Author’s Note: I started on this four-part series after a series of conversations with Ridglea parents. In those conversations, I kept bumping against the slippery patchwork history of the Texas School Finance system and its resulting dysfunction. There was universal agreement that there were problems, but exactly what those problems are and what options we have to address them were much less aligned.

So I put together this content to help explain why on earth we might want to do things, like take control of hiring and firing the teachers, balancing the budgets, and why I might say that lots of great ideas are perhaps illegal, and additionally, unconstitutional. It brings you into my understanding of the forces and legal limits that manifest as design constraints in this problem space as I understand it.

Accordingly, we will take a walk through the three major elements of Texas School Finance:

We will give each of these elements special treatment with their own articles because each of these institutions has taken a turn over the long history of Texas at driving our school finance system. Each leaving their greasy fingerprints on the system that is still in place today.

Finally, in our fourth installment, we will conclude this series by laying out where we are currently and what we can do about it.

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If you want to know why your property tax bill is so high while your local school budget is bleeding, you have to look at what happened in and the lead up to a Constitutional Convention in 1876.

And to understand our Texas Constitution, we have to get ourselves into a mindset where our modern selves can hold two things at one time:

They designed a system that was legally described as 'separate but equal,' though in practice, it was designed to heavily under-resource African American communities. So how did we get there, and how much of that is still here in our current system?

Let’s set the scene: It is the 1830s. Before Texas was the Republic of Texas, it was a frontier administrative region in the nascent United Mexican States.

After an absolutely bananas election and a tumultuous transition of power, where the guy who was elected was run out of the country by the remnants of the freedom fighters, Vicente Guerrero ascended to the second presidency of Mexico with a military assist from General Santa Anna (Yup, that Santa Anna).

Guerrero is a folk hero of the Mexican Revolution. More importantly for our story, he was a radical progressive for his era. He formally abolished slavery, championed the racially and economically oppressed, and demanded public schools.

Mexico is a brand new country, on only its second president, that is rapidly going bankrupt without the support of the Spanish economy. It needs to grow its population and tax base. In the Texas territory, the most attractive colonists were wealthy, slave-owning plantation owners willing to leave the American Louisiana territory. So pragmatically, Guerrero exempt the Texas territory from the prohibition on slavery. Initially, the leader of Texas colonization, Stephen F. Austin, was thrilled, writing to his sister in 1829:

Alas, in a story worthy of a Hollywood political thriller, Guerrero was betrayed. The aristocrats staged a coup. He was double-crossed by a merchant for a literal king's ransom, turned over to the military, and executed by firing squad (a particularly harsh punishment at the time, given that rulers were usually merely exiled).

Enter General Santa Ana (yup, that Santa Ana), who took control in the chaotic aftermath as dictator and began centralizing power under the Centralist Republic of Mexico. He crushed Guerrero's popular policies and completely abandoned the public school initiatives to consolidate the support of the aristocracy. Santa Ana was known to be ruthless, news of how 2000 non-combatants were killed after he quelled a revolt of Zacatecas stoked the fears of the early Texans.

When the Texans decided to liberate themselves in 1836, education was a massive part of their battle cry. In the Texas Declaration of Independence, they explicitly indicted the Mexican government for abandoning the classroom:

When the Texans finally gained their independence, they made sure to codify this core value in our very first Constitution of 1836:

Unfortunately, the short-lived Congress of the Republic of Texas would lean on the “as soon as circumstances will permit” language for the duration of the Republic to avoid ever putting together a comprehensive schools law.

From the very beginning, given the constant military threat of invading Natives and the Mexican Army, coupled with the immature and under-scaled economy, the Texans were looking for an out, ideally from through annexation by the United States of America. 10 years would pass before the Annexation of Texas would become one of the major issues of the 1845 Presidential Election.

Meanwhile, with no formal government effort on schooling, Texas education was dominated by a collection of private tutors and charted private schools.

After Texas was annexed as the 28th state of the Union, Texas rewrote its constitution. They learned from the mistakes of the previous constitution and overall just wrote a much better document. On education it spoke very directly:

The goal to establish free schools throughout the state, funded by property taxes and annual tax revenue set off without ability for other parts of the government to reallocate those funds is now constitutionalized.

Furthermore, in keeping with the thoughts on wealth and value at the time, the school system was granted land from the public domain:

So two pillars of Texas education and school finance arise already:

So its important we contextualize all these words in the meanings of the time, versus how our modern ears might read some of these words. For example, “free” schools at that point in time likely didn’t mean a unified, state-sponsored school system but instead likely meant that a system for financial access to schooling for indigents. And furthermore, “public” schools likely didn’t mean the large state-managed system of public schools we know now, nothing like that even existed in the world at that time. Instead, “public” here meant more ‘open to the public’, so the schools might have been private or parochial but the state was expected to ensure a sort of equal access to the schooling system.

Alas, with all these great intentions enshrined in the new constitution of the state, actually putting any funds into the account was yet to occur. It would take about 10 more years before the school fund was seeded with some cash

So heading into the Civil War, the state of Antebellum Texas schools is that of a fragmented, early experiment. It was heavily reliant on private initiative with almost zero state administration. We had a legal and financial framework in law, but nothing that might resemble a “system” has emerged yet.

Most education is home-based, and there are three types of schools starting to emerge from the public system: (1) pure public schools; (2) schools for indigents; and (3) private schools that received state funding. The most popular was the third model, at that time called “subscription schools” where parents paid tuition and the state supplemented with a small per-pupil stipend.

The system exclusively serves free white children, enslaved children are legally barred from being educated and there is no attempt to education any of the Tejano population. The schools for indigents are accompanied by such a deep social stigma that even families that qualified opted out.

The state at that time provided $0.62 (about $24 today) per student per year and that would eventually rise to $1.21 (about $46 today). That could hardly cover the cost of a teacher or school building. Local government were not interested in paying local taxes for education, instead they preferred the state-funded stipend model.

Now, we’re in the bloody meatgrinder of the American Civil War. The school fund has been drained to pay for the war effort. The students have largely gone to the battlefield and traded in their pens for muskets. The students that didn’t go to war were decimated by a Yellow Fever outbreak that would wreck the homefront.

In a tale that certainly rhymes with “ovid”: panic and flight drove people away from city centers to avoid the plague; teachers and healthcare professionals were some of the first victims of the outbreak; and the schools were shuttered because they were hotbeds of disease.

When the Reconstructionists come into power in Texas, they see an under-resourced, fragmented, and deeply exclusionary collection of schools that could never be called a system. There are very few public schools and a public university was never created. And it has all been decaying and abandoned throughout the Civil War, and even now that fighting has stopped, there is not peace in the land. The economies still haven’t recovered from waves of Yellow Fever and the war.

The Civil War has just ended. Confederate states are trying to get back into the Union. However, in order to do so they must be readmitted and their constitutions must be accepted by the US Congress.

The old guard of Texas is still in power and is still responsible for drafting the new constitution. They made sure to codify the public education structure in the new document and add some new parts to it.

For example the perpetual finance mechanism was tweaked to include:

Additionally, they added a state level education taxing power, with a couple unique caveats:

And finally for our consideration, they created a Superintendent of the schools and a Board of Education:

So what’s important here in this constitution is not necessary the distaste of the racially charged policies, but instead I’ll focus this audience on Texas merely writing the education system as it existed at the time. The only new part they proposed to add with this document was really the Superintendent and the Board of Education.

Now obviously this completely violated the spirit of Readmission and the equal treatment of Freedmen. The provision for separate funding meant that the African American population would be resource starved systemically and we knew from past constitutions that merely encouraging a legislature to fund and develop education would result in education being constantly deprioritized.

Thus, unsurprisingly, the US Congress rejected this constitution and refused to readmit Texas. The federal response was swift and forceful, the US Reconstruction Acts were passed and martial law was imposed on Texas.

The US Army supervised voter registration, elections, the constitutional convention and the meeting of the Texas legislature. The Federal government mandated a constitutional convention for Texas as part of Reconstruction.

The supervision lead to a wildly different delegation drafting the constitution than had ever done it before. There were Radical Republicans, moderate Unionists, and, importantly, 10 African American delegates.

They rewrote the education sections to create a more hierarchical structured system under the Superintendent of Schools:

They outlined that the system shall be fair and uniform:

They required compulsory or mandatory attendance:

They increased dramatically increased the funding for the permanent school fund to 25% of the state’s general taxation and also add a poll tax for schools:

They created a mechanism for local school taxation:

And finally, they wrote the urgency for this in as well:

We’ll zoom into the Radical Republicans for a second, because they will become the public face of this regime.

In 1854, Yankee abolitionists, believing that slavery was a moral and social evil, formed the Republican political party, the Texas delegation was organized in 1867. The delegation split into two factions during the 1868-69 Constitutional Convention: the Conservatives and the Radicals. The Conservatives wanted to recognize all non-Civil-War-related local and state laws made after secession in 1861. The Radicals insisted that all such laws should be declared null and void.

The resulting constitution of 1869—strongly influenced by the Radical Republicans—provided for increased powers of the governor, greater support of public education, and suffrage for adult male African Americans.

In 1870, members of the Radical faction formed the Radical Republican Association, an organization of white and African-American Republicans.

Even after the ratification of that Constitution, getting legislative outcomes around this public school effort where being frustrated. A coalition led by Radical Republican Governor Edmund J. Davis pushed through the School Act of 1871. Davis believed that a democratic society could not survive the "plague of ignorance" that caused the Civil War.

And he didn't just talk about it; he built it. Davis centralized the schools, mandated compulsory attendance, and gave local districts the power to levy a 1% property tax to build schools and pay teachers. This created the follow-through to deliver the education system the Constitution of 1869 envisioned. For a brief, shining window, Texas had a heavily centralized, tax-funded public education system that rivaled the elite schools of the time in New England.

But the old guard—former Confederates and wealthy secessionist landowners—were enraged. To them, property taxes to fund schools for Black and poor white children wasn't progress; it was tyranny.

They launched a vicious political smear campaign. They didn't just attack the taxes; they demonized the state education leadership. In official legislative reports, the old guard politicians attacked the State Superintendent of schools, painting him not as an educator, but as a tyrant:

To the old guard, taxing white landowners to educate newly freed Black Texans wasn't a civic duty. It was the work of a "despotic inquisitor."

The reality was the despite its many operating challenges, the system that was put in place was effective and in its short existence had managed to make considerable progress in improving equal access to high quality public education for all Texans.

But while, the what might have idyllic to some, how it was done and the amount of social capital required to maintain it would prove catastrophic in short order.

By 1873, the old guard successfully clawed back power in an event they dubbed "The Redemption."

They immediately took a sledgehammer to the public school system, gutting the taxes, dismantling the centralized board, and leaving public schools to wither.

But the wealthy elites still needed to educate their own kids. So, what did they do? They abandoned the public system entirely and built private schools and colleges.

This era led to a massive wave of private institution restoration across Texas. Southwestern University in Georgetown (1873, via merger of 4 other struggling colleges). Austin College relocates to Sherman (1878). Trinity University (1869, via merger of 3 other struggling colleges). St. Edwards (1878). St. Mary’s University (1877, revived from near bankruptcy).

And most notably for us? In 1873, a small school called Add-Ran College opened in Thorp Springs. It would later move to Waco, and finally to Fort Worth, where it took the name Texas Christian University (TCU).

While the elite re-built their private enclaves, the Black community had to build their own fortresses of knowledge from scratch. Wiley University in Marshall, Prairie View A&M, stood alone against this new wave of Redemption.

When the old guard finalized their takeover, they re-wrote the Texas Constitution of 1876—the exact same constitution that governs Texas today.

In that document, they purposely designed a decentralized, wildly unequal school finance system. It was a forceful reaction to the tyranny of the Radical Republicans and the ‘Carpetbagger Constitution.’ But also, it was a collective cultural rage about the costs of the Civil War and the resulting social change forced on a resistant populace afterwards.

The Radical Republicans and the Federal government viewed education as a tool of systemic Reconstruction—a way to build a biracial democracy via centralized state authority. The Old Guard of Texans viewed this exact same system as an expensive, tyrannical overreach that threatened their local control and segregated social order.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1875, delegates dismantled the centralized system, arguing for "retrenchment and reform" to stop "expensive" state overreach. They decentralized funding, slashed taxes, and functionally segregated the schools.

They reduced the taxing powers of the State Legislature:

They decentralized the school system by removing the district structure.

And they functionally segregated the schools with the following:

And that’s where the Constitutional story ends. It’s kind of a downer, but the good news is it’s just the first art of the story. But if you’ve ever wondered why it maybe seems like the foundations of Texas School Finance perhaps seem to have a bit of racist twang to that, well, that was intentional. The school system and our story will stay in this condition for the next 70 years. We will pick up next week with the Gilmer-Aikin era - Episode 2: The Legislature Strikes Back

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If you read this far, I just want to say thank you so much. It was a lot of fun digging this deep into Texas Constitutional history and putting this all together into a narrative that brings together a cohesive story for Texas School Finance.

While all this history might feel a bit pedantic, once its all laid out I hope we will find that it all serves a valuable purpose in helping us all see the challenge we Texas parents face with the same eyes.