Things could always be worse.
We could be living in Alabama, where last week a recount confirmed that the voters had narrowly rejected amending the state constitution to eliminate historical language (no longer enforceable) mandating racial segregation. Those opposing the amendment argued that their real, somehow purer motive was to maintain a provision denying Alabama’s children “any right to education or training at public expense.” Subtle moral philosophers, those Alabamans.
Back home in Texas, our reactionaries have a somewhat tougher task – getting around the plain language of the state Constitution mandating the establishment and support of “an efficient system of public free schools.” Those 19th-century socialists (at least for white people) forever put Texas politicians in somewhat of a bind, and in recent years they have devoted much time and energy to figuring out how to obey the letter of the Constitution on public education while evading its spirit.
Now that the other shoe has dropped in the latest iteration of the school finance lawsuit, Judge John Dietz’s writing is on the wall, and despite a pending appeal to the Supreme Court, the Legislature enters the new year with a renewed urgency to the same old mandate: finding serious money to pay for public education. Dietz issued his formal ruling and his extensive Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law last week, and whatever else happens in this litigation, he has made it difficult for the state, and especially the Legislature, to pretend that they are unaware of the actual circumstances and conditions under which our children and their teachers labor – whatever their school district.
Dietz’s analysis is a blistering and sobering litany of the serious financial limitations now governing all our schools, to which the primary contribution of the state in recent years – under the rubric of “accountability” – has been to make things worse. “Lieutenant Governor William Ratliff aptly stated that the State,” Dietz recounts from testimony, “by implementing more rigorous standards without providing additional resources, is asking districts to ‘make bricks without straw.'” Perhaps the biblical scholars down at the Capitol can parse that reference.
Read It and Weep That’s not to deny that many of Texas’ children are much less equal than others. Dietz has much to say about the inability of all school districts, under current law, to raise enough money to perform the very academic tasks that legislators struck by the religion of “higher standards” are insisting that the schools must do as a matter of course. Indeed Austin ISD, as both a “wealthy district” and one of the “focus districts” chosen by the parties as exemplary, provides one of several examples of those districts severely constrained by rising costs, an increasingly needy student population, and multiplying legal mandates. Since Austin is also a recapture district in a closed state system, our steadily increasing property taxes are “being used to subsidize the state funding system at the expense of the local taxpayers.”
But at least on the facilities side (as in the recent bond vote), Austinites still have the capacity to raise money to adequately house and provide for district students. In a dispiriting catalog of the poorer districts (mostly in South Texas), the judge documents in detail the consequences of the state’s decades-long neglect. In El Paso’s Ysleta ISD, for example, 58% of the school’s facilities have been determined to be “markedly unsatisfactory” and 87% need “considerable rehabilitation.” The state’s recent cutbacks on facility support programs, coupled with the inability of these districts (because they are property poor) to raise money on their own, mean that any notion of equitable access to adequate facilities (as required by the Constitution) simply does not exist. (Recent official estimates of the funds needed to bring facilities up to standard statewide run to more than $9 billion.)
The same is true in matters of compensatory funding for economically disadvantaged or limited-English students, for which the financial formulas set by the state – by admission of the state’s own witnesses – are entirely inadequate. In matters of teacher hiring, of equipment, of technical resources, of libraries, of books – district after district makes do with much less than the bare minimum, and with little prospect of improvement any time soon. In sum, in the dry but telling language of the court, the current state system “fails to provide [poorer] districts with sufficient access to revenue to provide for a general diffusion of knowledge to their students, in violation of the efficiency, suitability and adequacy provisions of Article VII Sec. 1 of the Texas Constitution.”
Small Comfort
Judge Dietz technically ordered the state to cease and desist in the current system immediately, but stayed his order until Oct. 1, 2005, to give the Lege “reasonable opportunity to cure the constitutional deficiencies.” The state is appealing directly to the Supreme Court, and reportedly there is some small political sentiment to delay action until the Supremes rule. The governor has restated his own priorities – lowering property taxes and ending recapture (“Robin Hood”) – although neither of those goals address either the court’s decision or the real, undeniable needs of the public schools.
At least some of the leadership – notably Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and former schoolteacher Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano – are saying that a serious funding plan will come out of the Senate (as it has before, to slim prospects). All of this foundered two years ago amid partisan rancor and the purblind institutional mantra of “No New Taxes,” so it is difficult to be confident that the new Lege will return with pure hearts and uplifted spirits and address the needs of the children of Texas. And it is not as though there are no other urgent needs going begging since 2003, like the little matter of a quarter of our citizens, many of them children, doing without health insurance.
Then again, things could be worse. We could be living in Alabama. 
Judge John Dietz’s Final Judgment as well as his Findings of Fact – well worth reviewing for anyone interested in public education – are available on the Texas Education Agency Web site, www.tea.state.tx.us.
This article appears in December 10 • 2004.
