Burnt Orange Report

HB 2 Voted Out of Committee

By Andrew Dobbs

House Bill 2, the school finance bill, was voted out of the House Public Education Committee today in a short meeting at Grusendorf's desk on the House floor upon adjournment. Most think that the debate will begin on the bill on Monday or Tuesday of next week and it promises to be a blood bath. Hearings on the bill this week found only 1 witness in favor of the bill and an odd alliance of property rich and property poor school districts, along with teachers, administrators and others all joining forces to denounce the bill.

For a recap on why everyone hates the bill, we'll start with Quorum Report, one of the better places to start on these things (though paid subscription is required):

Property-wealthy school districts, represented by Clayton Downing of the Texas School Coalition, could not support the bill because they, like others, don't believe the money goes far enough. Many, in fact, fear that enrichment dollars will have to be used to cover current programs. That's no bargain and little gain. In cases like Lewisville, Downing's home district, new money represents adds no more than the cost of inflation. Others dislike the fact that the bill cannot make whole what already has been cut from budgets. (...)

Property-poor districts, represented by Wayne Pierce of the Equity Center, also have problems with the formula. For someone like Pierce, who has put his life's blood into the ideal of true equity, the numbers just don't work. The system maintains “hold harmless” provisions – that's typical of prior school finance bills – but Pierce considers pushing those inequities forward to be no more than perpetuating current problems. Combined with the 35 percent cap, it puts about 70 school districts outside the equalized system, which Pierce points out is the same place the state was when Edgewood began.

Even beyond the property-poor districts are those that are both property poor and educate high-needs children. Superintendent Danny King of Hidalgo ISD, who represented the South Texas Association of Schools, argued that the real measure of equity is not a dollar amount, but the ability to move children in different districts up to the same achievement levels. He countered Branch's assertion that federal dollars meant property-poor districts spent more than property-wealthy districts, saying that it costs far more to educate high-needs children in Hidalgo than it does in wealthy suburban communities.

What was not said in testimony – but has been said outside the meetings – is that school districts wanted a long-term fix to the school finance system. For many of the school districts that have hit the property tax cap – and that's now 700 school districts – the last three to five years have been a task of squeezing more into limited budgets. Promised that the new formula that would “fix” the system with new capacity, the new school finance system appears to be no better than the old one with a new coat of paint.

Teacher groups spoke, all in favor of across-the-board pay raises. That's no surprise. Some committee members consider the teacher groups' opposition to merit pay to be baseless, but if you listened closely to the testimony, some are open to the concept but are concerned with the implementation process. Ted Melina Raab of the Texas Federation of Teachers pointed out what most research on merit pay has indicated, which is that significant teacher involvement must be a part of the creation of merit pay to make the process work. Raab did not consider the language in the bill to go far enough to that end.

On more specific measures, the president of the Texas Elementary School Principals Association questioned why funding for other successful programs for early grades appeared to be cut under the bill, given that the state now retains the third- and fifth-grade students who fail portions of the state-mandated tests. (...)

And then, when the committee had heard plenty of negatives – and everyone was fairly pleasant about it, actually – Scott McCown stepped forward. McCown, the District Judge in the Edgewood cases, told the committee there were two visions of Texas education – one with substantial investment for high achievement and the other with minimal dollars and no new taxes. You can guess which one HB 2 was.

Some question why wealthy school districts can't have “a little bit more,” McCown said. By maintaining equity, everyone remains in the same boat. Everyone has the same imperative to be heard. Equity protects all children, McCown said.

“School districts ask, 'If you have enough, why do you care if I have more?'” McCown said. “Equity is a test of political sincerity. If I truly have enough, and you ask me, 'Why do you need more than I have?' then the answer is, 'I don't truly have enough.”

So, I don't want to rip Harvey off too much, but that is the jist of what went down. Property wealthy districts don't like the bill because there is hardly any new money and the enrichment tax ($0.10 per $100 of property value) is unlikely to cover their expenses. Property poor districts don't like the bill because it does nothing to increase equity and in fact takes us back to pre-Edgewood (the original Texas school finance case) levels of inequity. Teachers don't like it because the merit pay proposals strike them as unfair and insufficient, administrators don't like the cuts to successful programs and the later school start date. Everyone in the education community is dead set against the bill, and the Senate hasn't even taken a crack at the thing yet.

As if all of this weren't enough, the whole funding system is starting to fall apart. At the beginning of the session HB 2 was paired with HB 3- they were two halves of the same whole. The idea was that HB 2 would define how the money would be spent, HB 3 would come up with the money while cutting property taxes. But with the wrangling over revenue sources to make up for the shortfall that will arise with the massive property tax cuts (namely over gambling) and what is soon to emerge as a struggle over the back door income tax, the two are too difficult to handle at the same time. So now HB 3 is simply a tax relief bill, HB 2 is simply an education reform bill and the money for HB 2 is going to have to come out of the budget some how. $3 billion is what has been promised, but how they can guarantee that when there isn't enough money in the bank to fund our current programs at their current levels has yet to be answered.

Harvey puts it this way:

Okay. So here is what you can extrapolate, intended or not, from the discussion: Funding for HB 2 comes from the appropriations bill, not HB 3. HB 3 is a property tax relief bill, with any excess funding going to property tax relief rather than additional education funding. The $3 billion for new educational funding pegged in HB 2 is an arbitrary amount the Republicans determined prior to the beginning of the appropriations process. It was not the result of the appropriations process. In other words, the bill will fit the funding rather than the available funding fitting the bill. The amount may have little or nothing to do with the “costing out” study completed last session, which Republicans now insist was simply a “guidepost” for funding amounts. Until the LBB runs are available, it’s still unclear how much of the new money will go to discretionary funding and how much will go to mandates.

Yeah, so all of the work done last session was really unnecessary because in their desperation the GOP just came up with a number and are going to try and find the money for education somewhere. Rather than saying "this bill designs an equitable system, this is how much we need to achieve this, this is how we will get that money", the GOP is now saying "this is how much money we'd like to have, God willing and the creek don't rise we'll be able to jimmy-rig an equitable system out of it, assuming we can find the cash somewhere." Sloppy policy making at its worst.

This bill is an inequitable, insufficient, despised piece of boneheaded malarkey that has been molested by a dozen short-sighted politicians more interested in pleasing lobbyists and winning reelection. If it passes the House, it will be a miracle. If it passes the Senate it will probably portend the end of the world. As it stands, a fight is about to come down and the one thing the GOP promised to do in 2005 will be another broken promise.

Texas deserves better, but until they start voting for new leadership they won't realize how much they are being shortchanged right now.