April 24, 2025, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, by TFR Staff
Introduction
We’re proud Texans. We believe in family, freedom, and personal responsibility. We trust that parents, not bureaucrats, know what’s best for their children. And we understand that good stewardship of tax dollars means investing in what works, not simply spending more. This session, the Texas Legislature has an opportunity to reflect those values by taking a critical step in the right direction—not a perfect solution, but a meaningful one. By fairly funding high-performing public charter schools, we can allow more Texas families to choose a better future for their children.
It’s true: the ideal education system would be shaped by market activity and parental demand, not centralized budgets and one-size-fits-all models. However, today, Texas spends over $100 billion on public education, with most of it allocated to traditional school districts, regardless of their performance. Charter schools, by contrast, are public schools of choice. They succeed only when parents voluntarily send their kids there. They don’t rely on assignments by ZIP code or political protection. They earn their enrollment, and they earn their results.
That’s why fixing the broken funding model for public charter schools is not just a good policy—it’s the right next step toward a freer, more accountable education system.
Texas Has a Choice to Make
Today, public charter schools serve more than 400,000 students across Texas, many of whom come from low-income or minority backgrounds. These families are not waiting for the perfect system. They’re looking for a school that works for their children right now. And that’s what many public charter schools are delivering. At the same time, these schools are being punished for their success.
Texas law provides no local property tax revenue to charter schools, leaving them to fund all their building and maintenance needs out of classroom budgets. Meanwhile, traditional ISDs receive both state funds and local property taxes, and often have access to bond financing for capital improvements.
Currently, Texas law only provides public charter schools with a small fraction of the facilities funding per student allotment that traditional public school districts receive. Further, the State put a cap on that funding in 2017, so it grows smaller per student each year as overall public charter school enrollment grows. Hence, public charter schools receive $1,600 less in facilities funding per student than a traditional public school district. This means public charter schools have to fund ~90% of their total facilities and maintenance costs out of classroom budgets. The result is a broken, unjust system where the schools producing the best outcomes for the students who need them most are also those with the least support.
Senate Bill 1750, authored by Senator Angela Paxton (R-McKinney) , was designed to begin addressing this issue. As initially written, it would have closed half of the $1,600 per-student facilities funding gap. But after amendments, it now proposes to cover less than one-quarter of the gap.
We can—and must—do better than that.
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