Grading Texas

There are budgets, and there are political statements. House Bill 1, the slashandburn appropriations bill now being debated on the House floor, is more the latter than the former.

It is a political statement by rightwing ideologues who want to shrink state government and don’t care about the consequences – higher unemployment, more homeless on the streets, more poor people crowding into county hospital emergency rooms, poorer schools and more dropouts headed to overcrowded prisons.

The political statement called House Bill 1 is designed to appeal to antigovernment activists who would just as soon privatize the public schools and let disadvantaged Texans who are elderly, ill or frail fend for themselves. If they make it, fine; if they don’t, the tea party types really don’t care. If they could, they would return Texas to the nineteenth century. House Bill 1, as presented to the House, is a huge step in that direction.

It is now about 6:05 p.m. and the Texas House is getting ready to debate Article III, the education article, of House Bill 1. During more than eight hours of debate on Article I, the executive branch, and Article II, health and human services, no significant amendments were adopted, which is bad news for children who need health care, seniors in nursing homes and families looking for a healthy environment for frail grandparents.

As a reminder, Article III would cut $7.8 billion from the public education budget and, along with it, tens of thousands of educators’ jobs. The result will be overcrowded classrooms, closed neighborhood schools and diminished educational quality.

Article III also reduces funding for textbooks and other instructional materials and for prekindergarten and other dropout prevention programs.

If he was watching the House debate on HB1 a little while ago, state Education Commissioner Robert Scott may have felt a little scare. Republican Rep. Burt Solomons proposed an amendment to deeply cut into the Texas Education Agency’s budget and cut Scott’s salary in about half. Solomons would have put the savings – more than $200 million – into the public schools.

Solomons’ amendment was tabled, however, on a bipartisan vote after some legislators argued that the TEA already had been cut enough.

The public schools are underfunded by about $7.8 billion in HB1.

House debate on HB1 continues to plod along, with most amendments either being defeated by substantial margins or withdrawn. For variety, sometimes an amendment will be temporarily withdrawn, brought back up a little later and then defeated by a substantial margin.

One of the more interesting amendments was offered by Rep. Pete Gallego, DAlpine, who would have transferred $4 billion in public schools’ money from fiscal 2013, the second year of the biennium, into fiscal 2012.

That would have had the effect of getting public education funding to about where we need it to be for fiscal 2012. But it would have left an $8 billion shortfall in the public education budget for 2013. Gallego argued that the next session of the Legislature could address that problem with a supplemental appropriations bill, but his Republican colleagues didn’t like that idea and tabled, or killed, the amendment.