Education cuts hurt neediest, study finds

Research: Though funding recovered, ‘it didn’t always come back equally’

Doing more with less has been the new normal for Texas public schools since the Legislature cut $5.3 billion from state education spending from 2011 to 2016.

The cuts disproportionately impacted high school students, bilingual students, low-income students and special education students, according to findings from a joint report by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities.

“When funding to the schools decreased, programs that serve some of the most needy and struggling students lost the most money,” said Michael Marder, the report’s co-author and co-director of UTeach, a STEM training program for teachers at UT Austin. “And when funding eventually came back, it didn’t always come back equally. Many of the students who are still struggling the most see permanent reductions in the supports that they have.”

The Texas school finance system has long been decried as deficient. Last year, the Texas Supreme Court stopped short of finding it unconstitutional but called it “Byzantine” and outdated. During the 2017 legislative session, Texas House leaders produced a bill that would have invested an additional $1.9 billion in public education through 2019, but the legislation died after senators attached language creating a small private school voucher program, which a House majority opposed.

A subsequent special legislative session punted the problem to a newly formed Texas Commission on Public School Finance, a body tasked with making recommendations “for improvements to the current public school finance system or for new methods of financing public schools.”

To measure the impact of the funding cuts, Marder and Chandra Kring Villanueva, a senior policy analyst at CPPP, a liberalleaning think tank, divided Texas public schools into four groups based on the percentage of students who qualified for the fed-

eral free or reduced lunch program.

As a group, the poorer schools lost the most, even though low-income students tend to struggle more academically and usually need additional school resources.

For example, between 2008 and 2016, elementary schools with the most low-income students cut instructional spending by $256 per student, while the wealthiest elementary schools raised their spending by $11 per pupil during the same period. In 2008, those lowest-income elementary campuses had allocated $687 more per student to instruction than the wealthier campuses.

More students now

Additionally, students in bilingual programs at the lowest-income schools saw huge declines in instructional spending — 40 percent for elementary students and 28 percent at the high school level.

By last year, the state had returned to investing the same amount of money in Texas schools that it had prior to the 2011 funding cuts. But as population growth has surged, schools now serve more students than they did several years ago, which requires additional funding.

Across all schools, the funding decrease hit high school students the hardest, according to the findings. In 2016, high schools on average spent $428 less per student on instructional programs compared to 2008, while middle schools spent $268 less and elementary schools spent $65 less.

Being ‘very creative’

Leslie Price, spokeswoman for San Antonio ISD, where 92 percent of students are considered economically disadvantaged, said the spending squeeze and accounting for inflation has forced the district to be “very creative” in managing its budget. SAISD also went out for a “tax ratification election” last November that led to a 13-cent-per-$100 tax rate increase, yielding $32 million in additional annual revenue.

If not for the TRE funding — a “critical resource,” Price said — the district would not have been able to debut a program that provides additional support to struggling students or overhaul the district’s bilingual education and dual-language offerings. The TRE revenue will also facilitate the expansion of middle school extracurricular programs, she said.

“Our funding formula is so out of date,” Price said. “The court deemed it archaic. It certainly needs to be updated.”

Finding solutions

At the moment, Marder said, it is unclear how the funding shortage will impact student performance now and in the long run. He said the next phase of research will focus on comparing cuts in instructional programs to academic outcomes among various student populations.

Marder said he hopes the findings will help the state focus on how to do better in the future.

“We should be asking ourselves, what does this mean for the students who have been coming up through the system?” he said. “What can and should we be doing to help?”