AUSTIN— Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation published the paper Education and Property Taxes – A Texas-Sized Conundrum.
“Texas’ school finance system has undergone more than four decades of legal challenges,” said Austin Griesinger, legislative fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “A leading driver for these legal challenges has been the system’s reliance on property taxes as a revenue source.”
Education funding is treated as a shared responsibility between state and local governments, with the addition of some federal funds. In the 2017-18 school year, Texas allocated $63.16 billion for the public education system. In the same school year, the state educated roughly 5.4 million students and employed about 350,000 teachers.
“A lot of people have heard of the controversial ‘Robin Hood’ or ‘recapture,’ but they don’t know why it exists,” said Emily Sass, policy director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Innovation in Education. “Recapture is a symptom of a deeper tension—our reliance on local property taxes to fund what has become a statewide public education system.”
The Texas Public Policy Foundation has identified two viable options for the state to drastically reduce or replace local property taxes as a funding mechanism for education.
To read the paper in full, please visit:
www.texaspolicy.com/education-and-property-taxes-a-texas-sized-conundrum/