New report feinforces what we already know about investing in K-12 education

A new report in a longitudinal series from the Albert Shanker Institute reveals what we know to be true-financial investment in public education does matter when it comes to K-12 student outcomes.

The third edition of the institute's "Does Money Matter in Education?" reviews decades of high-quality empirical studies of school funding and student outcomes, and what it has to say about the Lonestar State should have all Texans concerned.

Some general conclusions from the report include:

• More investment in K-12 schools helps students, while reducing funding harms students.

• New K-12 funding consistently yields benefits, whether the money goes toward current school operations (e.g., teachers, supplies, etc.) or toward capital investment, such as school construction and modernization.

• The effects, positive or negative, are particularly pronounced among students who experience poverty and those living in communities in which states have historically underinvested.

The report ranked 47 states based on federal data from 2022-2023 according to three indicators:

1. How much of the states' total resources were spent directly on public education as a share of its economic capacity, or fiscal effort.

1. How many students were in districts funded adequately enough to meet outcome goals.

1. How funding was distributed among lower- and higher-poverty districts.

The report cites that about 2 in 3 of the nation's students enrolled in chronically underfunded districts are disproportionately concentrated in just 10 states, including Texas but also naming several other southern Republican-controlled states.

According to the report, Texas is a low fiscal effort state, spending just 2.59% of its capacity on K-12 schools, ranking us 40 of 50 states. Texas also ranks embarrassingly low on adequacy of funding (47/50), citing the typical district spends 33.4% below adequate levels for the population of students that it serves.

The bright spot in the data is that Texas does have a lower opportunity gap than most states, addressing the spending between the highest and lowest poverty districts. This point may be cold comfort when the other indicators are so much lower than they ought to be.

This report comes in sharp relief against the backdrop of a desolated federal Department of Education and the adoption of a federal voucher system hot on the heels of the Texas voucher scam, all of which threaten to destabilize public school spending. We note, however, that this report is based on data from the 2022-2023 school year. It will take some years for the effects of the recent House Bill 2 to trickle through the system, but as we noted during the 89^th session, this historic funding fills an equally historic hole in school finance. We must not allow the Texas Legislature to assume they have "fixed" public school finance and continue to press lawmakers to invest in the system that educates 93% of our students.