Persuasive Speech On Texas Education

Hello Ms. Bahorich, I am a current student at the University of Texas at Arlington and I believe that there is an injustice in the education system in Texas. I believe that the way it’s funded gives a disadvantages to students that attend a school located in a low income neighborhood over schools located in a rich neighborhood. Personally, I admire you for being on the Texas Board of Education as the chairperson, because your job is more than just leading meetings over the Texas education system, giving ideas on how to improve the education system, or make sure that school districts are regulated according to standards. Your job goes beyond that; the future of Texas students is in your hands. Texas education has greatly improved since the beginning

Texas Ten Percent plan purpose is to maintain diversity in its most-competitive public universities in a race-neutral way (Daugherty, Martorell, and McFarlin). The way this program works is by automatically accepting anyone who attended a public high school in the state of Texas and graduated within the top ten percent of their class. Although what this programs was meant to help disadvantaged minorities or low income students, it ends up hurting not only students that attended a low performing high school by admitting them in an university for which they’re not qualified for, but they also “take spots from better-qualified students who are not admitted under the TTP Plan” (Daughtery, Martorell, and McFarlin Jr.) Giving students who attended a competitive high school a disadvantage to get accepted in a flagship university. However, the main issue on the education issue is not about what race is getting the better education, but how the system is funded. Unfortunately, everything is based on money now days, the more money a school has, the better their technological equipment is, they can buy new books for every student, or even their school programs are better. I know this because I went to a high

The public education system in Texas is mostly funded at the local, then the state, and finally at the federal level. In the school year of 2013-2014, public school districts were funded 56.4% at the local level, 32.9% at state level, and 9.0% at the federal level (FAST - Public Education Funding In Texas). This means that more than half of the public education funding comes from the local level which includes the property taxes, therefore there is an unequal funding within school districts from different cities. As I mentioned before, the state of Texas fails to distribute the money equally within schools, but why? Well there is two answers to this issue. The first one is that wealthy school districts have found a loophole in the Robin Hood plan. Although, the wealthy school districts still send money to the state to support poor school districts. They spend some of that money in interest and sinking taxes, which is a tax used to cover new construction, acquisition and equipment for the schools (Michels). However, some wealthy school districts have overstretched the limits of this tax. A great school district example of this would be Eanes ISD which “bought iPads for its high school students with bond money” (Michels). This is just insane. How is it possible that we are letting this happening while other poor school districts, such as the one I