Texas budget writers anticipate losing court case over school funding

Top Texas budget writers anticipate losing court case over school funding
Austin Bureau
31 January 2013 11:10 PM

AUSTIN — The Legislature’s top budget writers indicated Thursday that they are pessimistic about the state’s chances of winning in a lawsuit brought by hundreds of school districts, though they said they haven’t seen harm to public schools from budget cuts enacted two years ago. Sen. Tommy Williams and Rep. Jim Pitts said that the state should set aside money in the budget — or leave money unspent — in case the Texas Supreme Court rules against the state late this year or next year. The districts’ suit argues that state school aid formulas are unconstitutionally unequal and their funding inadequate. “We’re looking at … an epic battle on this in 2014,” said Williams, R-The Woodlands.



He and Pitts appeared Thursday at a forum sponsored by the Texas Tribune. He added that some school officials have told him the cuts helped them eliminate unneeded staff. “I’ve had some superintendents from very large school districts say, ‘Thank you, I never could’ve fired these administrators unless you cut my funding,’” Williams said. “They won’t say it publicly but they say it privately.”
Pitts, a former school board member, said he’s also not seen devastation from the Legislature’s $5.3 billion in school cuts last session. “I have not seen the layoffs,” said Pitts, R-Waxahachie. “I haven’t seen the teachers and the school superintendents having to come to me and say, ‘Oh, woe is me.’”
He quickly added, “I’ll probably get the calls now.”
Williams said he agrees with an idea floated by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst several weeks ago that budget writers set aside a couple of billion as a reserve against a court loss. Williams said the set-aside might be between $1.8 billion and $2.2 billion. Pitts indicated lawmakers will probably have unspent revenue because of the constitutional cap on spending. He didn’t estimate how much. Pitts, though, said the school lawsuit’s outcome — and Texas’ recent experience with an up and down economy and volatile revenues — gives him pause about Gov. Rick Perry’s call for $1.8 billion in tax relief this session. “I don’t want to tell Texans that we’re going to do a tax relief [package] when we’ve got all these expenses that we need to cover,” he said.
Pitts also criticized Perry’s proposal to draw $840 million for the unspecified tax cuts from the state’s rainy day fund. For a tax reduction not to be temporary, “it’s going to have to be a continuous draw on the rainy day fund,” he said.

Senators Grill TEA Chief on Testing, School Funding
by Morgan Smith

When Commissioner Michael Williams appeared before state senators Wednesday to ask them to add money to the Texas Education Agency's budget, they had a few questions of their own.

Williams testified at the Senate Finance Committee's initial hearing on the $186.8 billion budget it released earlier this month, and among the commissioner's requests were another $22 million to fulfill "state and federal testing requirements" and the restoration of a proposed $2.6 million cut in funding for agency administrative operations. Senators took the opportunity to probe the new agency chief on his priorities for public education in the state — particularly in the areas of accountability and funding grants for pre-kindergarten and remedial tutoring.

Gov. Rick Perry appointed Williams, who had served more than a decade on the state's Railroad Commission, in August. Williams took over an agency that was in the middle of navigating a rocky transition to a new student assessment system and had lost more than a third of its workforce because of state budget cuts in 2011. 


At Wednesday's hearing, Williams said the Senate's proposed reduction of an additional $2.6 million in funding to the agency — which would mean the loss of another 24 full-time employees — would be "extremely difficult to manage."


"The agency is down, quite frankly, to bare bones now," he said.

But lawmakers were more focused on the request for an additional $22 million in funding for assessment. Sen. Kel Seliger, the Midland Republican who chairs the upper chamber's higher education committee, kicked off the questioning by inquiring how much the agency currently spends on student assessment. A $468 million, five-year contract with Pearson to administer the state's new standardized exams has proven controversial amid a growing backlash against high-stakes testing in the state.

"Is this $22 million just added to that $468 million?" asked Seliger, who is one of several lawmakers who has proposed legislation restructuring the current system.

The subject arose again in an exchange with Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, who interrupted the commissioner as he was answering her question on how much the state spent on student testing.

"I'm almost afraid to say this, but last year we gave 8 million tests," Williams said.

After Nelson interjected to ask if that was too many, Williams responded by saying the Legislature should be proud of the rigor that the new student assessment system imposes, and that it encourages a focus on "every kid in every classroom."

Unsatisfied, Nelson again asked if the state was testing students too much.

"We measure what we treasure," Williams said. But he added that changes could be made in how tests count toward final grades or graduation requirements.

"Right now that doesn't answer my question, which is, are we testing these children too much, and are we spending too much money?" Nelson said, before moving on.

In his testimony, Williams also indicated that he would be unlikely to push for more funding for the Student Success Initiative, a program that provides remedial instruction for fifth and eighth grade students who don't pass state standardized tests and that was all but zeroed out in the 2011 budget. State law requires the commissioner to certify that the initiative has adequate resources for a ban on social promotion to take effect — and Williams' predecessor, Robert Scott, threatened that he would not certify it unless the 2013 Legislature restored that funding.

When questioned by Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, Williams was reluctant to endorse the program, which in the Senate's budget is funded at roughly the 2011 level. He said he thought the state could get "more bang with a different kind of paradigm," citing improvements in technology that allowed for online assistance for teachers in diagnosing whether students were learning the material.

The commissioner offered a reason that the agency is not pushing for the restoration of more specialized grants that supported programs like Student Success Initiative and full day pre-kindergarten: The state is currently on trial in a lawsuit involving most of its school districts over the way it funds public schools following the 2011 Legislature's more than $5 billion reduction to public education funding.

"There are any number of good or great programs the state has been funding," he said. But because of the litigation, he said, "it's prudent to see what the court is going to do."





This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/UWjfrg.