Claim of a state increase in school spending is false
By STATE REP. SYLVESTER TURNER
June 28, 2011, 7:35PM
Some of the leaders in our Texas Legislature are making the claim that the state budget expected to be signed by Gov. Rick Perry will give $1.6 billion to $3 billion more to our public schools than the previous budget.
It’s simply not true.
In fact, the Legislature’s own "fiscal note," which analyzes the financial impact of legislation, says that there is a "savings to the state" — meaning a reduction in aid to school districts – of $4 billion over the next two years. And some are proposing that those cuts be extended for three years after that – a total cut of $10 billion from our public schools. So how can state leaders make such claims if the statements aren’t true? Simple. They use the propagandists’ technique of cherry-picking a true bit of information and putting it into a context where the result proves a false statement.
Here is how they did it.
Our public schools are funded out of a combination of many different accounts in the state treasury. At the very end of the 2009 legislative session, legislators sharply reduced the amount of general state tax revenue put into the Foundation School Fund and substituted federal stimulus money in its place. So the first thing they did was compare the general revenue from the upcoming budget to that artificially reduced level from last biennium.
Second, they left out some important changes that occurred after the previous budget was adopted. On one hand, the amount appropriated last session was not enough to fully pay for the cost of the Foundation School Program, so a supplemental appropriation of an additional $550 million had to be made to fully fund our schools for the school year just ending. On the other hand, Senate Bill 2 will reduce the school funding appropriation by $800 million based on a decision to increase the estimate of how much local school district taxes will go up and to decrease the estimated number of new students. Additionally, Senate Bill 1 of the special session will further cut $2.3 billion from state aid to schools by delaying the payment to schools for the last month of the 2013 fiscal year into the first month of the following budget year, although the schools will theoretically get that money eventually.
Next, there is the little issue of declining property values. Because state aid is intended to make up for costs that are greater than what the schools can raise with local property taxes, when property values go up, the amount the state is required to provide goes down – and the Legislature frequently has been happy to shift that money to other purposes. Now that property values are declining, the cost the state is supposed to pay is going up, but those same legislators who gladly skimmed the money from our schools when values rose are refusing to make good when values are falling. Instead, they want local schools to eat that loss.
Finally, there is the cost of new students. We add 75,000 to 80,000 new students to our schools each year.
The Legislature is failing to pay for the students we will add over the next two years, for the first time since the Foundation School Program was created in 1949. Comparing spending for the coming two years to the prior two years (rather than to twice the cost of the second year, which has been the long-standing method of comparison) pretends that the growth that occurred last biennium can magically be reversed.
The new students we added this past year increased the cost to our schools by more than $500 million per year. As part of their false claim, our leaders want to pretend that we should compare the first year of the coming biennium to the first year of the last, when those students weren’t yet there. That alone makes up more than one-third of their phony increase.
These new students Texas will add over the next two years will increase costs – and what the state is supposed to pay for – by more than $2.2 billion, just to maintain current funding levels with more children. Our Texas Constitution says that "it shall be the duty of the Legislature" to provide for the education of those children. I took an oath to uphold that Constitution, as did our leaders.
There are projected to be 368,000 more students in 2013 than were estimated for 2008. In 2007, we appropriated an average of $4,580 in state aid per student over that biennium. For the coming two years, that number will be $4,043 – a cut of $537 per student, or almost 12 percent.
Those are the facts. The claims of an increase are just spin.
Turner, a Democrat, represents state House District 139 in Northwest Houston.
