Monday, July 2, 2012

School Funding: A Race to the Bottom

Kris Oliver, member of the Richardson school board, attended the Summer Leadership Institute, a training conference for the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB). He kept his Twitter followers informed with bits of trivia.
Facts from my @tasbnews finance training. Texas rank in education spending per pupil? 42
Source: Kris Oliver.
If you knew that, then you probably won't be surprised by this next bit of trivia, either.
Texas rank in percent of adult residents with a high school diploma? Dead last.
Source: Kris Oliver.
Surely, you think, the Texas legislature realizes that the correlation between school funding and academic results just might be a bit of a cause-and-effect relationship, too.

After the jump, will it be this year?



In a word, no. Here's the latest news from the Richardson school board (RISD) about the trend in funding for public schooling in Texas. Spoiler alert: it's a race to the bottom and the Texas legislature is leading us down.
On June 18, the RISD Board of Trustees approved RISD's 2012-13 budget and tax rate as recommended by Superintendent Kay Waggoner. The district based its 2012-13 operating budget of $247,677,521 on a projected reduction in state funding of $7.5 million, in addition to the $14.2 million reduction of state funding in last year's budget. The total reduction in state funding for RISD totaled $21.7 million over the two-year budget biennium.
Source: RISD.

4 comments:

dc-tm said...
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Nathan Morgan said...

Another cause and effect relationship exists between the level of spending on education and the growth in the number of administrators. That growth seems to have eclipsed the increase in academic performance. Funny how that happens.

Nathan Morgan said...

What happened? dc-tm forget to show his picture ID card?

dc-tm said...
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