Grading Texas

Gov. Rick Perry was only the latest antipublic schools politician to suffer a serious “oops moment” this week. (Although he initially couldn’t remember the Department of Energy during the debate of Republican presidential candidates, he didn’t have any trouble remembering that the Department of Education is on his kill list. He blurted that one right out.)

Perry’s latest in a long series of gaffes follows, of course, the wellpublicized (and welldeserved) embarrassment suffered by Ohio Gov. John Kasich when teachers, parents and other friends of the public schools joined in handing him his head. They overwhelmingly repealed a law that would have imposed broad restrictions on the employment rights of teachers and other public employees.

Although they received less publicity, voters in one legislative district in Michigan also lashed back at efforts to starve the public schools in favor of privatization. They voted to recall Republican state Rep. Paul Scott of Grand Blanc, the chairman of the House Education Committee, for his role in cutting school funding and enacting polices that weakened teacher tenure.

The Michigan recall was a spark of hope in a state where backwardthinking entrepreneurs (who view education primarily as a potential profit center for their own further enrichment) already had made strong inroads. According to a recent article in Mother Jones magazine, about half of Michigan’s 550 public school districts have privatized at least one of three key services food, transportation or custodial.

Earlier this year, the Republican governor and Republican legislative majority in Michigan cut public school funding by $300 per student. And, then, Republican Sen. Phil Pavlov, the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, proposed legislation to allow public school districts to hire teachers through private, forprofit companies. Pavlov said his halfbaked idea needed to be “part of the conversation on reform.” All it would do, however, is assure that budgetstrapped schools seek the lowest bidder, not the best teachers. The lowest bidder, of course, would underpay its teacher hires and strip them of health coverage and other benefits. That is not reform. It is robbing children of a quality education.

Pavlov, unfortunately, wasn’t the target of a recall election on Tuesday, but Scott, his House counterpart, was, and he was sent packing.

The education budget cuts that cost Scott his job in Michigan weren’t as deep as they were in Texas, where Perry and the Republican legislative majority slashed $5.4 billion from the public schools. Unlike Michigan, though, Texas doesn’t allow voters to hold recall elections for state officials. And, unlike voters in Ohio, Texans can’t force elections to repeal antieducation laws.

But every member of the Texas Legislature will be on the ballot next year, and districts for the Texas House, at least, are likely to be drawn by a federal court whose first priority won’t be saving the seats of as many budgetcutting Republicans as possible.

Teachers and others who value strong public schools still face a long fight back from harmful regressions imposed by misguided ideologues in Texas, Ohio, Michigan and other states. It is a fight that must be waged one election at a time.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is Election Day, and TSTA urges everyone to take the time to vote, if you haven’t already voted early. Everybody will have the opportunity to vote on 10 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution. There also are a scattering of local school board elections and one special election for the Texas House in Brazos County, all of which are critical to teachers and students. Voter turnout will be low, so those who do vote will have a strong opportunity to make a difference.

TSTA is backing Judy LeUnes, a former, 30year teacher in the special election for House District 14 in Brazos County. LeUnes, a Democrat and former president of the College Station Education Association, is the only candidate in the race to make education her top priority and vow to fight for more state support for public schools. Her opponents – three Republicans and a Libertarian have given lip service to education but have spent much of their time arguing about who is the biggest, budgetcutting conservative. Remember, the governor and the legislative majority already have slashed $5.4 billion from the public education budget this year. Teachers and school children can’t afford any more cuts. They need more people like Judy LeUnes – real education advocates – looking out for them at the Capitol.

Local school board races of interest include CypressFairbanks ISD, where Cy Fair TSTA/NEA is supporting Tom Jackson and Christine Hartley for Positions 1 and 2 on the board of trustees. And, AliefTSTA/NEA is backing Dr. John P. Hansen and Ann Williams for Positions 1 and 3 on the Alief ISD board.

TSTA isn’t taking a position on any of the proposed constitutional amendments, including Proposition 6, dealing with the Permanent School Fund. We urge everyone to study them and make your own decisions. Click on the following link for analyses of all 10 propositions, make up your own mind and then vote.

http://www.hro.house.state.tx.us/pdf/focus/amend82.pdf

Sadly, the assault on teachers continues. The latest attack, prepared in the guise of a research paper by The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, concludes that public schoolteachers are overpaid to the tune, nationwide, of about $120 billion. That probably comes as a surprise to the 40 percent of so of Texas teachers who have taken second jobs during the school year to make ends meet for their families. But if you are going to spin a yarn, as these conservative “think tanks” set out to do, you may as well make it a whopper.

If you want to read the whole report, it is linked below. Warning: do not read it if you are easily offended or have high blood pressure. The bottom line is that the report is simply another attempt to justify attempts to strip the most experienced teachers of the pay they have earned, reduce or eliminate teachers’ pensions and retiree health care benefits, and undermine unions.

The report says that public school teacher salaries are comparable to similarly skilled workers in the private sector but concludes the big differences in compensation are the “more generous” fringe benefits, including greater job security, afforded teachers.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. This is an attempt to justify the attacks on teacher benefits, collective bargaining and other employment rights carried out earlier this year in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states – and to encourage additional assaults across the country.

“Teacher compensation could therefore be reduced with only minor effects on recruitment and retention,” the report says.

Says who? Texas teachers are not getting rich on their salaries. And, job security for thousands of Texas teachers flew out the window when Gov. Rick Perry signed the current state budget slashing $5.4 billion from public education funding.

“Generous” benefits? Retired teachers in Texas haven’t had a benefit increase in a decade. Most retired teachers in Texas don’t quality for Social Security, so their teacher pensions are a large part of their nest eggs. And, retirees also pay a significant part of their own health insurance premiums.

Despite the academic jargon used by the authors, the effectiveness and production of a teacher simply cannot be determined in terms of dollars and cents by using test scores. And the value of a teacher cannot be based, as the report suggests, on the same “market rates” that apply to insurance clerks, software designers or other private sector workers.

Private sector workers are supposed to help their employers make a profit. Public school teachers are charged with teaching children how to learn so they can build the future, an enterprise that can take years to produce a return. When teachers open that door of opportunity to their students, those young people acquire the skills they need to help their future employers turn a profit or become entrepreneurs themselves.

The report also claims that college teacher preparation curricula are less demanding than many other fields of higher education study. This observation is used as an argument against salary schedules that pay higher salaries to teachers with advanced degrees.

This insult cloaked as “analysis” is just another way of resurrecting that old, discredited taunt, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” And, that, of course, is preposterous.

That line of flawed “reasoning” ignores the fact that many teachers who obtain advanced degrees do so in science, English and other specialized fields in which they teach. Not every teacher is a rocket scientist, but every rocket scientist received basic educational training from a teacher. And that is priceless knowledge gained from a teacher who was not overpaid.

http://www.aei.org/docLib/CDA1103AEI.pdf

The Texas Association of Business (TAB) does a good job of wringing its hands over the state’s educational problems. The latest example is a billboard that TAB erected in Austin to bemoan the high rate of dropouts from college and the long time it takes many other students to get degrees.College completion rates obviously are a major concern, but TAB leaders ignore some realities, including the fact that they themselves are part of the problem.

The Austin billboard notes that only 4 percent of students at Austin Community College finish their coursework in three years and asks, “Is that a good use of tax dollars?”

In remarks to the media, Bill Hammond, TAB’s president and CEO, also demanded that Texas do a better job of getting high school graduates ready for college. He said he hoped his group’s campaign would prompt the public to “start demanding a better product from our schools.”

TAB, however, ignores the fact that many ACC students have to work to pay their way through college. Community colleges have always included large numbers of students who juggle jobs with classes. So, of course, it takes a while for many to complete their class work.

The business group also ignores the fact that even “traditional” students at community colleges and universities throughout Texas are finding it increasingly difficult to get degrees “on time” because soaring tuition costs and dwindling financial aid are taking a financial toll on their families. Some are being forced to take time off to work, and others are dropping out entirely.

And, most importantly of all, TAB ignores the reality that an ideological, cronydriven state government, under Gov. Rick Perry and the current legislative majority, is the single biggest problem facing both our public and higher education systems.

How is anyone going to improve college readiness or increase graduation rates by slashing, as Perry and the legislative majority did this year, more than $5 billion from the public schools and billions more from higher education? Texas already ranked in the bottom third among the states in perpupil expenditures for instruction. And the new public education budget, for the first time in more than 60 years, didn’t even pay for enrollment growth. According to one new estimate, the budget cuts already have cost 32,000 school employees – including 12,000 teachers – their jobs in Texas, with job losses likely to increase next year.

Meanwhile, Perry’s appointees to the University of Texas System Board of Regents voted unanimously to invest $10 million in a privately held company with close ties to a former UT chancellor, the former chancellor’s son and associates of the governor. The company runs a website offering services to students. This is from the same regents who vote to raise tuition virtually every year.

Perry has been governor for almost 11 years, thanks in large part to the financial support and endorsements of business people, including some members of the Texas Association of Business, who talk a good game of supporting education, as long as they don’t have to pay for it. They also have supported the election of the budgetcutting legislative majority.

I am not trying to indict Texas’ entire business community. Many farsighted business leaders have cooperated with state leaders – including former Lt. Govs. Bill Hobby and Bob Bullock – to assure adequate school funding during troubled economic times, and those efforts helped attract high tech companies and other leaders of the “new economy” to Texas. Likewise, some business leaders are going out of their way to advance public education today.

But other business people have applauded the deep cuts to the education budget or have stood silently by. Still others have tried to siphon tax dollars for private school vouchers and other entrepreneurial schemes that would undermine the public schools.

The Texas Association of Business can erect all the education billboards it wants. But instead of simply crying about failure, it should start putting the blame where it belongs…and seek new leadership in the statehouse.

-From Chron.com