Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to cut property taxes will starve public schools while he sends state money to private schools.
Texas already ranks 47th in the nation in public school funding and pays teachers $10,000 less a year than the national average. No surprise then that Texas students trail the nation in reading and math scores, according to the Nation’s Report Card, a nonprofit that analyzes testing data.
The Legislature increased public school funding by $8 billion for the next two years, but it was the first increase in state funding since 2019 and doesn’t keep up with inflation. Lawmakers then promised to spend $1 billion in state tax revenue to send 100,000 kids to private schools.
Tying the hands of school boards will guarantee they will have to close more schools and cut more teachers, explained Clay Robison, spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association.
“Abbott does not really care about public education; his focus now is on private schools, charter schools, and giving them all the tax dollars,” he told me. “More teachers are going to quit.”
This might be a controversial opinion, and I am almost certainly uninformed on the Texas public school system as a whole, but from what I’ve seen they are not hurting for funding. Their high schools and middle schools have sports equipment that would make your local school insanely jealous. Some of the stadiums those kids play in are crazy nice, and they often have their own announcer crew, complete with ways to broadcast the game to multiple platforms.
More of that money should be diverted to the teachers obviously, but overall I think they have plenty of money to go around, from what I’ve seen.
If you live in a rural town of 5000 slack jawed yokels, the state sends you a ton of money paid for by the taxes of blue cities in Texas. This is what they use to build multi-million dollar football stadiums while teachers in blue cities have to start GoFundMe’s for school supplies. All the while, the governor’s goal is to make sure that public school children are taught that Jesus walked hand in hand with dinosaurs.
Yeah, that’s fucked. So as usual, the money is there it’s just being spent on the wrong things for the wrong people.
Like a quarter of the state constitutional amendments that passed this election reduce tax sources for schools for what it’s worth.