School Finance Reform in Texas: The Edgewood Saga

Abstract

As one pessimist has opined, school finance reform is like a Russian novel: it's long, tedious, and everybody dies in the end.For that reason, among others, I will keep my remarks brief today.Besides, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, there are some people who are not only dull themselves but they bring out dullness in others.For more than fifty years, Texas has been in a more or less constant process of reforming its finance system for public education.Each reform has led to the infusion of more state dollars to guarantee a higher minimum expenditure per pupil and to narrow disparities between poor and affluent school districts.Every reform was followed by a period of relative complacency.However, during each complacent period, inflation, expanding enrollments, new state and federal mandates, and higher expenditures by richer districts caused the disparities to grow and fester, leading poorer districts and their allies to press for the next round of reforms.This process continued unabated even after the United States Supreme Court upheld the state's system in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez -in 1973.1 Lawsuits in this domain alter only the rules of engagement; they never settle the underlying dispute.Too much is at stake.Sixteen years after Rodriguez, the Supreme Court of Texas entered the quagmire, holding in Edgewood Independent School District v. Kirby (Edgewood 1)2 that the state's school financing system violated the state constitution. 3 While Edgewood I had enormous political, educational, and policy consequences for Texas, it was a genuinely unremarkable opinion when viewed against legal developments in other states.The Texas Supreme Court construed the constitutional mandate of efficiency in public education to require fiscal neutrality. 4 Fiscal neutrality means