Senate Wheels Still Spinning

Sen. Florence Shapiro

If there's any rush to get a new public school finance plan passed by the May 19 end-of-session deadline, you couldn't prove it this week by the Senate, which convened a "committee of the whole" to start the ball rolling again – from the bottom of the hill. With a week left in the session – and the governor cheerfully promising to call another – Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, chair of the Senate Education Committee, entertained a string of expert witnesses on various education subjects – just as if the past year or so of interim committee studies had never taken place. First on the agenda were "performance incentives," high on the governor's list but less so on those of teachers groups, who question whether "value-added" rewards can be fairly applied, and whether they are simply a method of avoiding pay increases for all teaching personnel.

Meanwhile, backroom conversations pursued an elusive consensus, and the senators told reporters that they were frankly reluctant to draft a tax bill to fund the plan without some assurance of support from the governor and the House – which had resoundingly punted the whole mess to the Senate the week before. Despite melodramatic House opposition and a threat of a filibuster from Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Lewisville, some senators were still floating "video lottery terminals" (slot machines) as the only possible solution to the revenue crunch. Ken Armbrister, D-Victoria, and Jon Lindsay, R-Houston, suggested that if the slots were spread more evenly around the state (i.e., if more of them were in their own districts) somehow the support would materialize for turning Texas into Casino Central.

In addition to the VLTs, various senators are proposing a statewide property tax and variations on a statewide business tax to allow major cuts in property taxes. "Frankly, we've gotten to the point that passing nothing may well be success," Scott McCown of the Center for Public Policy Priorities told an audience of school administrators and businessmen gathered Monday night for a Border Education Summit sponsored by Sen. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville. McCown and Wayne Pierce of the Equity Center continued to point out that nearly 90% of school districts and students benefit from the recapture system ("Robin Hood"), and that the problem is not the system itself but the lack of money to fund it. "If your car runs out of gas," says McCown, "you don't pay a mechanic a lot of money to reconstruct the engine. You buy more gas."

McCown said bluntly that all the plans currently under consideration at the Capitol "are worse than what we have now," and insisted that eliminating Robin Hood while maintaining equity is simply not possible "without a major reform of the state tax structure" – and that there is as yet no political will to accomplish that task.