August 30, 2014 10:06 AM

District Judge John Dietz Decision: The Cliff Notes Version

We paraphrased and condensed 383 pages into 1,200 words so you don’t have to

Dietz’s rationale for his decision the Texas system of school finance was unconstitutional, boiled down for the lay reader:

We start this opinion at the point of the last school finance ruling in 2005, West Orange Cove v. Neeley. At the time, the Texas Supreme Court’s main finding in favor of the plaintiffs was that school districts lacked meaningful discretion to set their own tax rates, creating an de facto state property tax. That’s illegal. The state’s top court noted “a drift toward unconstitutional adequacy” but stopped short of declaring the school finance system unconstitutional.

Almost a decade later, the kids are poorer, the standards are higher and the system has less funding. Dietz pinpoints the initial decline to the passage of House Bill 1 in 2006, the state’s solution to local “meaningful discretion” over tax rates. The bill, which compressed tax rates by a third and added a revised business margins tax, created a recurring $10 billion structural deficit each biennium.

Texas avoided immediate system failure by plugging $12 billion in federal stimulus funds into the system in 2009, masking the fact state revenue pumped into the school finance system dropped by $3.2 billion over the biennium. The subsequent session, in 2011, state lawmakers cut $5.3 billion out of the system and Texas Education Agency, resulting in “significant harm” to students, according to Dietz.

By Kimberly Reeves