Grading Texas

The Texas Legislature’s ability to showboat while missing the real boat is apparently limitless. Or, to put it another way, when it comes to hypocrisy or hollow rhetoric, the statehouse has set the gold standard.

One of the latest (of many) examples is House Bill 2909, which won House approval last month and was heard by the Senate Education Committee today. It would tweak an existing law requiring the public schools to educate their students about the importance of getting a college education.

“Relating to increasing awareness in this state of the importance of higher education,” reads the title.

What, you may be asking, is wrong with that?

It is meaningless to pass such a law after several years of making it increasingly difficult for young Texans and their families to afford a college education. And, this year, the state leadership is intent on making it even harder.

It is hypocritical to order public schools to preach the importance of a college education while slashing funding for both colleges and the public schools, wiping out state grants for thousands of deserving college students and forcing university regents to impose another round of tuition increases.

The first person who needs to be educated about the importance of higher education is the governor. He needs to be followed by every member of the Texas House who voted not too many weeks ago to slash billions of dollars from public schools and universities.

The Senate should laugh at the bill and toss it in the trash.

Much to their chagrin, public school teachers are increasingly finding themselves thrust into the political arena, with the result that many also are finding themselves thrust out of the classroom, stripped of jobs or, at least, longterm job security. For political and budgetary reasons, legislatures in such widely separated states as Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee, New Jersey, California and, of course, Texas, to name but a few, have declared war on public school educators this year, forcing teachers who want to continue being teachers to fight back or be run over.

I am regurgitating the obvious because of a comment I received following last Friday’s post about the demise of House Bill 400, which I headlined, “HB400 wasn’t the end of the fight.”

“I didn’t get into teaching to have to ‘fight’ at all,” one teacher responded, wincing at my choice of what she obviously views as a negative word. Then she added, “But I will put up my dukes, no doubt.”

No educator chose the profession because he or she was itching for a fight. But, like it or not, teachers and the entire public school system in Texas (as well as many other states) are in a political fight for their continued existence.

Why?

It’s partly budgetary. Texas lawmakers arrived in Austin in January facing a $27 billion revenue shortfall. But the attack on teachers orchestrated by the governor and the legislative leadership in Austin, in truth, is more political than budgetary.

The attack on the public schools began in earnest five years ago when Gov. Perry and the legislative leadership deliberately reduced education funding while cutting local property taxes, producing a deficit in the public education budget alone that now has grown to $10 billion for the upcoming biennium.

Instead of responding to the wishes of the vast majority of Texas parents and other taxpayers who recognize and value the critical importance of the public schools to the state’s future, state leaders are listening primarily to two groups of people:

# Private school owners and other wouldbe entrepreneurs whose primary interest in education is how to make money from it. They actively promote vouchers and other schemes to divert tax dollars to their own selfinterests.

# The tea party and other antigovernment agitators who want to drastically shrink the size of state government, a task that can’t be accomplished without gutting public education.

Compounding the problem are a legislative legacy of underfunding public education, a myth that there are mountains of waste in every public school budget and a legislative preference for taking educational advice from everyone but the real experts – educators.

Policymakers in Austin would rather slash the public education budget and make teachers – those who survive the cuts jump through hoops to “earn” the ability to continue practicing their profession.

You may not want to fight. But if you are a public school teacher, the fight has come to you.

Teachers could take a short breath of relief with the demise last night of House Bill 400 shortly after the stroke of midnight in the House chamber. Ostensibly, the bill was the victim of a missed procedural deadline. In reality, it was killed by the phone calls and emails to legislative offices from thousands of educators and other friends of the public schools.

The relief, though, may be short.

Counting today, there are 18 days left in this legislative session, and although HB400 is gone, the bad ideas it includes, unfortunately, aren’t. Any or all of them – lifting the 221 cap on K4 classes, cutting teacher pay, allowing teacher furloughs, weakening teacher employment rights – could be resurrected by getting attached as amendments to other bills, most likely in the Senate.

One of the likely “vehicles” on which these proposals could hitch a ride is Senate Bill 12 by Senate Education Chairwoman Florence Shapiro. It already includes some – but not all – of the same provisions as HB400 but has been blocked from a Senate vote, so far, by the twothirds rule. There has been enough Democratic opposition to keep the bill bottled up, but that could change as pressure mounts on senators, latesession deals are cut, etc.

Or, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and the Republican majority could change the Senate rules to allow SB12 to be debated on a simple majority vote. The twothirds rule is a longtime Senate tradition, but on key issues (including a vote on the Senate budget bill just last week) it has been eroding under Republican pressure.

Another possible vehicle is Senate Bill 22, a school finance bill that also has been hung up in the Senate.

Strange – and, often, outrageous – things happen in the closing days of legislative sessions. Bad ideas that people thought were dead are suddenly alive again, and the process isn’t pretty.

So, school district employees who value their jobs, their professions and the quality of their classrooms had better keep calling their state representatives and state senators, demanding that they oppose all of the bad ideas in House Bill 400. Parents who value the quality of their children’s educations should do the same thing.

And, while they are at it, they also should demand that lawmakers find more revenue for the new state budget, another issue that will go down to the wire.

Gov. Rick Perry, whose political gameplaying delayed and could have killed the $830 million in “emergency” federal funds for education jobs in Texas, now is trying to claim credit for the money finally getting here.

That, at least, was Paul Burka’s take in an item he posted late last night on his Texas Monthly blog, and he may be right. According to Paul, legislative budget writers intended to use the extra funding to help close the shortfall in funding public schools. But Perry and the Texas Education Agency got the jump when TEA quickly had the money distributed directly to school districts, based on school finance formulas.

I don’t think Perry fooled any school superintendents or school board members. Only those with their heads in the sand – or deeply intoxicated by Republican politics – would give the governor any credit for easing a budgetary mess that Perry helped create.

The $830 million obviously is welcome, and it may save a significant number of educator jobs. But without the Doggett amendment, which would have guarded against a comparable reduction in state education funding, there is no guarantee that the Legislature’s budget conferees may not try to cut back even further on education funding in the final state appropriations bill.

The public education budget already is $8 billion short on the House side and $4 billion short in the Senate version. It would be outrageous to subtract another $830 million, but that possibility – particularly coming from the House side can’t be ruled out yet, considering the antieducation, antigovernment fever that pervades this Legislature.