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Waco tribune herald5/10/2023 ![]() Unfortunately, these funds are drying up, and districts will soon need state funding to continue their COVID recovery. Federal funds helped districts invest in capital projects, learning interventions, and after-school community-based programs. The state’s complicated recapture system takes money out of some high-poverty school districts such as those in Houston, Dallas and Austin, where many persistently struggling schools operate. Since then, the state has failed to make continued efforts to improve school funding. In 2019, House Bill 3 included $6.5 billion in additional education spending. Despite multiple cases reaching the Supreme Court of Texas, including several rulings in favor of plaintiff school districts, our lawmakers have never created a system that puts all students on equal footing. The state’s antiquated finance system ranks among the bottom five for providing adequate resources to high-poverty school districts. If the state were rated for addressing these two failures, Texas would be rated “F” relative to other states. Persistently struggling schools represent a decades-long problem that reflects two policy failures: the failure to adequately fund schools in poorer communities, and the failure to create a teacher workforce to fill each school with experienced, high-quality teachers. None is in the most affluent communities. Here is the problem: Almost 90% of schools not rated are in the state’s poorest communities. Approximately 1,600 schools received a “C,” and more than 550 schools would have been rated as a “D” or an “F,” but the TEA opted to classify those schools as “Not Rated.” This year, almost 8,500 campuses were evaluated, and more than 6,000 received either an “A” or a “B” for student achievement outcomes and growth. Many schools in the state’s poorest communities struggle to meet achievement targets. The Texas Education Agency recently released school and district ratings for the first time since 2019, and there has been some improvement, but a longstanding trend persists.
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