> It sounds like that funding decision predates the current crop of state leadership

If anything, today it is the folks in Austin (who are predominantly politically liberal) who decry their property taxes being used to fund rural school districts.

People who are actually from Texas know that we help each other out. That's how we roll.

Everyone forgets it used to be a Democratic state when Republicans were the reviled coastal elites.

That was when "Southern Conservative Democrat" was still a thing. Republicans were reviled in the South because they were literally the party of Lincoln, the most unpopular politician among southern whites for a long time (suffice it to say, black southerners had no problem voting for Republicans when they were allowed to vote at all). The turning point didn't really start until Nixon's southern strategy, and took a three decades to finish.

I'm still surprised that Texas would distribute property taxes equally like that for education. Even if they were run by Democrats, they were never run by the liberal kind.