GUEST CONTRIBUTION
THE
INTERVIEW:
JUDGE JOHN
DIETZ
BY PATRICK MICHELS
TEXAS OBSERVER
Former Travis County District Judge John Dietz
Now that he’s retired, the judge
who found Texas’ school finance
system unconstitutional has a
few things to say in an interview
with the Texas Observer’s Patrick
Michels.
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 correlat8
photo by Patrick Michels
ed, 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.
TO: That doesn’t mean you can
stop funding it.
JD: Exactly. If you look at Justice
[Nathan] Hecht’s opinion in West Orange Cove II [the last school finance
case] in 2004, he says, after upholding me on the property tax issue,
“Look, there’s really a lot of evidence
that the court considered about how
the schools are underperforming.” An
achievement gap between economically advantaged and disadvantaged.
There’s an achievement gap in the
race characteristics. And between rural and urban. There were a number
of problems. He lays them out and he
goes, “You know, just looking at it, we
think it’s just barely constitutional,
but it could get worse.”
When I was drafting the [latest] judgment, I took every one of those things,
and every one had gotten worse, and
we could quantify it. Two hundred
thousand students in the Texas higher education system are taking remedial math and remedial English. The
achievement gap between the economically advantaged and disadvantaged — which had been narrowing
continued on page 10
TASBO REPORT | AUGUST 2016