Grading Texas

So far, the most positive (if I can use that word) and realistic Republican leadership on the state budget in Austin is coming from Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden, who stands head and shoulders above the governor, among many others, on the biggest crisis to face state government in decades.

Make no mistake. Ogden, who also is the Senate’s president pro tem, is a pennysqueezing conservative, and there will be serious spending cuts in the budget that his Finance Committee eventually will draft. But Ogden also is a realist and already is openly talking about trying to balance the budget cuts with new revenue.

In a speech on the session’s opening day, while Gov. Perry was trying to dance around the fiscal crisis, Ogden said lawmakers needed to look at fixing some problems with the state’s underperforming business tax. And yesterday, he talked about spending at least part of the Rainy Day Fund and said Senate leaders may appoint a subcommittee to review tax exemptions.

“In order to get to 21 (Senate) votes, I’ve got to look at everything – including cuts, using the Rainy Day Fund and finding nontax revenue. Before it’s all over, I suspect it (the new budget) will be a combination of the three,” he was quoted online in Texas Monthly.

In Ogden’s mind, closing exemptions to existing taxes, including some school property tax exemptions, would not be a “tax increase,” at least in the political sense of the term.

Another important factor guiding Ogden is the Senate’s twothirds rule, which will require 21 votes to pass any budget bill through the chamber. The 12 Democratic senators alone could block a bill, but budget cuts as deep and extensive as those necessary to bridge the revenue shortfall without new revenue would be offensive to many Republican senators as well.

Republican senators voted to bypass the twothirds rule for the voter ID bill, but most were wise enough to keep it for everything else, including the budget. Despite all the slashandburn rhetoric from the governor’s office and the Tea Party contingent in the Texas House, most senators want to keep the option of protecting their districts from devastating budget cuts as much as possible.

It also is easier for Ogden than some others to stray from the hardright GOP line. He is not contemplating a Republican primary race for the U.S. Senate, as is Lt.Gov. David Dewhurst, or entertaining visions of a presidential campaign, as Gov. Perry may be.

You may have heard by now that “Waiting for Superman,” last year’s overhyped movie that was little more than a featurelength advertisement for the charter school movement, won’t be waiting for an Oscar. It didn’t win an Academy Award nomination in the documentary category, and if you detect a bit of smugness in my tone, you are perceptive.

The conversation about education that director Davis Guggenheim said he wanted to start already was well underway before Guggenheim decided to interject himself into the debate. And, much of the conversation was being conducted by public school teachers, whom the director not only chose to ignore but also wrongly tried to portray as villains.

Good charter schools have their place, but the vast majority of children in Texas and other states will continue to be educated in traditional public schools, most of whom are doing a much better job than Guggenheim’s movie suggested.

As media consultant James Aldrete pointed out today during a presentation to the National Education Association’s PR Council, meeting in Austin, “There are no shortcuts (to educational quality).”

No shortcuts, no silver bullets, just a lot of hard, dedicated work by educators and adequate support by state policymakers. Texas’ educators have long done their share, but they are still waiting on the policymakers, and, as we already know, that wait will be long and difficult during this year’s state budgetary process.

Gov. Rick Perry and many legislators still persist in crippling cuts to an already underfunded school finance system, endangering the jobs of thousands of educators, undercutting the learning environment for millions of school kids and putting a huge question mark on Texas’ future.

TSTA and the National Education Association have some differences with President Obama over education policy, but the president was right on point last night when, during his State of the Union address, he warned against cuts in education spending. He was talking to Congress, but the same message applies to the Texas Legislature.

“Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing the engine,” he said. “It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact.”

Rick Sloan, communications director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, gave an update on the nation’s unemployment picture to a group of teachers unions’ communications specialists today, and it wasn’t good.
Another 60,000 and 200,000 education jobs are projected to be lost in the United States this year, he said, as 30 million Americans remain either unemployed or underemployed. That’s one fifth of the national workforce, he said.

Sloan was in Austin to address a session of the National Education Association’s PR Council, meeting at the Driskill Hotel.

He didn’t discuss Texas’ education jobs’ outlook specifically, but Texas ultimately could have a major effect on the national figures. A lot will depend on how deeply the Legislature and the governor cut into the public education budget to bridge a revenue shortfall as high as $27 billion. One “doomsday” budget proposal laid out last week in the House would slash as many as 100,000 public school jobs in Texas alone during the next twoyear budget cycle.

That budgetary plan was based on Gov. Perry’s insistence that the shortfall be “cured” without raising taxes or spending any of the state’s Rainy Day Fund.

You may have noticed that Gov. Rick Perry – always eager to divert attention from his own failures has declared an “emergency” for state legislation that would call on Congress to pass a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now, if only he could figure out a way to cure a very real emergency. That, of course, would be the $27 billion budget hole that must be filled before Texas can meet its own constitutional requirement for a balanced state budget.

By “cure,” I mean crafting a balanced, realistic solution that wouldn’t add tens of thousands of school teachers and state employees to the unemployment roles, close untold numbers of public schools, price thousands of young people out of college, sink Texas’ bottomoftheladder health care standards even lower and wreck the state’s economy. Those would be some of the results of the budget proposal laid out in the House earlier this week to meet Perry’s orders to write a new state budget without raising taxes or spending any of the Rainy Day Fund.

Senate budgetwriters are expected to present their startingpoint budget plan next week, and it won’t be much better. The potential misery may just be reconfigured.

In all his posturing over “belttightening,” the governor would just as soon everyone forgets that a big chunk of Texas’ revenue shortfall is the direct result of his and the legislative leadership’s mismanagement. As one of my colleagues noted, executives in the corporate world normally are fired for such problems. The Texas political world, however, is obviously different.

I am talking about Perry’s electionyear scheme to cut school property taxes, which he convinced the Legislature to enact in 2006. In return for onethird reductions in school maintenance taxes and strict limits on future local increases, the Legislature passed a package of state tax increases – notably an increase in cigarette taxes and a new business margins tax – to allegedly make up the difference.

But there was no increase in public education funding. And, the new business tax – partly by design and partly because of the recession – has never raised enough revenue to close the funding gap left by the property tax reductions. That socalled “structural deficit” now accounts for more than $9 billion of the state’s $27 billion revenue shortfall.

To his credit, Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden served notice on the opening day of the legislative session that the business tax must be fixed. Whether that means being fixed to the tune of $9 billion is unlikely. Perry, so far, has danced around reporters’ questions of whether he would support any changes in the tax. And, any attempt to revise the tax to raise significant amounts of revenue will surely be greeted with howls from many business people, including some who claim to be strong supporters of education.

Time will tell how this plays out, but it is highly unlikely that Perry will declare a cleanup of his own mismanagement an “emergency.”