Texas’ 1993 recapture plan, better known as the “Robin Hood” plan, was designed to equalize per-student funding across the state. The plan takes local property tax dollars from districts with high property wealth and redistributes them across districts with lower property wealth.
However, as the program has grown, it has become one of the state’s largest sources of income, while many school districts struggle to educate their disadvantaged student population.
In 2021, Texas school districts paid $3 billion in local property taxes to the state under the “Robin Hood” plan.
Dallas ISD paid $85,035,728 during the 2020-2021 school year, ranking ninth in the list of districts that paid the most money to the state as a part of the Robin Hood plan, despite 85% of its students being classified as economically disadvantaged.
The School Coalition released a report this month detailing the impact of Robin Hood on students, taxpayers, and the state’s budget. The lobbying group represents schools that participate in the Robin Hood plan.
The report shows how much money has left school districts and been used to balance the state’s budget.
According to Axios Dallas, in 2021, 158 school districts paid $2.96 billion to the state, compared to 2013 when only thirty-four of the wealthiest school districts spent $127 million in Robin Hood funds. Each year the amount paid to the state increases along with property values.
House Bill 3, which passed the state legislature in 2019, was hoped to offset Robin Hood. It overhauled the state’s school finance system, but during the spring 2021 session, it was discovered that property values across the state had outpaced the projection made two years prior.
Due to the growth, school districts sent an additional $1.4 billion to the state in Robin Hood payments, but the money did not go to schools or back to taxpayers; instead, the overpayment was counted as a saving in the state’s budget.
“One of the reasons [some officials] don’t want to get rid of recapture is the state makes money from it,” Al Kauffman, a lawyer who represented Edgewood ISD in lawsuits over school financing, said to the Texas Tribune. “If they don’t have recapture, the state would have to replace that with state money.”
Kauffman does see the merit in the program in some ways. “The way I look at it is that we don’t want any poor kids to be treated badly, but there’s no reason why poor kids in Dallas and Austin should be treated better than kids in San Antonio or San Elizario,” he said.
According to The School Coalition’s report, there are possible solutions.
One solution is to restructure the formula used to determine a school district’s entitlement to include how much it costs to educate students depending on the location, including educating economically disadvantaged students.
A second option would be to direct that any overpayment should go towards education rather than balancing the state’s budget.
A third recommendation in the report is to promote tax-bill transparency by requiring property-tax bills to clearly state how much of the money a property owner pays in local school taxes will be taken away by the state through recapture.