Texas public schools are relentlessly accountable to the state and their communities, but the state is rarely accountable back to its schools. This power imbalance curtails schools’ ability to actualize their community’s vision for their children, particularly in rural Texas.
It’s time the state of Texas took reciprocal accountability seriously. Reciprocal accountability means that, yes, Texas schools are, and should be, accountable to their local communities and the state for the outcomes they produce. From annual financial audits to locally-elected school boards to publicly available data to living and serving alongside our stakeholders, public schools are accountable to their communities every day.
However, the state must also be accountable for the conditions they create and the inputs they provide—funding, resources, policies, and, too often, unfunded mandates—that either accelerate educational outcomes or stymy them.
Current state leaders have overseen Texas public schools for more than two decades. Yet the mark of their leadership is decreased funding and teacher pay on an inflation-adjusted basis, ballooning unfunded mandates, and a crisis-level teacher shortage; collectively, these conditions result in relatively stagnant academic outcomes for Texas kids. These impacts are felt most acutely in rural Texas, where the most chronically underfunded schools and underpaid teachers are concentrated.
Frankly, Texas cannot further underfund, undermine, and undercut its public schools to their next level of excellence. State leaders often willfully ignore the accountability they must have to our schools and their communities.
Unfortunately, this accountability gap continues to widen between state-level expectations and state-level leadership for public schools. Despite record-setting surpluses in the last two Texas legislative sessions, persistently underfunded needs went unaddressed by state leaders. The special education funding gap remains around $2 billion statewide. The transportation funding gap, which disproportionately underfunds rural districts, remains around $1 billion.
Nuances within the state funding formulas, such as school underfunding due to property value disputes between local county appraisal districts and the Comptroller’s Office, were not rectified, continuing to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from rural schools across the state. While increases for teacher pay were finally provided this year, they were not funded for all teachers, only partially closed the inflation-adjusted pay gap created over the last decade, and were funded so indiscriminately that they did not meaningfully close the rural-urban pay gap statewide, let alone move Texas into a nationally-competitive teacher pay range.
What did this Legislature produce for Texas public schools, though? Countless new mandates, many of which are not aligned with the drivers of academic improvement. Since June, school districts have received more than 100 new “to the administrator addressed” correspondences from the Texas Education Agency, outlining new state requirements with tight timelines, confounding guidance, and no consideration for local capacity. These requirements are particularly burdensome to rural schools, which are not staffed with compliance departments to review and act upon these ever-increasing list of state mandates.
To be clear, rural communities bear the cost of the state’s inaction on behalf of Texas public schools. The absence of reciprocal accountability harms rural students and communities by creating conditions where programs are in danger of being cut every year, student supports are limited, and teacher recruitment and retention is a persistent challenge. Undermining rural schools undermines the economic stability of small town Texas. This is a perplexing juxtaposition to Texas’ stated commitment to economic growth and fostering a future-ready workforce.
Accountability without support is not accountability; it’s an abdication of responsibility.
It’s time for the state to fulfill its commitment to the promise of public education. This would include sustained, predictable school funding indexed to inflation and competitive on the national level. State accountability would also include targeted rural support strategies, such as addressing rural funding gaps in transportation, special education, and staff compensation, while reducing, not increasing, stifling compliance mandates. State leaders would also redesign the school accountability system to include not just outcomes, but also state-controlled inputs, like state investment (or underinvestment) and resource equity. This would serve to illustrate the reciprocal accountability, or lack thereof, between local school districts and the state agencies which create the conditions for their success.
Rural Texas is keeping its promise, operationalizing our communities’ vision for our children through our public schools. It’s time for the state to do the same. It’s time for state leaders to own their historic underinvestment in rural Texas and then operationalize policies and resources that undo these decades of neglect.
Texas, the state with the largest number of rural schools and the largest number of rural districts, must be accountable to these schools and communities. Strong rural schools mean a strong Texas. We need both, now more than ever.
Rinehart is the Alpine ISD superintendent.