IDRA 2025 Policy Digest for Texas
Public schools should have the resources needed to provide the excellent education all students deserve.
Schools need sufficient funds to serve students who are emergent bilingual, from households with lower incomes, or have a disability. To do this, the state should fund all public schools adequately and equitably. However, schools have struggled to get fair funding for decades.
Per-student and special program school funding remains unfair
Basic per-pupil funding is still too low. The basic allotment is $6,160 per attending student and does not account for inflation. Total education spending has dropped nearly $10 billion since before the COVID-19 pandemic accounting for inflation. Texas received over $19 billion in ESSER funds to support academic tutoring, enrichment, mental health services, and support for educators and staff. That money has now dried up but the need has not (Craven, 2024).
Targeted student-based funding by need is too low. Student-based weights generate additional funding for educating special student populations, including emergent bilingual students, students with disabilities and students from households with low incomes. Yet these funding weights have remained entirely too low to serve students. For example, the bilingual education weight is one of the lowest in the country at just 10% additional funding, or $616 per student (ECS, 2024).
Fair school funding is under threat
Compressing or eliminating local school funding without new state support threatens to defund public schools. Texas’ school funding system largely relies on local property taxes to fund schools. Local revenue accounts for 48% of school funding (LBB, 2024).* The state implemented automatic tax compression for districts in 2019 (House Bill 3), meaning school district tax rates are reduced each year. Without additional state funding to offset the loss to local revenue, this results in districts unfairly losing out on local funding.
Between 2021-23, district M&O Tax rates (i.e., school district taxes) were compressed between 4¢ and 36¢ – a loss of millions of dollars in local funding (TEA, 2023). State lawmakers have also proposed eliminating the entire school district tax that supports school operations (M&O tax rate). This would effectively defund public schools.
Inequitable policies that divert funding from the students who need it most. Private school voucher systems divert much-needed funding away from public schools and into private systems that are unaccountable to students, parents and community taxpayers. States that have adopted school voucher programs report strained education budgets and declining per-pupil funding for public schools. Public money should stay in public schools, which serve 90% of students in Texas.
What Texas Needs the Legislature to Do
• Fund the basic allotment to raise per-pupil funding for all students, including by adjusting for inflation.
• Increase targeted funding for high-quality bilingual education programs, educators, programs and instructional materials.
• Protect local school districts’ autonomy to levy their M&O tax rates without disparate tax rate compression by the state.
• Keep public dollars in public schools by opposing vouchers and similar programs (e.g., education savings accounts, tax credit scholarships) that use public funds for private purposes.
Contact Chloe Latham Sikes, Ph.D., IDRA Deputy Director of Policy at chloe.sikes@idra.org
*Local dollars, or revenue, are generated by local school district property tax rates. When a school district raises local funding in excess of state-set rates, the excess funding is “recaptured” and sent back to the state to redistribute to districts that cannot raise as much local school funding. Some budget reports include recapture dollars as state revenue because of this redistribution, but IDRA considers recapture part of the local share of school funding since it comes from local property taxes.
Abrams, S.E., & Koutsavlis, S.J. (2023). The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers.
Southern Poverty Law Center, Education Law Center, Public Funds Public Schools.
Craven, M. (September 2024). What You Need to Know About the ESSER Funding Cliff – How Schools Will Be Impacted by the End of Federal COVID-19 Relief Funding. IDRA.
ECS. (2024). 50 State Comparison, English Learner Funding, webpage. Education Commission of the States.
IDRA. (2016). Principles for Fair Funding for the Common Good.
LBB. (July 2024). Figure 151: Prekindergarten to Grade 12 Texas Education Agency Funding in Actual and Constant Dollars, Fiscal Years 2016 to 2025 (Page 221). Fiscal Size-up 2024–25 Biennium. Legislative Budget Board.
Texas Comptroller. (2024). School District Rates and Levies, 2021, 2022, 2023. Tax Rates and Levies, webpage.
Villanueva, C. (2023). Property Tax Compression: Growing the Sate Share without Improving School Funding. Every Texan.
