Oh, they're worse. The ongoing bitter joke in the state is "At least our schools are better than Mississippi's!" It's bad enough that every damn year, the school finance budget is declared unconstitutional because the kids in overwhelmingly white and privileged areas such as Highland Park and University Park get so much more money per capita than the kids in the Rio Grande Valley. (Highland Park and University Park are cities that are completely surrounded by Dallas, but keep themselves separate in the way that Beverly Hills is separate from Los Angeles. It's for the same reason, too: among other factors, this way the Highland Park schools don't become part of the Dallas system, with the horrors of Highland Park's elite snowflakes having to go to the same schools as the kids of the lawn crew.) What's worse is that we have a system where every little podunk town in the state has its own "Independent School District", so half of that money gets sopped up in administration. (The Dallas ISD, for instance, is notorious for getting a new supervisor every few years, and s/he brings in nothing but paid toadies who are then set with a job for life. I won't even get into the horrors in Houston.)
The really sad part is that any efforts to improve the situation are immediately scuttled thanks to one pet obsession: high school football. Several times in the last thirty years, the Texas Legislature has offered proposals to combine all of those ISDs into six mega-districts and save millions in administrative costs. Every time this happens, the people who like things just the way they are start squawking "So how will this affect high school football?" Immediately, every legislator in Austin is overloaded with incoherent and angry calls from Jukes and Kallikaks screaming that they'll kill everyone in Austin if anyone even thinks of messing with high school football programs, and the legislators back off. I have to admit that it's a great system, especially for producing more students whose concern for education in the state begins and ends with sports programs. (I myself went to a high school in Lewisville, a hellpit just north of Dallas, where the head football coach was making $60k at a time when the head English teacher was making $15k. It's only gotten much worse since I escaped in 1984: I'm regularly hit up to contribute money to allow teachers to buy essential school supplies, while the district pumps well over a million dollars per year into its high school and middle school football programs.)
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The really sad part is that any efforts to improve the situation are immediately scuttled thanks to one pet obsession: high school football. Several times in the last thirty years, the Texas Legislature has offered proposals to combine all of those ISDs into six mega-districts and save millions in administrative costs. Every time this happens, the people who like things just the way they are start squawking "So how will this affect high school football?" Immediately, every legislator in Austin is overloaded with incoherent and angry calls from Jukes and Kallikaks screaming that they'll kill everyone in Austin if anyone even thinks of messing with high school football programs, and the legislators back off. I have to admit that it's a great system, especially for producing more students whose concern for education in the state begins and ends with sports programs. (I myself went to a high school in Lewisville, a hellpit just north of Dallas, where the head football coach was making $60k at a time when the head English teacher was making $15k. It's only gotten much worse since I escaped in 1984: I'm regularly hit up to contribute money to allow teachers to buy essential school supplies, while the district pumps well over a million dollars per year into its high school and middle school football programs.)