Making Heads or Tails Out of Texas School Finance

Hardhatters ^ | 09/12/2014 | Jordan Long

[thetallguy24]

It was bone-chillingly cold in the village of Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836. There, a group of Texans had gathered to formally announce their break from the despotic Mexican state recently established by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. With the Alamo under siege almost 200 miles to the southwest, the settlers methodically listed their complaints in the Texas Declaration of Independence. One of them lashed out at the Mexican government for neglecting “to establish any public system of education… although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty, or the capacity for self-government.” From the very first day of our independent political existence, Texans have cared deeply about financing and organizing public education, so much so that they considered the lack of it as grounds for revolution.

President Mirabeau Lamar asked the Congress of the Lone Star Republic in 1838 to fund a public school system. Texas’ original 1845 state constitution calls on the legislature to “establish free schools” and “furnish means for their support by taxation on property,” but it would take until 1854 and the administration of governor Elisha M. Pease to begin to make good on this promise by creating the Permanent School Fund (PSF). Texas had recently received $10 million from the federal government in return for surrendering territory claims in what is now New Mexico and Colorado and endowed the PSF with $2 million from the settlement. An 1854 school census showed about 65,000 enrolled students. The funding mechanism at the time was simple: the state allocated to schools 62 cents for each pupil on the roll sheet.

[thetallguy24]

Seems like the Texas founders had the right idea. Each student gets X amount. That's it. Keep It Simple Stupid.