Thank You Senator Davis

Stout Resistance Slows, Then Stops an Awful School-Finance Bill; Special Session Could Be Called

By a closer margin than expected, the Texas House passed a bad school-finance bill Sunday night, but the bill was stopped dead in the Senate at midnight thanks to a filibuster by Sen. Wendy Davis, Democrat of Fort Worth. The House debate and Davis’s filibuster speech brought into sharp focus the strong reasons for opposing SB 1811, which contains the enforcement mechanism for the deep cuts in public education included in the 2012-2013 budget bill passed yesterday.
 
The school-finance plan was cobbled together at the last minute by House and Senate leaders and only shared with rank-and-file members of each chamber on Sunday morning. The more lawmakers saw of the bill over the course of the day, the less they liked it.

In the ensuing floor debate, Rep. Scott Hochberg, Democrat of Houston, did a fine job of explaining a new and dangerous feature of the plan, under which districts could no longer count on the state to deliver even the radically reduced amount of school aid promised under revised state funding formulas. Under current law, if state aid falls short of the promised amount in a given year, the state remains obligated to make up for the shortfall the next year. Under SB 1811, the state’s obligation would be canceled, and the school districts would be out of luck.

House debate also heightened concerns about the profound inequity of this proposed school-finance plan. Under SB 1811, lower-wealth school districts that already are at a huge disadvantage financially would bear the brunt of $4 billion in cuts in state aid. The lower-wealth districts already are making do with per-pupil funding more than $1,000 below the amount guaranteed for the top 15 percent of districts. Yet, as the Equity Center, an advocacy and research group for low-wealth districts, reported today, this new plan “was designed to prioritize the highest-funded districts over the lower-funded.” The Equity Center analysis of the SB 1811 plan found that it would widen the advantage for the highest-funded districts over the lowest-funded to $2,000 per weighted pupil after fiscal 2012.