Grading Texas

Most don’t know it, but thousands of public school teachers and students in Texas are indebted to the late Carlos Truan, a former legislator and public education champion from Corpus Christi who died Tuesday. Sure, as many veteran Capitol insiders will remember, Truan’s speeches could be insufferably long (even in a forum where long is the norm), he sometimes stumbled over personal grudges and sometimes found success in spite of himself. But he was on the right (as in correct) side of most issues, particularly those, such as education, that really mattered to the vast majority of Texans.

He did more than vote for educational improvements. He fought for them, including equity in public education funding and in higher education opportunities. He was instrumental in upgrading universities in his native South Texas by helping to bring them into the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems. Even something as basic as the duty free lunch, which many teachers may now take for granted, was enacted with Truan’s active support.

Our public schools and universities didn’t always get what they needed during Truan’s era, but, even during tough economic times, he and his lawmaking colleagues never contemplated shoving Texas into reverse, which, of course, is what happened last year under the current, backwardthinking legislative majority.

Truan, who ended his 34year legislative career (eight in the House and 26 in the Senate) after the 2001 session, was best known as a champion of bilingual education. In 1969, his first session in the Texas House, he successfully sponsored Texas’ first bilingual education law and fought for most of the rest of his career to improve it.

Truan remembered being spanked by his elementary school principal for speaking Spanish at school. That was during a time when Texas had an “English Only” law that made it a misdemeanor for any teacher or administrator to use a language other than English in school or to prescribe textbooks not printed in English, except in high school foreign language classes. That law was still on the books when Truan first arrived in Austin, and he and his colleagues had to repeal it before they could enact the first bilingual law.

Bilingual education may be more critical now than ever in Texas. About half of the children enrolled in public schools are Hispanic, and many of them speak Spanish at home. Truan knew where Texas schools were headed and tried to prepare them for the future. The current legislative majority has its eyes firmly trained on the past.

Carlos Truan put his heart into the fight to provide every Texas child the opportunity afforded by public education. We honor his life and his work by carrying the fight to those whose policies would deny that opportunity to many Texas children in 2012.

Republican state officials continue to spread the Big Lie. The latest is Comptroller Susan Combs, who told a BryanCollege Station forum yesterday that the Legislature didn’t reduce funding for public education last year but increased it by $2 billion. If she thinks her nose looks a little longer this morning, it may have more to do with fabrication than imagination.

The only way to realistically measure whether the Legislature cut or increased education funding is on a perstudent basis, and on that measure, the legislative majority slashed spending by $538 per child for this school year alone and by an additional amount for 201213. This is based on a projected increase in school enrollment of about 170,000 during this school year and 201213, the two years covered by the budget adopted by lawmakers last spring. Calculated statewide, that is a $4 billion reduction in funding obligations to school districts. Add another $1.4 billion in cuts to public school grants, and the total reductions are $5.4 billion.

Texas spent $9,446 in state and local funds for each student in average daily attendance during the 201011 school year. Following the cuts in state aid, that was reduced to $8,908 – a $538 cut per child – during the current school year, according to the National Education Association’s crunching of state data. This is why TSTA is demanding that Gov. Perry call the Legislature into special session to spend $2.5 billion of the Rainy Day Fund to avoid the cuts scheduled for 201213.

Combs’ BryanCollege Station appearance was one of 45 “town hall” meetings she is leading across the state. If taxpayers picked up the tab – and we probably did – we are getting ripped off. Combs is using the appearances mainly to build up her name identification and strengthen her conservative credentials in advance of a likely race for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 2014.

So, of course, she used the appearance to bash the federal government over Medicaid expansion, claiming increased spending on the health care program will result in even more reductions in spending on public education. Noticeably missing was any suggestion that the state wouldn’t have to choose between health care and education if state “leaders” had the courage and foresight to replace our outdated tax structure with an adequate and fair system that will grow with the economy.

“The important thing about Texas is we’ve been an important, powerful, successful state because we take risks,” Combs said.

The only risk state government is taking now is with our children and Texas’ future. A state doesn’t become – or remain – important, powerful or successful by slashing funding for the public schools.

http://www.theeagle.com/local/Healthcarebillblamed7080807

Don’t believe everything you read or watch about the public schools in America’s media, journalist Paul Farhi warns. In the American Journalism Review article linked below, Farhi makes good arguments that the “sky is falling” style of education reporting in some news outlets is overblown, misinformed and, intentionally or not, promotes the goals of selfstyled educational “experts” whose main interest in the public schools is how to squeeze them for profit.

Although many news people are quick to use phrases such as “failing schools,” overuse and misuse the word, “reform,” and blame bad teachers for a “crisis” in public education, Farhi notes that “by many important measures…America’s educational attainment has never been higher.”

Those measures, he says, include high school completion rates, college enrollment and overall performance on standardized tests. Writing about the country as a whole, not individual states, he notes that American elementary and middle school students have improved their performance on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study every four years since the tests began in 1995 and are now within a few percentage points of the world leaders. The number of Americans with at least some college education has soared from 10 percent in 1940 to 56 percent today, even as the country’s population has tripled and become more diverse.

Are there still problems? Of course, Farhi points out, notably among poor children and nonEnglish speakers. (And, he could have added, inadequate and inequitable funding in some states, including Texas. )But, Farhi believes, the impact of poverty and cultural differences on educational attainment is all too often overlooked or underreported in favor of broaderbrush stories about “failing schools” and “ineffective teachers” and stories promoting vouchers, charter schools, merit pay for teachers or standardized tests as magical solutions.

In truth, few studies have linked merit pay to increased student performance, charters – on the whole – are no better than traditional public schools, vouchers siphon tax dollars from public school classrooms to help support private schools and the main beneficiaries of standardized tests are the educational entrepreneurs who design and peddle them.

Farhi, a reporter for the Washington Post, levels particular criticism at NBCTV and its “Education Nation” summit – and the potential conflicts of interests it has with sponsors who are part of the school reformforprofit movement.

He acknowledges that some reporters understand the complexities of public education and try to tell the whole story but are hampered by local school district policies limiting their access to classrooms or teachers. “That means journalists don’t get to see the very thing they’re reporting about,” Farhi writes. “Imagine if sportswriters never got to see athletes play or political reporters never attended a campaign rally.”

I encourage you to read the whole story – it’s fairly lengthy – at the link below. I would add a couple of things about Texas journalists (I used to be one). Some are fair and pretty thorough in their coverage of public education issues. Others aren’t, although not necessarily by design. There would be more of the former were it not for the significant cutbacks Texas newspapers and other media outlets have made in their reporting staffs in recent years, leaving the reporters who are left spread very thin.

Incomplete and misleading reporting of educational issues also is encouraged by elected public officials, including the Texas governor and legislative majority, who find it easier to use teachers and students as scapegoats than face up to their own responsibilities for providing adequate financial and political support for the public schools.

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=5280

It already has been reported that more than 8,400 elementary classes in Texas have been affected by the record number of financial hardship waivers to the 221 studentteacher cap for K4. But how many children are in those overcrowded classrooms? The short answer is…a lot.

Crunching some numbers, TSTA’s teaching and learning specialist, Bryan Weatherford, has determined that as many as 88,639 K4 students in the state’s 10 largest school districts alone are in classes with more students than the limit set by state law. The number is about 22 percent of the total K4 enrollment in those 10 districts, and it is based on the number of elementary campuses and grades covered by waivers in each district.

Leading the overcrowded pack is Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, with as many as 47,413 elementary students (57 percent of the district’s total K4 enrollment) impacted. In second place is San Antonio’s Northside ISD, a rapidly growing district, with as many as 18,595 elementary students in overcrowded classes. That is about half (49.7 percent) of the district’s total K4 enrollment.

Here are the other potential waiver impacts among the 10 biggest districts:

Dallas ISD – 5,517 K4 students (8.3 percent of total)

CypressFairbanks ISD – 11,346 (28.2 percent)

Austin ISD – 1,294 (3.5 percent)

North East ISD (San Antonio) – 4,034 (16.09 percent)

El Paso ISD – 440 (1.9 percent)

Only three of the largest districts – Fort Worth, Arlington and Fort Bend – had no waivers reported – at least so far. But can they hold out when the second round of budget cuts kicks in next year? And, how much higher will the waiver numbers grow in other districts?

There still is time to put a lid on these waivers and stop the budget bleeding in the public schools. That is why TSTA is demanding that Governor Perry call the Legislature into special session to appropriate $2.5 billion from the Rainy Day Fund to stop the cuts now. The money is there, and it won’t require a tax increase.

The governor and the legislative majority pretended last year that the $5.4 billion in public education cuts wouldn’t hurt the classroom, even as they left more than $7 billion of taxpayers’ money unspent in the Rainy Day Fund. Their argument didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now. The budget cuts are swelling classrooms and eroding the learning environment for many thousands of Texas children. If you haven’t signed TSTA’s petition, please click on this link and send it around:

-From TSTAweb.net