Grading Texas

Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential campaign encounters a new hurdle this week when the governor is scheduled to participate in his first televised presidential debate. News reporters chronicling the GOP horserace already are writing a lot about what to expert, what not to expect in terms of candidate tactics, who stands to win, who stands to lose, etc.

For those who do tune in Wednesday evening, don’t hold your breath expecting to hear any positive, realistic proposals for the public schools and school teachers. That is not what the Republican presidential race is all about.

Perry, instead, probably will brag about balancing the Texas budget without a state tax increase, even though he and the Legislature slashed $5.4 billion from public education and endangered thousands of educator jobs and diminished opportunities for tens of thousands of school kids.

One or more of the participants may endorse a Republican proposal in Michigan to let school districts contract their teacher hiring through private, forprofit companies. You also may hear about vouchers and other privatization schemes that are designed to enrich entrepreneurs while undermining the public schools.

The candidates also will spend some time debating ideas to return the United States to the 19th Century. Whatever happened, after all, to the cozy community of the oneroom schoolhouse? And, is the Earth really round?

In the interest of politeness, I am reluctant to use the word, “lie.” But if state leaders continue to deny that they slashed $5.4 billion from the public education budget, which took effect today, their noses soon will stretch from Austin to El Paso. The numbers in the worst public education budget that Texas has seen in Gov. Perry’s lifetime are indefensible.

The article linked below regurgitates a couple of recent untruthful statements by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and a Perry spokeswoman, and they doubtlessly are being repeated with annoying regularity.

“We tightened the belt on administration. We reduced some of the spending for the Texas Education Agency, but we put more money in the classroom, because we know good teachers are the key,” Dewhurst recently told an audience in Houston.

Bullcorn.

The relevant test here is whether the governor and the Legislature enacted a public education budget that fully funded the state’s school finance requirements, including an anticipated enrollment growth of 170,000 over the next two years. They flunked miserably.

More money in the classroom? Not when teachers are losing their jobs, and class sizes are growing.

For the first time in more than 60 years, the public education budget fails to fund the state’s financial obligations to districts and meet enrollment growth. That failure is a $4 billion shortfall. Additionally, the budget cuts $1.4 billion from education grants for such important programs as fullday, prekindergarten and dropout prevention.

The total is a $5.4 billion cut, all the ridiculous revisionism to the contrary.

Paul Colbert, a school finance guru and former legislator, says state leaders who talk about increasing funding to schools “are being conservative with the truth.”

Colbert is too kind. They are throwing truth out the window.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/politics/article/Stateseducationfundingisnotmakingthegrade2133521.php

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, under Perry’s watch, eagerly accepted several billion dollars in federal stimulus money in 2009 to help balance the state budget while letting Perry keep bragging about holding the line on state taxes. Maybe he figured the good folks in Tulsa didn’t know about that.

And, just a few months ago, Perry accepted another $830 million in federal stimulus funds to save (at least temporarily) some educators’ jobs. That was after he had spent several months playing politics over the issue.

The article about Perry’s speech to the Tulsa Press Club notes that the governor “shed little new light on his campaign’s economic plan.”

That’s because he doesn’t have one. He does have a lot of trite ideological rhetoric, though.

-From customwire.ap.org

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 recent sessions.

Well, there is one other thing the state does.

It provides an extra incentive to stay in school for kids eager to exercise their independence behind the wheel of a car. Texans younger than 18 have an extra requirement for obtaining and renewing a driver’s license. It’s called a verification of enrollment (VOE) form, proving that they are enrolled in school for the current semester.

A freshly issued, uptodate student ID badge won’t do, as my 17yearold son and I learned this morning when we went to one of the most inconveniently located and most parkingunfriendly DPS driver’s license offices in the entire state (and then waited in line) to renew his license.

He got his first regular driver’s license in January, but drivers younger than 18 have to renew their licenses on their next birthday, and they can’t renew online. Please keep all of this in mind (and also make sure you know your son’s or daughter’s Social Security number) if you are a parent gathering the nerve to dive into this teenage driving adventure. It might save you an extra trip to the driver’s license office after taking time off from work and school. These offices are closed on the weekends, a costcutting step taken during a previous state budgetary crunch.

This morning’s setback was minor. Adrian will get his VOE form, and we will try again on Friday, when he has an open schedule until midmorning. But it got me to thinking about whether this school enrollment proof for young drivers is an effective deterrence to dropping out or merely something that sounds good and was easy for the Legislature to impose.

I don’t know. It may be keeping some kids in school, but many dropouts are from families that can’t afford cars. And, I suspect there are thousands of other young dropouts driving around on our streets and highways without the blessing of a license, just as there are thousands of motorists driving around without insurance, which the state also requires.