Grading Texas

With only occasional exceptions, a government’s policy priorities and its funding priorities go hand-in-hand. Policymakers can call repeatedly for building more roads and highways, but if they don’t spend more money on highway construction, the roads don’t get built. Or, they can pontificate forever about improving education, but if they continue to shortchange public schools, it is extremely difficult for teachers and students to effectively teach and learn.

In his news conference yesterday, Gov.-elect Greg Abbott continued to claim education is a top policy priority. But except for some limited initiatives — including limited expansion of pre-kindergarten programs — he has yet to show that he means what he says. Instead of calling for a significant increase in funding for public schools that haven’t fully recovered from the 2011 state budget cuts, Abbott is still defending an inadequate and unconstitutional school finance system that includes the budget cuts.

“I want to ensure that all children finish the third grade reading and doing math at or above grade level,” he said. That’s a laudable goal that would be much easier to reach if thousands of kids weren’t still parked in overcrowded classrooms and forced to sacrifice real learning opportunities in preparation for excessive, counter-productive standardized tests.

With Texas now spending about $460 less per student than it did four years ago, with school enrollment increasing by about 80,000 children per year and with most of those kids coming from low-income homes, Abbott isn’t going to come close to realizing that goal without a greater investment of state revenue in public education and support services, such as health care. And, with billions of additional tax dollars generated by the state’s strong economy, the new governor and the Legislature can make that investment without raising anyone’s existing taxes.

Abbott identified his top priority yesterday, and it wasn’t education. It was highway construction, for which he proposed a $4 billion a year funding increase. Texas needs to increase funding for highways, and Texas voters overwhelmingly approved a proposition diverting additional oil and gas production tax revenue to the highway fund. That diversion is expected to total about $1.7 billion next year, and it is included in Abbott’s $4 billion proposal.

The Legislature will have enough revenue next year to pay for Abbott’s highway proposal AND increase funding for public schools and other critical services. Abbott needs to start giving public education the same status he is giving roads because it will take more than new highways to keep Texas moving forward.

Months ago, at the beginning of his campaign for governor, Greg Abbott said that average Texans “know better how to spend your (tax) money than do bureaucrats in Austin or Washington.” Abbott won the governor’s race, but the comment, recently repeated in The Dallas Morning News, was political make-believe.

Government budgets in Austin and Washington are set by elected officials, not unelected bureaucrats, and the average Texas taxpayer knows next to nothing about funding public programs and services. Countless Texans, for example, still think the lottery should provide all the funding that public schools need, when, in truth, all the proceeds the state realizes from the lottery account for less than a nickel of every public education dollar.

Abbott, supposedly, was elected governor to lead Texas to a successful future, not follow the dreams of ideologues who would rather not pay taxes at all, or certainly not enough to keep the state’s highways moving, its schools functioning and its economy improving. So far, though, Abbott’s post-election policy and budgetary pronouncements have been influenced more by ideology – and so-called business “leaders” who should know better — than the realities of a rapidly growing, 21^st century, urban state.

The still-undefined tax cuts that the governor-elect is promoting aren’t going to unclog highways or adequately fund a school finance system that, as a state judge recently determined, is woefully and unfairly unfunded to the point of being unconstitutional. Depending on the revenue estimate still to come from the new state comptroller, the Legislature will have as much as $10 billion in surplus revenue to spend next session on critical state needs, such as education, without raising anyone’s taxes or busting a constitutional spending cap. And, thanks to a strong economy, that doesn’t include billions of extra dollars in the Rainy Day Fund.

Campaigning for governor, Abbott vowed to make Texas “number one” in public education, but so far he has offered little that would accomplish that goal. Because of deep state budget cuts in 2011 that were only partially restored in 2013, public schools now have about $460 less to spend per student than they had four years ago, while enrollment grows by about 80,000 kids per year.

Abbott so far has offered very few education initiatives, and what he has offered would be of very limited scope, including a selective prekindergarten program that wouldn’t even restore all the pre-K funding cut four years ago.

The governor-elect has an opportunity – and the means – to insist that the Legislature join him in moving Texas forward, but that will require different priorities than Abbott so far is signaling.