Grading Texas

Truth often is a victim in the political process of lawmaking, and it has been assaulted so many times by the state “leadership” during this legislative session that it is on life support.

The tone was set early when Gov. Perry and the top Republican legislators began perpetuating the “Big Lie,” which claims that lawmakers have to make huge cuts in education, health care and other public services to allow the state to “live within its means.”

The state does have to live within its means, but the limited means claimed by the governor and his antigovernment allies are simply artificial, political declarations. The state’s means are determined by the governor and the Legislature. And, the Legislature has billions of untapped dollars in potential revenue. They include another $6 billion in the Rainy Day Fund and billions in potential tax revenue, only a small fraction of which – and posing only a limited impact on most taxpayers – would be necessary to fund a reasonable state budget.

The “Big Lie” subsequently has spawned a number of other misrepresentations, half truths and worse under the Capitol dome.

Here is a small sampling:

# House Public Education Chairman Rob Eissler’s claim, during House debate over the weekend, that his House Bill 400 actually “embraces” teachers.

Yeah, Rob….embraces in the manner of an octopus, a boa constrictor or the Boston Strangler. HB400 is the most antiteacher bill to hit the Legislature in a long time.

# Eissler: “We have a (teacher) salary schedule that’s antiquated.”

Not so much antiquated, Rob, as woefully underfunded. But Eissler has a “solution” with HB400. Repeal the state minimum salary schedule entirely and let districts set their own salaries with their own rules. Then, we can watch Texas’ national ranking of 31st in average teacher pay drop even lower.

# Rep. Jerry Madden, bemoaning the fact that a former intern on his staff, now a firstyear teacher in Austin ISD, is losing her job. He blamed AISD’s lack of the budget “flexibility” that HB400 offers.

No, Jerry, your former intern didn’t lose her job because Austin ISD lacks budget flexibility. She lost her job in anticipation of the deep cuts in state funding for public education that you voted for.

# Senate Education Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, defending a Senate budget that cuts $4 billion from public education: “We pay for students, all students. No students are left out.”

Every public school student would see his or her tax support drop and educational opportunity reduced. For the first time in at least 27 years, neither the House nor the Senate budget would fully fund school finance formulas or pay for anticipated enrollment growth – another 170,000 school kids over the next two years.

# Rep. Myra Crownover, defending attempts to pack more kids into K4 classrooms: “We know there is nothing magical about 221.”

She misses the point entirely – and probably deliberately. Repeated studies have shown that the smaller the classes in K4, the better the learning environment and student results. Smaller would be even better, but 221 is what we have, it has worked and it certainly is better than 251, the new limit Crownover supports.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Advocates for the public schools, health care and other important public services who may have tried to find encouragement from Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden’s pledge to hold firm in budget negotiations with the House better not get their hopes up too high.

I don’t doubt that Ogden will try. He has tried, after all, to exercise more realistic, adult leadership than any of his Republican colleagues during the protracted budget debate. But in his negotiations with House budget conferees, he will be fighting recent history as well as a rockheaded determination from the House majority and the governor’s office to bleed state government and all it supports, including the public schools.

During the David Dewhurst era as lieutenant governor, the Senate has not fared well in key deliberations with the House. Dewhurst and his Senate negotiators, for example, blinked in 2003 and caved in to thenHouse Speaker Tom Craddick’s demands that tuition deregulation be part of the budget deal. Since then, tuition has soared as higher education budgets have tightened.

Craddick also used to give Dewhurst fits over school finance, among other things. Granted, Craddick isn’t speaker anymore, and Joe Straus isn’t as autocratic. But Craddick’s leadership has been replaced by a Republican supermajority in the House, strongly supported by a governor who wants to cut, cut, cut.

Moreover, Dewhurst already has signaled that he may not be prepared to go to the mat with Ogden in support of the Senate bill. Only last week, Dewhurst publicly abandoned Ogden’s efforts to spend more Rainy Day money on the Senate budget, a move that cost Ogden any hope of Democratic support for the bill in the Senate chamber.

Even if by some miracle (which won’t happen), Ogden were able to save every dollar in the Senate budget in his negotiations with the House, the people of Texas still would be confronted with an awful state budget. The Senate version may not be as severe as the House’s, but it still would cut deeply into important services and would cut $4 billion from the public schools alone.

It still would be the first budget in at least 27 years that doesn’t fully fund school formulas and cover enrollment growth.

As TSTA President Rita Haecker noted yesterday, Texans should demand that legislators “throw both bills into the trash and start over.”

This week, I received my annual notice of appraised value on my house with the list of estimated taxes I will owe later this year to various local governmental entities in Travis County, including Austin ISD, which will account for a little more than half of the tab.

The notice also includes the annual disclaimer: “The Texas Legislature does not set the amount of your local taxes. Your property tax burden is decided by your locally elected officials, and all inquiries concerning your taxes should be directed to those officials.”

The appraisal office was required by the Legislature (some years ago) to include that language on the notice. The Legislature loves to pass the responsibility and the blame as much as it can for anything that voters may consider distasteful. This is the same kind of dodge that prompted Gov. Perry to proclaim earlier this year that he and the Legislature weren’t firing any school teachers, even though they were very busy (and still are) slashing the public education budget.

In truth, of course, much of the local government tax burden is the direct or indirect result of laws enacted by the Legislature and the Legislature’s budgetsetting policies. Some of the laws – including quality educational standards that some legislators now want to repeal – are very good, while others may be debatable.

But the point is local governments – including school districts – are largely captives of state government, and the size of your local property tax bill largely reflects legislative policy, despite the state’s “don’tblameus” disclaimer.

And, as the state “leadership” (if you want to call it that) persists in filling a huge budget hole with major cuts to education, health care and other public services, those local taxes – for everything from county emergency medical care to keeping schools open are going to continue to rise.

Meanwhile, the governor and his legislative allies will continue to brag about “holding the line” on taxes.

What’s worse, some people actually will believe them.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has this thing about steroids. He doesn’t use them, but he won’t give up on the idea of testing high school athletes for possible use. So, consequently, the budget bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee, which cuts $4 billion from public education programs, includes $1.8 million for continued, random steroid testing in high school locker rooms.

This is the same budget bill that was having trouble mustering enough votes to be debated on the Senate floor.

Deterring steroid use among young athletes is a worthy cause, but so are funding libraries, fully staffing classrooms, saving educators’ jobs and keeping neighborhood schools open – all of which would be jeopardized if the Senate budget plan were to become law. Jason Embry outlined many of the cuts in the Austin AmericanStatesman this morning. He also listed the steroid spending in his 50 facts about the bill.

You could save a lot of teacher jobs with $1.8 million, or keep a lot of lowincome school kids on health care.

Dewhurst would argue that the random testing program is a deterrent to steroid use, and it may be. But, according to an Associated Press story that ran about a year ago, only 20 confirmed cases of steroid use had been found among the nearly 50,000 tests that had been conducted up until that point.

Did the prospect of testing deter many athletes from steroid use? Or, was there never a big problem?