Texas schools shouldn’t have tried poverty plea

Texas school districts were slapped away from the state Supreme Court on Friday. It was a rude response to their claims that they don’t get enough money.

Funding “adequacy” arguments have failed before in other states, and the Texas districts were wrong to try it.

There were other arguments in the case, but the Supreme Court said they all unraveled because the school districts — more than half of the districts in the state, including Fort Worth, Keller, Lake Worth and Weatherford — couldn’t prove they are paupers.

Courts must defer to legislative decisions unless they can be shown to be arbitrary and unreasonable, Friday’s ruling said.

No one has ever shown conclusively how much money is required to educate a body of students, to achieve a “general diffusion of knowledge” as the Texas Constitution calls it. Almost any guess by the Legislature, so long as it doesn’t leave schools so poor as to shut their doors, could be said to be reasonable.

This key error in legal strategy set the case apart from a long line of Texas school finance cases dating back to 1984, all of which eventually were won by the complaining school districts.

Those cases kept their complaints about adequacy of funding in the background. They were won on legal arguments about equitable distribution of funds among diverse school districts, rich and poor, and on a showing that the system at the time effectively created an unconstitutional statewide property tax.

This case was originally heard in an Austin district court beginning in October 2012. The Legislature made some school funding changes in 2013, so testimony in the case reopened in January and February 2014.

The district court ruled the funding system unconstitutional in August 2014.

In rejecting that view, the Supreme Court said its role is not “second-guessing the political branches’ policy choices, or substituting the wisdom of nine judges for that of 181 lawmakers.”

The court also said the state’s more than 5 million public school students deserve a school finance system that’s better than today’s “Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid.”

The outcome of this case means that any improvements will come because the Legislature decides to make them. It will be a long time before another court case bucks this precedent.

This story was originally published May 13, 2016 at 5:48 PM with the headline "Texas schools shouldn’t have tried poverty plea."