Grading Texas

Clay Robison’s report card on education and the Texas political arena

Immoral is a very judgmental word, often used to describe the behavior of people who display little regard for societal norms of fairness or decency. It also is used to describe unsavory business practices that prey on the poor or extreme political decisions, such as terrorist acts or military invasions that impose death and physical, financial and emotional suffering on large numbers of innocent people.

The word, however, is normally not used to describe a tax, at least not since the Boston Tea Party. Many other words – sometimes foul and often in anger – are uttered every day against taxes, but one witness – economist Vance Ginn -- called the property tax “fundamentally immoral” in a recent hearing before the state Senate’s Finance Committee.

Ginn is the former chief economist at the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation. His and TPPF’s ultimate goal is to eliminate the property tax, a goal they are not likely to reach. But they will continue trying to chip away at it, endangering a critical funding source for local governments, especially school districts.

There is nothing immoral per se about property taxes or any other tax because the revenue they raise helps pay for the facilities and services the public needs – schools; highways; clean water and sanitation facilities; police and fire protection; and national defense, to name a few. But there are serious problems with how the tax load is distributed in Texas, where the wealthier you are, the better the tax deal you get, while the poorest Texans pay the biggest share of their income in taxes. This is called a regressive tax system, and it is immoral.

In a recent study of tax systems in all 50 states, the non-profit, non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) concluded that Texas – with its heavy dependence on property and sales taxes and absence of a state income tax – has the seventh most regressive tax system in the country.

The study determined that Texas households in the lowest 20 percent of income – those with incomes less than $21,700 per year – pay almost three times (12.8 percent) the proportion of their income in sales, property and other Texas taxes than households in the top 1 percent of income – people with incomes of more than $744,800 a year – who pay only 4.6 percent in state and local taxes.

Households in the middle 60 percent of income ($21,700 to $134,200) pay an average of 9.5 percent.

Many of the lowest income earners in Texas are immigrants (they don’t get a free ride on taxes), and many are renters who help their landlords pay their property taxes but don’t benefit from the homestead exemption tax breaks their landlords receive. And the lowest-paid Texans don’t get the business tax breaks that some of the wealthiest Texans get for their companies.

After analyzing the ITEP report, Dick Lavine, senior fiscal analyst for Every Texan, noted that the state comptroller also produces a study of tax incidence, showing by business sector and family income who pays Texas taxes and who doesn’t. He said the two studies differ in some specifics but reach the same conclusion: “Texas public services are supported by an unfair tax system that takes the most from those who can afford it the least.”

I repeat. That is what’s immoral about Texas taxes.

Clay Robison

Were Donald Trump to win the presidency in November, it may be an exaggeration to say he would take us all the way back to the Dark Ages, but it is no exaggeration to say he would take our country to a darker time.

A time of detention camps along the border, segregated schools, classrooms where hostile acts toward kids who are “different” are tolerated and bleaker economic prospects for millions of middle-class workers, including many of Trump’s own MAGA supporters.

Trump is not talking about these consequences as he tours the country promising to make America “great” again. But a well-heeled group of Trump supporters at the right-wing Heritage Foundation has already drafted a detailed plan, several hundred pages long, for Trump to begin implementing right after Inauguration Day. If carried out, it would begin to destroy our public education system and inflict much damage to our democracy as well.

This plan, called Project 2025, would abolish the U.S. Department of Education and create a national voucher system by diverting billions of federal education tax dollars to religious and other private schools. This would be done through a system of no-strings-attached block grants to the states. In time, this practice would result in a dual but unequal education system of well-funded private and religious schools and under-funded public schools, with students segregated by family income.

Wealthy and upper middle-class families would receive tax subsidies for tuition payments most of them could already afford, while low-income kids, including millions of children of color, would be left in public schools struggling to find the resources needed for a minimal education. Even with vouchers, most low-income families would be unable to afford many private schools. And deprived of adequate funding, many public school districts would ultimately be forced to close, the goal of school privatization advocates intent on profiting from education or spreading religious instruction, not improving the lives of children who would be left behind.

Destroying public education, of course, is what Gov. Greg Abbott and others already have been trying to do state-by-state with school voucher plans. But Trump, if elected to another term in the White House, would speed up the process.

The script written by Trump’s supporters also calls for a repeal of President Biden’s expansion of Title IX to protect students from discrimination based on gender identify. If Trump returns to the Oval Office, transgender kids would have little, if any, protection from bullying by their classmates – or harassment by politicians.

Meanwhile, many working-class families would be thrust into poverty by a repeal of basic employment protections.

Project 2025 would ban unions for educators and other public service workers, let companies eliminate unions in mid-contract, allow companies to stop paying for overtime and allow states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws. The plan would even eliminate some child-labor protections.

The extreme ideological script also calls for large numbers of immigrants – men, women and children -- to be detained in border camps, while active-duty military personnel as well as National Guard troops are deployed to intercept and arrest migrants. Trump’s border wall would again become a major federal priority, and the Dreamers who came to the United States as children and for years have lived productive lives as teachers, nurses and other professionals in the only country they have ever known would again be in peril of deportation.

Project 2025 also would increase the powers of the presidency, allowing Trump, a convicted felon, to fire thousands of government civil service workers and replace them with political loyalists intent on helping him achieve his goals. These would include giving Trump the autocratic power to use federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, to further his own political agenda, including retribution against opponents.

The people who drafted this plan fear the future and the multi-colored, multi-cultural, more representative democracy that future holds. These people are fearful, selfish, greedy and some undoubtedly are racist. They are trying to reverse decades of progress in educational, human and civil rights by taking us back to meaner, more restrictive times, and they know Donald Trump is eager to help them.

Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, will tear up the Project 2025 plan. “We are not going back,” she has declared.

This election must be about going forward. The survival of our public education system and our democracy depends on it.

Clay Robison

Like hundreds of school districts around the state, Manor ISD in Austin is struggling with its budget after Gov. Greg Abbott shut the door on additional state education funding last year in his misguided campaign for private school vouchers.

Manor, now struggling to address a $6 million deficit, has lost more than $115 million in tax revenue over the past five years to charter schools moving into the district and poaching its students, taking funds that Manor could have used to improve programs and meet other student needs. This is another bad idea that should be against the law but, unfortunately, is legal and championed by Abbott’s appointed education commissioner, Mike Morath.

One of the last things Manor ISD needs right now – in addition to the enactment of a voucher law – is another charter school in the neighborhood. The district certainly doesn’t need the Unparalleled Preparatory Academy. Unparalleled in what I am not sure, but Commissioner Morath and the Texas Education Agency have advanced its charter application to the State Board of Education for consideration and possible approval later this month. The charter school proposes to serve students from grades 6-12 with a maximum enrollment of 800, all from Manor ISD.

In their application, organizers of the proposed Unparalleled Preparatory Academy claimed there is little charter enrollment in Manor ISD. In truth, Texas Education Agency data show that Manor lost 36 percent of its student enrollment, more than one-third, to charter transfers last year. This was one of the highest percentages of charter transfers from any school district in the state.

If approved by the state board, Unparalleled Prep would be part of the Building Excellent Schools (BES) charter chain, which has been plagued by poor academic performance and low enrollment.

Eleven BES charter schools have been approved in Texas since 2016, and only one has come close to meeting its enrollment projections. Seven are underenrolled by more than 50 percent. Five of the six BES charter campuses that were rated by the state in 2022 received an F for student achievement. The sixth received a C. Five campuses were not rated because they did not serve tested grades.

The proposed Unparalleled Prep plans to offer a Career and Technical Education (CTE) component that supposedly will focus on developing an “entrepreneurial mindset” among students. Manor ISD already has 16 strong CTE programs that offer students opportunities for well-developed course sequences in careers such as finance, biomedical science, graphic arts and applied agricultural science.

The school district also has established business partnerships with such companies as Dell, Tesla and Samsung.

Unparalleled Prep, if granted a charter by the State Board of Education, would quickly begin raiding Manor for students and tax dollars from these established CTE programs, worsening the school district’s financial troubles.

Should Manor ISD and its students and educators suffer from program cuts and maybe lose jobs because some charter operators with a poor record want to tap into the district’s tax revenue?

Pro-public education advocates don’t think so, and that is why TSTA is opposing this application and four other deficient charter proposals, scattered across the state, that soon will be before the board.

The Texas Education Agency gave preliminary approval to all five applicants. Even worse, if the board grants the charters, Commissioner Morath and TEA will soon be able to amend the charters to allow the operators to open additional campuses, whether they are needed or not. And most aren’t.

That’s been Morath’s practice. Keep adding charter campuses, while school district budgets grow tighter and tighter.

Meanwhile, Gov. Greg Abbott, Morath’s boss, stiffs public schools of additional state funding, while promoting a multi-billion-dollar tax giveaway for private school vouchers to speed up the destruction of the Texas public school system. It is a triple whammy, and it is deliberate.

Clay Robison

Gov. Greg Abbott continues to claim that voucher opponents, not him, were responsible for killing additional funding for public schools last year. But educators in those schools, which are now suffering serious budgetary shortfalls, know better. The governor can lie and try to mislead all he wants, but the truth remains that he – Greg Abbott – killed the school funding bill.

Given the opportunity, every member of the Texas House of Representatives likely would have voted for additional public education funding and higher pay for school employees during the last special session of 2023.

But once a House majority voted to remove the governor’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher plan from the funding bill, the measure was pulled down and never came to a vote. It never came to a vote because Abbott had vowed to kill any additional funding for public schools without the tax giveaway for private schools.

Abbott also blames schools’ financial problems on the pending expiration of the federal COVID relief funds and declining enrollments. Those are contributing factors for some districts, but the governor’s blatant refusal to increase the public education budget at a time when the state was flush with $33 billion of surplus cash is the main reason many schools are now struggling and preparing to cut programs and lay off teachers and other employees.

The governor also tries to confuse people by claiming that his failure to allow lawmakers to increase the annual basic student allotment of $6,160 for school districts is “misleading.”

“The average funding per student actually exceeds $12,000,” he said in a recent news release. But that is nothing to brag about.

According to the National Education Association’s latest analysis of Texas school finance data, the average spending per student in average daily attendance in Texas is now $12,781, but this is $5,220 less per student than the national average and ranks Texas 46th among the states and the District of Columbia, almost scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Only someone as anti-public education as Greg Abbott would be proud of that.

And what about that basic student allotment of $6,160, which Abbott doesn’t seem to think is very important?

The basic allotment is the foundation of Texas’ complex school finance system. Other formula funding, based on factors that vary among school districts, is added to that to determine each district’s actual per-student allotment of funds.

The basic allotment hasn’t been increased since 2019, and school finance experts say it would take an increase of at least $1,000 simply to help school districts catch up with inflationary increases in their programs. An extra $1,000 in the basic allotment would increase Texas’ average spending per student to close to $14,000, a significant step in the right direction.

The governor of Texas should understand that, but this governor obviously doesn’t care.

Clay Robison