The Difficulty of Funding Schools in Texas

An interactive walk through funding across Texas school districts. Scroll to Begin.

By: Matthew Conlen | November 15, 2017

As 2018 begins, the crisis of funding for Texas public schools is reaching a tipping point. Need among Texas school children is expanding at an unprecedented rate as school funding from the state is declining for traditional school districts. To make matters more complicated, the state legislature hasn’t updated its funding formulas — called “weights” — designed to help districts with high concentrations of poverty since the 1980s. Together, this has raised alarm with legislators, policy analysts, and education leaders from across Texas who believe we are losing generations of Texans to a broken school finance system that the State Legislature hasn’t fixed for almost 50 years.

Generations of children are being lost.
— Dan Huberty



Despite being one of the most important expenditures among state and local governments, many have difficulty understanding what’s wrong in Texas school finance because it has long been notoriously complex. If you stick with us by scrolling below, we’ll help explain in the simplest terms possible why so many in Texas are concerned for that the futures of 5.3 million school children are in jeopardy by a 50-year failure to fix school finance.

The State of Texas has been growing tremendously. But the state is getting poorer faster than it’s getting bigger and adjustments—called "weights"—to help districts with high concentrations of poverty haven't been updated since the 1980s.
The number of students who are economically disadvantaged has been increasing as well, from 1.7 million in 1995 to over 3 million in 2016.
Increase in students who are economically disadvantaged has been outpacing the general population growth, rising from 46% in 1995 to 59% in 2016.

The average amount of funding per student has increased during this period, individual districts are still feeling a squeeze.

To understand why, we have to examine where school districts get their money.

Districts receive money from state, federal and local funds. Federal funding accounts for only about 9% of district revenue on average, with the majority coming from state and local sources. Local funding comes largely from property taxes.

Since 2012 the proportion of funding coming from local property taxes has increased.

Property poor districts have long had a hard time keeping up. Wealthy districts are constrained by the instability of the system, many struggling to balance budgets.

A Virtual Gridlock

This reliance on local property taxes creates inequity in school funding: property wealthy districts are able to raise more money than poor districts with less effort. To address this, the state has instituted a program called recapture — commonly known as the “Robin Hood” plan — that redistributes funds from property wealthy districts to property poor districts.

While the program was designed to make school funding more fair, subsequent laws have created a holding pattern for both wealthy and poor districts.

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If we don't get this right, the future of Texas is bleak.
— Kevin Brown
Kids get one chance at an education.
— Chandra Villanueva

Combined, the future for the state’s 5.3 million children is at risk.

To find out how we got here, you have to go back to the west side of San Antonio in the early 70s when a group of Mexican-American families were locked in a Supreme Court battle against the state of Texas over whether Education is a constitutionally protected right.

TK: Link to story.