Grading Texas

I had a little trouble believing the headline on a story posted by WFAATV in DallasFort Worth. “Budget cuts may benefit Cedar Hill ISD students,” it said.

Although budgetary reductions prompted the district in Dallas County to cut 73 positions this year, the story tries to make the point that the thousands of school layoffs across the state have enlarged the pool of qualified applicants for the few positions that Cedar Hill has been filling.

“We haven’s had this great of a pool to pick from in a long time,” said high school principal Tammy Mariani.

Cedar Hill had 93 applicants for one nonprofessional position, a teacher’s aide in special education, and 475 applicants for an intermediate school teacher position. That may be an administrator’s dream, but it is a nightmare for a recently unemployed teacher or teacher’s aide scrambling for a job.

According to the story, Cedar Hill in the past has had to recruit teachers from as far away as Mexico, seeking the best and the brightest educators with the proper credentials.

That may be. But even with shortages of properly certified teachers in certain disciplines, I wonder why the district had that much trouble. Cedar Hill, after all, is on the edge of the Metroplex, not sitting among a bunch of cacti along the Pecos. It also is one of the higher paying school districts in Texas.

I still question the headline. Some Cedar Hill students may benefit from a handful of topnotch new hires, but other students will be illserved if classes become more crowded or electives are dropped because of a smaller, overall teaching force.

http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/OperationEducation126618813.html

Rick Perry, who has been pulling down a government paycheck for the past 26 years, will campaign, nevertheless, for president much as he has campaigned for governor – as an antigovernment “outsider.” It’s funny how that gimmick has worked….Well, maybe not too funny.

In Perry’s oftenrepeated view, the most important function of government is to help the private sector create jobs, a role in which Perry fancies himself as something of an expert, as he reminded the country in an interview with the Associated Press, published over the weekend.

The AP story is linked below, and if you manage to wade through all the conservative, red meat rhetoric about gay marriage and evolution, you will notice Perry praising his own job creation efforts while belittling those of President Obama, including the federal stimulus funds Perry readily accepted in Texas.

“I think we poured about $4 trillion down that (stimulus) rat hole, and government has not created a job,” Perry said.

The comment is a variation of what the governor often has claimed, that government doesn’t create jobs but that it can help private industry create jobs with low taxes, a businessfriendly regulatory climate and with corporate welfare in the form of outright grants of tax dollars.

Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Perry’s view of government’s role in job creation is, at best, incomplete.

The bureau reports that Texas has gained more than 1 million jobs since the end of 2000, about the time Perry became governor, and that about 300,000 of the new Texas jobs, about which he loves to brag, were in…government. More than half of the government jobs were in the public schools, thanks to a rapidly growing student population, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Moreover, the single biggest contributor to job growth – or, at least, the creation of highpaying, quality jobs – is a good public education system, a fact Perry doesn’t seem to comprehend. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have presided over more than $5 billion in cuts to the public schools this spring and signed the worst public education budget in Texas in at least 60 years.

Thousands of school district employees already have lost their jobs, and only in Perry’s view of the world does that merit a promotion for the governor.

http://www.wfaa.com/news/texasnews/Perrysaysmostimportantissueisjobs126464218.html

The Texas Tribune has a story today warning that the decision of the budgetstrapped Keller ISD to charge for school bus service could be only the beginning of a new round of fees in Texas’ “free” public schools.

The story doesn’t offer any additional examples, but more fees (in addition to what kids and parents already pay for extracurricular activities) are likely in the wake of the Legislature’s $4 billion cut to school finance formulas over the next two years. Lawmakers also cut an additional $1 billionplus from public education grants for things such as fullday prekindergarten.

The story also raises the question of how many fees can be considered constitutional. Maybe this will be one more issue school districts or other plaintiffs will raise when they file the next, longanticipated lawsuit against the state over public school funding.

As I noted in a posting last week, Keller ISD plans to charge $185 per student per semester for bus service with siblings discounted at $135 per semester. That will be a significant amount of money for many families.

Lowincome kids who quality for free and reduced lunches will be charged “only” $100 per semester, money that many families simply may not have.

Many students will end up walking to school, including along major thoroughfares that lack sidewalks, and safety may quickly become an issue.

Elections do have consequences, folks. It’s still a little early, but remember that when the party primaries for legislative seats roll around next March.

http://www.texastribune.org/texaseducation/publiceducation/studentfeesredefinefreepublicschool/

Even in tough economic times, the entrepreneurs whose main interest in education is how to make money from it – and from the taxpayers – are everpresent, and one company, K12 Inc., apparently scored big in Tennessee this spring with a new, forprofit “virtual school” law.

The budget cuts suffered by Texas’ public schools were bad enough, but Texas teachers and other taxpayers at least can be grateful it was Bill Haslam, the governor of Tennessee, and not Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, who signed the K12 law.

According to a story, linked below, in The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, the new law lets a forprofit company recruit children throughout the state for a virtual academy. This would include children who have been homeschooled as well as kids recruited from public schools. There is no cap on enrollment or total funding.

K12’s lobbyists pushed the bill through during the closing minutes of the Tennessee legislative session in May, and the company has been conducting an enrollment blitz this summer.

Haslam, who signed the new law last month, admits that he just now is learning its full impact.

“I do think we have to think through the consequences a little bit more than we’ve done so far,” he said.

It may be a little late for that, don’t you think, governor?

But not too late for public school supporters to be wary of a similar proposal when the Texas Legislature returns to Austin in 2013.

http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2011/07/25/37mct_tnvirtual.h30.html?cmp=ENLEUNEWS2