Last year, public education advocates urged lawmakers to increase the basic allotment, or the base amount of money schools receive per student. The basic allotment has not changed since 2019, when it was raised to $6,160.
To break down the Lone Star State’s complex school finance system, Community Impact spoke with Bob Popinski, the senior policy director for Raise Your Hand Texas, an education policy nonprofit. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you share an overview of how Texas public schools are funded? Where does the money come from?
It’s a complex system, right? We have 5.5 million kids; we have close to 70,000 teachers [and] another equivalent in staff and administration. And so, when you look at Texas as a whole, it is a large, complex system with lots of different student characteristics and district characteristics, whether you're rural, or urban or suburban. Right now, Texas is in the bottom 10 [states] for per-student funding. We're roughly about $4,800 below the national average, according to a new National Education Association report.
[Texas uses] what is known as an equalized system. It means that the legislature sets the amount of per-student funding and a district is guaranteed that amount. [District] revenue comes from a couple of different sources: It comes from local school district property taxes and it comes from general revenue from the state. The state gets its general revenue from sales tax, oil and gas taxes, [and more].
A little bit of the portion moving to schools for targeted programs is federal funding. So on average, when you look at per-student funding across the state, the funding that actually gets down into the classrooms—that pays for day to day operations like teachers and cafeteria workers and bus drivers and school principals—is roughly about $10,000 per student, on average, across the state.
Districts across Texas are facing high budget shortfalls for the next fiscal year. What factors contribute to that?
It is a mixture of about eight or nine different things, and they all impact school districts differently, but there are two driving factors that are impacting most districts. Since 2019, the last time we saw any increase to our school funding formulas, inflation has gone up 22%. That is the biggest driving factor out there.
Everyone knows how that feels, right? So school districts are operating at roughly a $1,400 deficit from where they were in 2019. When you look at the basic allotment—[which is] kind of the building block for our school funding formula—it’s at $6,160, and that hasn't been updated since 2019. So inflation is the biggest driving factor.
Federal stimulus funding is ending. And school districts knew that ... but it doesn't mean that the post-pandemic student achievement loss has gone away. There are still state requirements out there for accelerated instruction and high-dosage tutoring if your student is failing the [State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness] exam. There's still a lot of programs that are in place to help students with their academic progress that school districts would like to continue, but because that federal stimulus funding is going away, it may not be available to them.
In addition to those two major driving factors, there are some school districts out there experiencing enrollment decline. Think of it this way: if every student draws down about $10,000 to pay for teachers, and you lose 10 kids, that is $100,000 that the school district doesn't have to pay for a teacher salary. But you still have to have a teacher in the classroom and you still have to have a bus driver and you still have to be able to turn the lights and the air conditioning on. So those are big, kind of fixed costs that a school district doesn't necessarily control.
[Schools are also] identifying more special education students than ever, especially dyslexia students. And that identification costs some money. In addition to that, there's a new law saying you have to have an armed security guard on each campus. School districts are trying to come up with and maintain the funding for that. When they passed that law ... they only increased the school safety allotment by 28 cents per student and $15,000 per campus. And that's woefully short of what it actually costs to have that personnel on your campus.
There's just a mix of things that are really pressuring school districts into having to make and adopt deficit budgets or cut programs. And that is a big problem moving into not only next school year, but the school year after that, because the legislature doesn't meet until January of 2025 and [lawmakers] typically don't adopt everything until the end of May.
The 89th Texas Legislature convenes in January. What’s on your radar for the next legislative session, and what should Texans keep an eye out for?
School funding is going to be one of the priorities that the legislature is going to have to take care of. The comptroller [said July 17] that there's over $21.2 billion available in additional state revenue right now. That includes $4.5 billion that wasn't spent on school district funding formulas, because nothing passed last legislative session. So I hope first and foremost, they kind of make sure that school districts are keeping pace with inflation and more importantly, keeping pace with the needs that they have to make sure our students are achieving.
Special education is going to be an important issue. Are we still identifying the kids we need to identify; are we funding our special education formulas the right way? Last time I looked, there was a $1.8 billion dollar shortfall in special education funding. That's putting pressure on kids.
In addition to that, school vouchers—as we've seen over the last election cycle and last legislative session—there is going to be a huge push to get that across the finish line next legislative session. And what [Raise Your Hand Texas] hopes is that Texas is learning from other states on why this is still bad policy for our state. If you look at other states that have passed universal voucher systems within the last year or two, it's not surprising some of the issues that they're having.
If you look at Arizona, they're facing over a $1 billion budget shortfall ... because most of the kids that are using those universal vouchers already attended private schools the previous year—anywhere between 70% and 80%, depending on which state you look at. [We’ve] seen a significant increase in private school tuition, and some states are even doing tiered tuitions, where if you get the universal voucher, you actually owe more in tuition. So there's a lot of things and a lot of guardrails that I hope our legislators look at when they're looking at a voucher program.
At the end of the day, we have so many more things that we need to focus on with 5.5 million kids in our state. We need to boost not only our teacher workforce, but we need to make sure that we have an accountability and assessment system that is doing right by our kids. And we want it to be fair across both spectrums—we want it to be rigorous not only in public schools, but we want it to be rigorous for those at private schools [and other education systems]. So yes, there's a lot of interesting things that are going to take place next legislative session.
