With budget gridlock in Washington, and massive education cuts at home, the Texas school districts that qualify for federal "Impact Aid" dollars are waging a war on two fronts.

A bill from state Rep. Rob Eissler modifying how end-of-course exams factor into graduation led House Republicans into a debate over how best to handle student testing during what one called "extraordinary times" in public education.

On the heels of a newly approved House budget that leaves public schools $7.8 billion short of what they're entitled to under current funding formulas, the House Public Education Committee today considered a round of school finance bills.

The Texas House started with a $164.5 billion budget and ended with the same total. But lawmakers spent the better part of a weekend making changes inside the budget for 2012-13 before giving it their approval, 98 to 49.

We liveblogged the full debate over HB 1, the House version of the general appropriations bills for the next biennium, which passed late Sunday night 98 to 49.

Numbers aren’t all that’s buried in the budget. Lawmakers have filed hundreds of amendments that are political in nature, from repealing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants to trying to push Planned Parenthood out of the family planning business. 

The Texas public school finance system, responsible for underwriting the education of the nation’s second-largest student population, is notoriously byzantine. Here’s our layman’s guide to figuring it out.

A bill to improve how police conduct lineups to solve crimes tentatively passed the Texas House today without opposition.

File this in the "this hasn't happened yet?" category: The Texas Legislature has taken one big step toward banishing the "R" word from state statutes.

Beaumont's Carrol A. Thomas, who makes $347,834 annually, is the highest-paid superintendent in Texas, even though his district of about 20,000 students is considerably smaller than those in other Texas cities.

Senators tried to improve the funding picture for public education on Thursday when the Senate Finance Committee voted 13-2 to add $5.7 billion to its initial proposal. But that's still about a $4 billion reduction from current levels.

At Tuesday's Senate Education Committee hearing on a trio of anti-bullying bills, the parents of children who committed suicide after being picked on by classmates asked lawmakers to fix a system they say failed their families.

A disk holding the Social Security numbers of thousands of current and former students in the Laredo Independent School District — a total of 24,903 — has gone missing, according to the Texas Education Agency. 

Tribune readers, wondering what was personally at stake for the state’s education policy makers, asked us to check where lawmakers send their children to school. We obliged, and posed that question to all 181 members of the Legislature and 15 members of the State Board of Education.

Tribune readers, wondering what was personally at stake for the state’s education policy makers, asked us to check where lawmakers send their children to school. We obliged, and posed that question to all 181 members of the Legislature and 15 members of the State Board of Education.