Grading Texas

Upon returning to work from a couple of weeks off, I am not surprised that school districts still are trying to deal with the $5 billionplus in budget cuts handed them by the Legislature and the governorwhoshouldn’tbe president. And, I notice that the Keller ISD in North Texas has found a way to get the attention of parents who may have been ignoring all the teacher layoffs and other costsqueezing steps.

Keller has laid out a plan to start charging $185 a semester for the first kid and $135 for each sibling – for bus rides to and from school. That means some parents will be paying several hundred dollars a year, more than they would have paid in higher taxes if Keller voters had approved a modest increase in local property taxes several weeks ago.

Keller has the misfortune of sitting in an area of the state heavily influenced by the Tea Party, the antigovernment complainers who believe a quality education belongs in private schools and that other public services grow on trees. The tea partiers were influential in the defeat of the local tax increase proposed by the school district and in electing the legislative majority that slashed state funding for public education.

Maybe the Tea Partytypes now will start organizing car pools for the Keller school kids. It’s the least they can do.

In Rick Perry’s view the Earth is flat and tilts to the right, which is why the governor, once again, has dipped into his ideological well to fill the chairman’s spot on the State Board of Education. Barbara Cargill of The Woodlands becomes the latest member of the board’s social conservative faction to receive Perry’s nod to reach out to latenight TV comedians.

First, there was “Dinosaur Don” McLeroy, who apparently believed some of the big beasts may have walked the Earth with his nottoodistant ancestors. After he failed to receive Senate confirmation in 2009, Perry replaced him with Gail Lowe, who then presided over the board’s preposterous attempt last year to rewrite history and was so thinskinned that she ejected a group of eighthgraders from a public hearing on curriculum standards after they had applauded a board critic.

Lowe also failed to win Senate confirmation. So, after lawmakers were safely out of town, Perry tried again, this time with Cargill. Assuming there are no more special sessions, Cargill will serve as board chair until the next regular session in 2013, when the Senate will have to decide whether to confirm or reject her.

“Ms. Cargill has worked since her election to the board to promote her own personal beliefs rather than facts and sound scholarship in our kids’ classrooms,” said Dan Quinn, communications director for the Texas Freedom Network, which has closely followed the State Board of Education follies.

Quinn added: “In fact, she even succeeded in censoring the scientific consensus on the age of the universe from the state’s scientific standards. And she helped politicize new social studies standards by appointing an unqualified conservative evangelical minister as a socalled ‘expert’ adviser simply because his personal ideology matched her own.”

Although no major curriculum rewrites are scheduled over the next two years, don’t underestimate the ability of the board’s conservative bloc – particularly with one of its own as chair – to stir up more political controversy and embarrassing headlines.

http://tfninsider.org/category/barbaracargill/

The people who spent the past several months in Austin underfunding the public schools and attacking teachers were still trying to spin their fairy tales in media reports over the holiday weekend.

One was Rep. Rob Eissler of The Woodlands, the House Public Education chairman who was more interested in squeezing educational quality (and teachers) than improving the public schools. In an interview with his hometown paper, he continued to talk about saving teachers jobs even though the new state budget, which he supported, cuts $4 billion from school finance formulas.

“I think it’s going to turn out fine,” he said.

Fine? Well, let’s see how that word translates for Montgomery ISD, one of Eissler’s school districts.

“Fine” means no additional teachers for the extra students the district will enroll, meaning classes will become more crowded. “Fine” means no costofliving increases for teachers and other employees. “Fine” means fewer school bus stops, which means kids will have longer walks between bus stops and their homes.

Statewide, “fine” means thousands of fired teachers and other school employees looking for jobs and diminished educational opportunities for young Texans.

“I think it’s safe to say education is the top priority of the state,” Eissler said. “We spent more on public education in the next biennium than the last biennium.”

Eissler isn’t the first budgetcutter to claim the Legislature increased education spending, but their arithmetic would be relevant only if the public education system were to stop growing. In truth, the Legislature didn’t pay for any of the 170,000 new students expected to enter the public schools over the next two years.

Undoubtedly, education is the top priority of most Texans. Unfortunately, though, the top priority of the governor and the legislative leadership this session was feeding an antigovernment ideology that will hurt the public schools.

http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/courier/news/article_0a9e4689794a50ff92df29d5c8e0836e.html

Freshman state Rep. John Kuempel of Seguin obviously was glad to get home after long, difficult regular and special legislative sessions in Austin, but his assessment of what he and his colleagues accomplished during the past six months missed the basic point of representative government.

Kuempel told his hometown newspaper that he looked forward to visiting with his constituents in District 35 and “filling them in on one of the most successful sessions we’ve ever had. As a body, we did everything the governor asked, everything the leadership asked of us.”

The problem with Kuempel’s statement, of course, is that the voters of District 35 didn’t elect him to play puppy dog to the governor and the legislative leadership. They elected him to represent them – the residents of District 35 – and in that regard he represented most of them poorly, particularly school kids, their parents and their teachers.

He voted to cut funding from the public schools by more than $5 billion and pass a budget that, for the first time in more than 60 years, doesn’t fully pay for school finance formulas and enrollment growth. And, he voted for Senate Bill 8, which does nothing to address the budgetary crisis but instead attacks school teachers, the backbone of the public education system.

“Successful” session?

About as successful as the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

-From seguingazette.com