By Fritz Edelstein
September 27, 2004

A judge has struck down the school finance formula in Texas. The Houston Chronicle reports that after a six-week trial in Austin, Judge John Dietz ruled that the school finance law does not provide sufficient and equitable funding for public schools. More than 330 Texas districts had joined in the suit against the state. The judge gave Texas lawmakers until October 2005 to come up with a new system. Mayors in Texas as in other states should be finding out the status of similar law suits and determine the role they should be playing to obtain equity and adequacy in local public school funding from the state. Numerous states are in the same situation such as Ohio. New Jersey is one of the few states where the legislature has begun to address the issue of equity in school finance and mayors of the affected districts meeting regularly with local educators on a statewide basis to discuss next steps within the state and local districts. (For more information about New Jersey go to: elc@edlawcenter.org.) This is a critical issue the U.S. Conference of Mayors addressed in its policy resolutions passed at the annual meeting in Boston last June.