MoakCasey’s Dan Huberty, Chief Operating Officer, and Larry Taylor, Vice President, recently published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle advocating for increases in public education funding. Please feel free to share this with stakeholders in your community to help underscore the needs of public schools as we move toward the start of the 89th Legislature.
Take it from conservative former lawmakers: Texas schools need more money
Photo Credit: Sharon Steinmann, Houston Chronicle
Nearly 11% of American children attend a public school in Texas. Our state’s economy is the ninth largest in the world. Collectively, our students will have an outsized and generational impact on the nation.
As former members of the Texas Legislature who each chaired education committees, we know firsthand the awesome weight of that responsibility. We served together in 2018 on a bipartisan commission to get to the bottom of much-needed reforms to the state’s school funding and property tax formulas. The next session, we worked with lawmakers across the state from all political perspectives to pass landmark legislation, known as House Bill 3, that strategically invested over $6.5 billion of new public funding into our K-12 system and provided $5.1 billion in property tax relief. These investments were disproportionately targeted toward our students furthest behind academically.
Six months after the bill took effect, schools transitioned to remote learning or closed entirely due to the COVID pandemic. Four years later, there are troubling signs that our students aren’t doing well.
According to the most recent data published by the Texas Education Agency, less than half of Texas third graders are able to read on grade level, with performance down from the previous year. Math achievement is worse, hovering around 41% for grades 3-8. When looking at students from low-income households, African American students, Hispanic students and emerging bilingual students, their reading and math scores saw dips between 10 and 30%.
Let us be clear: As conservatives and former lawmakers, we know that funding is not the answer to every challenge facing our students. Budget decisions by local school boards can and should be scrutinized.
With that said, we are very concerned about the impact of stagnant per-pupil funding, which has not been raised since the 2019 legislative session. The state’s Legislative Budget Board (LBB), whose membership is 80% Republican and which is co-chaired by Republicans, recently published its report of school funding in the current budget cycle. This report showed that, in the 2019-2020 school year, public schools received around $11,011 in maintenance and operations funding per student from state and local sources.
That budget was passed by a Republican-led Legislature alongside historic tax cuts. It reflected the conservative values of this state and recognized the practical costs of running a public school, as well as made investments to improve resources for low-income students, students with dyslexia and others.
Compare that to where we stand now. According to the LBB’s comparison of constant dollars (which takes into account the effect of the significant inflation that has occurred since the 2019-20 school year), Texas public schools currently receive around $9,074 per student in the 2024-25 school year. That represents an 18% decrease in inflation-adjusted funding at a time when our public school leaders and teachers are trying to do the critical job of helping our students recover academically from the dramatic impact of COVID.
While school districts and public charter schools benefited from several emergency federal aid packages, those funds were one-time dollars specifically designed for expenses that would not occur outside of a global pandemic. Additionally, these aid packages required schools to spend down the dollars, which are now expired.
Every Texan can understand what it means to be running a household, a business or an organization on 2020 dollars in 2025. Not only has inflation been a challenge, but during this same time the Texas Legislature has also passed new policies that cost schools more money on an ongoing basis. New requirements for high-quality tutoring and for an armed guard on every public school campus, for example, are two important policies that the state has not yet funded.
Education policy will be at the forefront of the 2025 legislative session, and we are eager to work alongside all lawmakers and Texans to craft a budget proposal that recognizes historic rises in school costs and is mindful of fiscal stewardship.
The key tenets of the Texas Commission on Public School Finance, which ultimately became HB 3, have not changed. That bill passed unanimously, and its policies will result in academic gains if lawmakers continue bipartisan support of this foundational program.
As passionate supporters of a strong public education system, we are eager to work alongside policymakers and stakeholders from all points of view to ensure that our students receive the support they need to be prepared for life after high school.
Dan Huberty and Larry Taylor served as education committee chairs in the House and Senate, respectively, and stewarded the legislative passage of HB 3 in 2019.