McAllen AFT News - April/May, 2011

By a closer margin than expected, the Texas House passed a bad school-finance bill Sunday night, but the bill was stopped dead in the Senate at midnight thanks to a filibuster by Sen. Wendy Davis, Democrat of Fort Worth. The House debate and Davis’s filibuster speech brought into sharp focus the strong reasons for opposing SB 1811, which contains the enforcement mechanism for the deep cuts in public education included in the 2012-2013 budget bill passed yesterday.
 
The school-finance plan was cobbled together at the last minute by House and Senate leaders and only shared with rank-and-file members of each chamber on Sunday morning. The more lawmakers saw of the bill over the course of the day, the less they liked it.
 
In the ensuing floor debate, Rep. Scott Hochberg, Democrat of Houston, did a fine job of explaining a new and dangerous feature of the plan, under which districts could no longer count on the state to deliver even the radically reduced amount of school aid promised under revised state funding formulas. Under current law, if state aid falls short of the promised amount in a given year, the state remains obligated to make up for the shortfall the next year. Under SB 1811, the state’s obligation would be canceled, and the school districts would be out of luck.
 
House debate also heightened concerns about the profound inequity of this proposed school-finance plan. Under SB 1811, lower-wealth school districts that already are at a huge disadvantage financially would bear the brunt of $4 billion in cuts in state aid. The lower-wealth districts already are making do with per-pupil funding more than $1,000 below the amount guaranteed for the top 15 percent of districts. Yet, as the Equity Center, an advocacy and research group for low-wealth districts, reported today, this new plan “was designed to prioritize the highest-funded districts over the lower-funded.” The Equity Center analysis of the SB 1811 plan found that it would widen the advantage for the highest-funded districts over the lowest-funded to $2,000 per weighted pupil after fiscal 2012.
 
Rising qualms about the House plan were reflected in the final passage of SB 1811 by a margin of 84 to 63 Sunday night, with 16 Republican House members joining all 47 Democrats present in opposition. Even House members who voted for the bill expressed dismay that they were being forced to decide one of the most important issues of the session with minimal time for analysis and debate of its complex provisions.
 
The failure of leadership that left this vital issue to the last weekend of the session pushed SB 1811 up against a midnight deadline for a floor vote in the Senate. That’s where the firm stand taken by Sen. Davis brought proceedings on this ill-conceived school-finance plan to a halt. Sen. Davis took to the floor well-armed with district-by-district data on the depth of the severe cuts coming to school districts under SB 1811. She also read letter after letter from parents and teachers and concerned citizens in her district, urging the legislature to take a more balanced approach to balancing the budget, including the use of billions of dollars in the Rainy Day Fund. SB 1811 and the budget bill, HB 1, would make utterly unnecessary cuts in state aid to our public schools while leaving those billions of dollars in the state’s untouched. Sen. Davis rightly deemed that choice unconscionable and joined House and Senate counterparts in saying that Texas can do better and Texans deserve better than this bad deal for Texas students and teachers.
 
As midnight neared and it became certain that Sen. Davis’s filibuster would block passage of SB 1811, word came from the governor’s staff that Gov. Rick Perry would call a special session as early as Tuesday, May 31, to resurrect this school-finance plan. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the Senate’s presiding officer, said that the bill might be revived even sooner, on Monday, by a four-fifths vote to suspend the Senate’s rules. However, it would take only seven members of the 31-member Senate to block that move.
 
Texas AFT/McAllen AFT will continue to fight for decent funding for our students and our schools alongside allies like Sen. Davis and other lawmakers from both parties who understand that Texas can and must do better. We believe these legislators have the overwhelming support of parents, teachers and other school employees, and the public at large. Together we all need to translate that support into an active, ongoing presence at the state capitol as this struggle over school finance continues. As the 2010-2011 school year and the regular session of the legislature wind down, please be ready to step up and take action.