The Brief: School Finance Challenge Lands At Supreme Court

by Eleanor Dearman and John Reynolds,   News letter editor The Texas Tribune

The Texas Supreme Court will listen to oral arguments for two-and-a-half hours this morning in the latest court challenge to the state’s system for funding public schools.

The Tribune’s Kiah Collier writes that the state is appealing a ruling made last year by District Judge John Dietz that the current system does not adequately fund schools, distributes money unequally across districts and amounts to an unconstitutional statewide property tax.

In 2011, the Legislature cut $5.4 billion from public schools to counter a severe budget shortfall. Since then, lawmakers have restored most of those funds but as Collier wrote on Monday, many districts are still feeling pain from that original round of cuts.

And if there’s a certain familiar feeling to the proceedings, Collier notes that the state’s highest civil appellate court has heard challenges to the school finance system six times since 1984.

The state’s lawyers who are defending the current system are relying on arguments that the lower court hasn’t taken into consideration students’ performance on standardized tests as well as lawmakers’ recent spending on schools. And the Austin American-Statesman’s Chuck Lindell notes that the state is also arguing that courts should stay out of school funding decisions altogether:

Swinging for the fences, Gov. Greg Abbott asked the court to rule that school finance policy is a political exercise that does not belong in the courts — now or in the future.

“Litigation over Texas’ system of school finance has persisted for decades,” Abbott told the court in a legal brief, adding that unless the justices carve out an exception, “plaintiffs and their attorneys will subject the state to endless and needless litigation.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune.