Deitz was the district judge who ruled that the recent cuts by the Texas Legislature in school finance were unconstitutional. This was overturned by the Texas Supreme Court.
Her reacts to the decision in an interview.
- Click here for it.
Her reacts to the decision in an interview.
- Click here for it.
Texas Observer: When the Texas Supreme Court held the school funding system was constitutional, the justices spent plenty of time explaining why your ruling was wrong. What did you think about theirs?
John Dietz: Well, I don’t think they thought too much of my judgment, and I didn’t think too much of their decision. The way I viewed it was, [in the past] the Supreme Court has said this system needs to be fixed and you need to fix it now. The Legislature has never done that, unless you make them. They want to be told to do this because it gives them cover. I think that was an attempt, in my opinion — and it’s not a learned opinion — to get out of the school-finance litigation business altogether.
The law says that the Legislative Budget Board shall come up with a number. Nobody’s ever followed that law. So it’s always guesswork as to how much an accredited, adequate education costs. There is a criticism, which [Supreme Court Justice Don] Willett alludes to in the opinion, that there’s not a perfect correlation between the amount of money and the results. Now, there’s not no correlation. [It could be] that it’s inversely correlated, that the more money you get, the worse the outcome. Nobody’s saying it’s that way. Nobody, I think, really knows what the answer is. I think a lot of that has driven testing and accreditation. “Gosh, we’re giving ’em all this money and we’re not necessarily seeing the results.” That same test could be applied to just about anything the government does.
