walked out of class to demand more equitable school funding.
Diana Herrera, a teacher in Edgewood ISD for 30 years, was a junior at Edgewood High School when the walkout took place.
Herrera said the fight began when Edgewood students who wanted to attend college began realizing they did not meet the requirements.
“As they start looking into it they find that many of our teachers were not degreed. Many of them were not certified,” she said.
School facilities were also lacking.
“No hot water, no fans. The library was minimally used,” Herrera said. “Poor science labs and on and on and on and on.”
An Edgewood parent, Demetrio Rodriguez, filed a lawsuit with the help the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or MALDEF.
The civil rights organization was founded in San Antonio in 1968, the same year as the walkout.
Herrera, who did not walk out of class that day, remembers watching her classmates file out of the school building despite many of the exits being blocked by staff.
“Then at that point in ‘68, they were going to cross U.S. Highway 90. So, by that time, SAPD is around,” Herrera said. “But to our great satisfaction, SAPD were Edgewood grads, you know, many of the police officers were Edgewood grads. So what they did is they held back traffic on Highway 90 and let these kids walk by and cross over. As soon as they cross over, the Edgewood main office is there.”
“There was a federal court lawsuit back in 1968 through 1973, which really was Edgewood compared to Alamo Heights and then expanded to look at the whole state for districts versus rich districts,” said Albert Kauffman, professor of law at St. Mary’s University and former senior litigating attorney for MALDEF.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Texas school funding as a result of that suit.
Kauffman did not represent Edgewood ISD in the1968 lawsuit, but did in 1984 when Edgewood ISD filed another lawsuit again challenging school funding.
Despite the passage of nearly two decades, the 1984 lawsuit dealt with a lot of the same claims in the 1968 suit.
“Their schools, the physical buildings, were in worse shape than the other schools. They didn’t have enough teachers. They had too many teachers on emergency certificates,” Kauffman said. “And to make it even worse, these poor districts generally had more students who cost more to educate.”
The lawsuit was Edgewood ISD vs. Kirby, the state’s education commissioner at the time.
In 1989, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of Edgewood.
“The Supreme Court of Texas found that this system was not efficient. It wasted a lot of state money,” Kauffman said. “It was not equalized and didn’t give equal rights to students in poor districts and rich districts and therefore violated the Texas Constitution.”
The court did not tell the state legislature how to fix those violations, which did make some changes after the ruling.
“The legislature came up with a new system, which did put some more money into the system but didn’t really equalize,” Kauffman said.
MALDEF filed another lawsuit.
“We called it Edgewood II sometimes,” Kauffman said.
That second lawsuit would not be the last. Kauffman worked on the various iterations of the case from 1984 to 2002.
But 1995 brought a key development.
“Basically in ‘95 was the first time the legislature came up with a system that the Texas Supreme Court approved of,” Kauffman said.
That was something called recapture.
Property taxes taken from one district and sent to another
The process of recapture is still used to fund Texas public schools, though now the process is referred to as Excess Revenue.
It puts schools in two categories:
- those that must spread the wealth
- those that need the money
Schools that have what the state deems an excess must send the money back to the state for it to be redistributed to other school districts.
It’s a system that’s been dubbed “Robinhood” by some.
To calculate how much money a district must send back, the state compares a district’s property tax revenue to its entitlement.
Remember that previous math we did?
Basic allotment + weights = entitlement
The difference between entitlement and property tax revenue is how much money the state gives a district.
Entitlement - property tax revenue = state funding
If property tax revenue is more than the entitlement amount, that’s an excess.
Property tax revenue > entitlement
And that dollar difference goes back to the state.
Property tax revenue - entitlement = excess revenue
A difference is what Herrera noticed within Edgewood ISD almost immediately, she says, after recapture was put in place.
“I saw the first degreed PE coach, the first degreed librarian. We had never had a degreed librarian, Herrera recalls. “The first degreed reading teacher, the first degreed dyslexia- we had never had a dyslexia teacher ever!”
So, what does recapture look like on the flip side?
Let’s look at Alamo Heights ISD, for example, which was the same district Edgewood parents began looking at before filing the 1968 lawsuit.
According to the district’s online records, AHISD had a recapture amount of $33,985,335 in 2022.
That was nearly 47% of its property tax revenue.
More than 30 years after the landmark outcome of the Edgewood ISD lawsuit, questions about the future of Texas public school funding are still swirling, prompted by school voucher proposals, unfunded safety mandates, property tax compression and more.
“Why are we not adequately funding and especially supporting our classroom teachers, in particular, with appropriate funding when we know that the funding is there?” Craft asked.
“They continue to demand and mandate, and yet they continue to cut,” Herrera said.