Month: <span>August 2011</span>

Spending, then bashing, stimulus money

Gov. Rick Perry took his road show to Oklahoma yesterday and vowed that if he – shudder – were elected president, there would be no stimulus programs. Perry’s stimulusbashing, of course, is a glaring inconsistency in his campaign, and it remains to be seen how long he will try to get away with it. Texas, […]

Read More

Fighting dropouts, one teenage driver at a time

With Texas’ dropout rate hovering around onethird, you can make a good argument that policymakers need to figure out a better way of combating it, other than to order a new generation of accountability tests for students and then slash the public education budget, which is what the Legislature did, backtoback, during its two most […]

Read More

When does corporate assistance become meddling?

Businesses have been contributing money to public schools for a long time, and in most cases the financial help has been put to good use. But in recent years, with legislators in Texas and other states cutting back on school aid, a new pattern of corporate giving has been emerging. According to an article in […]

Read More

Senate Finance chairman vents

For those who are tired of reading media comments from Republican legislators bragging (a softer word than lying) about all the good work they did during their six months in Austin earlier this year, read the article linked below. It’s a newspaper account of a speech that Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden (a Republican) made […]

Read More