Texas taxpayers pay an average of more than $50,000 per pupil for the state’s government-run schools.
Vance Ginn, an economist who runs the Texas-based Vance Ginn Economic Consulting firm, highlighted Tuesday on X that when maintenance and operations (M&O) and debt service (I&S) taxes are combined with current levels of outstanding debt, the total per-pupil cost is $50,334.
The average private school tuition, meanwhile, is only $11,340 annually per pupil.
In Birdville Independent School District alone, “Texas has taxpayers funding $42K+ per student at ‘public schools,’” wrote Ginn. “1) $15,125 per student for M&O and debt service. 2) $27,504 per student for debt outstanding. = $42,629 per student for M&O + debt.”
Ginn obtained the school data through publicly available information provided by the Texas Education Agency for 2022 to 2023. Overall, Texas had 5,503,301 students enrolled during that period.
The $50,000 number calculated by Ginn comes from adding property taxes collected to pay for M&O and I&S to the amount of outstanding debt per student.
M&O taxes are the primary funding source for Texas’ local governments, accounting for roughly 80 percent of property taxes. The majority of M&O taxes go to government-run school districts.
However, local school districts often pursue projects that require more funding than the original M&O tax rate allows. In turn, government-run districts hold bond elections to try to fund these projects.
“Over the last five years, Texas ISDs have added over $50 billion in new bond debt, bringing the total to over $185 billion,” explained Jorge Borrego, the policy director of K-12 Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Next Generation Texas.
Ginn’s calculation of the data was a response to Borrego’s original post, which emphasized that the outstanding bond debt amounts to $33,542 per pupil.
“While this money should directly benefit teachers and improve student outcomes, much of it is instead spent on massive football stadiums and extravagant facilities,” added Borrego.
Ginn told Texas Scorecard that “politicians at the state and local levels are forcing Texas taxpayers to overfund government schools.”
“Funding per student has increased by 42 percent since 2011, while student proficiency in 8th-grade math has declined by 40 percent,” stated Ginn. “We have an overfunding and overspending problem in Texas, and more spending will never improve education outcomes in a flawed government school monopoly system.”
The solution, he contended, is for Texas to establish universal education savings accounts to fund students directly and “save taxpayers about $20 billion annually.”
Data from Texas Policy Research shows that per-pupil spending has gone up every year since the 2014-2015 fiscal year. Total government school spending has jumped around 45 percent—from $60.4 billion to $92.4 billion—over the same period.
A graph shared by school choice activist Corey DeAngelis in August suggested that much of that new funding has gone to principals and administrative staff rather than teachers and students.
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