Robin Hood plan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Robin Hood Plan is a colloquialism given to a provision of Texas Senate Bill 7 (73rd Texas Legislature) (the provision is officially referred to as "recapture"), originally enacted by the U.S. state of Texas in 1993 (and revised frequently since then) to provide equity of school financing within all school districts in the state of Texas. The plan is now codified within the Texas Education Code as Section 49.002.[1]
The original bill was passed in response to numerous court rulings (both Federal and state, notably the Texas Supreme Court's ruling in Edgewood Independent School District v. Kirby) that previous financing schemes were in violation of the Texas Constitution's requirements regarding what constitutes "an efficient system of public free schools" as that provision interacts with another provision prohibiting a statewide ad valorem property tax. Though the legislation has been revised since then, its basic premise remains the same: it limits both the amounts that school districts can both spend on public schools and the amounts that they can raise through locally assessed property taxes and further requires that any amounts in excess be "recaptured" by the state and given to other districts which are unable to raise the required revenue.