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Hood riddance: Rick Perry's approach to getting rid of Texas's rob-the-rich school finance system seems like politics as usual--as usual.

Article Excerpt
MARK YUDOF IS THE CHANCELLOR OF the University of Texas, but he also happens to be a thirty-year veteran of the Texas school finance wars. As a young UT law professor, he was co-counsel in a case challenging Texas's method of funding its public schools that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where his side lost. So he knows what he's talking about when he compares the continuing saga of school finance with a Russian novel: "It's long, tedious, and everybody dies in the end." [paragraph] That's just what the characters in the current school finance, drama are afraid of, from Governor Rick Perry to anxious legislators, school superintendents, and taxpayers. As Perry weighs whether to call the Legislature into special session this spring, the story of Texas schools seems once again to be hurtling toward doomsday. The Robin Hood funding scheme, adopted in 1993, which achieved equity between rich and poor school districts by redistributing the former's tax dollars to the latter, has reached the end of its useful life. Local property taxes have skyrocketed, and lawmakers of both parties have been content to boast about not raising state taxes while forcing local taxpayers to carry more and more of the burden of paying for public schools. As a result, the state's share of the cost of education has declined from 52 percent in 1980 to 38 percent today. More than half of Texas's 1,041 school districts are within one cent of the maximum tax rate allowed by state law and have no way to pay their bills except to slash programs and personnel. Dozens of school districts, representing around a quarter of Texas' students, have turned to the courts for immediate relief in a lawsuit scheduled to go to trial in July.

School districts are not the only ones in mortal danger. Failure to fix...

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