Voice in the Wilderness

[Yawn]….Yet another special session has been called by Governor Perry to solve the prickly issue of school finance. The Legislature appears to be getting closer to a solution, but not one as good as it could have been.

The school finance legislation is divided into two bills, HB 2 and HB 3. Generally speaking HB 2 is the school finance piece, with directs how the money should be spent. HB 3 is the tax piece, which identifies where the money is going to come from.

Thankfully, it appears there are some positive reforms in the current HB 2 that provides citizens a clearer window into school spending. Furthermore, as the Texas chapter of Americans for Prosperity recently pointed out, HB 2’s “65% solution” (where 65% of all education funding must go to direct instruction) would yield an additional $1.6B for instruction with no tax increases (By the way, the current ration of classroom versus non-classroom spending is about 50-50). Thus, the 65% solution would have the benefit of forcing school administrators to identify the true, administrative necessities and reduce the rest. So HB 2 has some very agreeable provisions, but it needs HB 3 to pass before it can become effective. That’s where mis-framing the issue has been problematic.

Letting school finance debate be defined only in terms of revenue sources has painted Republicans into a corner with HB 3. Shifting the tax burden to other taxpayers only opens up new taxing streams (which tend to increase over time) and often create “stealth taxes” that fewer people see. Moreover, every time a new tax is recommended, the lobby for the proposed new taxpayers gets up in arms. This leaves R’s shucking and jiving between constituencies that happen to be in the Lege’s sights for new taxation and continually tweaking HB 3 to cover a reduction in property taxes with other taxes. Thus, it is hard to come to a timely agreement.

If the issue would have been framed as “Why does public education cost so much?”, it would have unified the disparate constituencies the Lege is now alternately fighting and begging against those spendthrift public school administrators. Certainly, administrators and teachers unions are powerful lobbies. But uniting the various business and taxpayer groups behind the banner of education accountability and fiscal responsibility would have focused the debate and media attention on the spending indulged in by some public education officials and how to reign them in. As I blogged about earlier, it could have forced the public education regime to be more accountable for their profligate spending and helped stop spending above the rate of inflation and enrollment growth. In this case, the rate of growth in property taxes would have been decreased and any taxes levied on other constituencies would have been easier to swallow.

Furthermore, there is a successful precedent for this thinking from the 2003 regular session. Facing a $10B budget shortfall, the Republican leadership steadfastly refused to even discuss tax increases. They directed state agencies to zero out their existing budgets and rebuild them to justify each expense as well as identify a 7% budget reduction across the board. Approaching the issue this way immediately required state agencies to think about their core mission, how their expenditures mapped to their mission, who they were writing checks to and why. Why can't public schools be expected to do the same?

In other words, it is always a good idea to ask: “Where is the money going?” and “Why are we spending it?”

Permalink posted by Travis Fell @ 10:41 PM 6 comments links to this post