Grading Texas

Granted, paying Austin ISD Superintendent Maria Carstarphen an extra $25,000 in bonuses this year would have only a negligible impact on the district’s budgetary woes. But, symbolically, the bonus stinks. (I am speaking not only as an employee of TSTA but also as an AISD parent and taxpayer.)

For one thing, Carstarphen can make a very nice living in Austin on her $275,000 base salary, while many of the district’s teachers (who are paid far less and don’t get fat bonuses) are taking extra jobs during the school year simply to make ends meet.

Moreover, the bonus comes as AISD is considering significant cutbacks to its basic educational programs, including teacher layoffs. One option discussed at last night’s board meeting would eliminate a planning period for middle and high school teachers, a step that would trim an estimated 90 to 300 teaching positions.

The superintendent has enormous responsibilities, but the teachers are the heart of the school district. They will determine if the superintendent meets her bonus criteria, which include higher student scores on standardized tests, improved attendance rates and boosting AISD’s accountability rating.

Maria Carstarphen can make long, impassioned speeches about educational quality, but the teachers – and their planning periods – help her deliver the goods.

http://www.statesman.com/news/education/austinschoolboardapprovessuperintendentbonusesstudenttransfer1068176.html

As headlines from around the state continue to remind us, Texas’ public school budgets are in for more shrinkage, even as enrollments will continue to expand. Superintendents around the state are scrambling to identify potential budget cuts – including educators’ jobs – in anticipation of major reductions in state revenue next year.

So, I was a little surprised last week to notice a news item that the Dallas ISD was considering an expansion of its prekindergarten classes into a fullday program. How, I wondered, was the district going to pay for it?

Well, as it turns out, several Dallas school board members were wondering the same thing and, during a meeting late last week, told Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, who had made the recommendation, that he was getting ahead of himself.

It didn’t make much sense, they said, to expand a program that may have to be cut back in only a few more months, if the Legislature, as anticipated, chops away at the education budget.

Good idea, bad timing.

http://dallasisdblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/11/dallasisdsuperintendenthino.html

With a little luck, this will be the last time I ever will feel inclined to write about that expertinherownmind, Cynthia Dunbar, who this week is participating in her last scheduled meeting as a member of the State Board of Education.

Dunbar did the schoolchildren of Texas a favor by declining to seek reelection this year, but only after several years of working hard to undermine the quality of Texas’ public schools with her own religious and political beliefs. She was a leader of the rightwing bloc that, most recently, tried to rewrite social studies curriculum standards to incorrectly depict the United States as a Christian theocracy with limited historical contributions from anyone who wasn’t white.

At yesterday’s board meeting, Dunbar offered what the Austin AmericanStatesman called a “parting gift” to her fellow board members – a resolution declaring the U.S. Department of Education an unconstitutional bureaucracy with no authority over Texas schools. The board didn’t act on the resolution, and we can hope the new board, after it takes office with five new members in January, also will decline to waste time on the measure.

The board can’t wish away the Department of Education anymore than Dunbar can wish away the separation of church and state principle, although she and her colleagues have mightily tried.

Also bidding farewell to the board this week is Dunbar’s philosophical comradeinarms, Don McLeroy, who was unseated last spring by moremoderate Republican Thomas Ratliff.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/sharedgen/blogs/austin/politics/entries/2010/11/18/dunbar_seeks_to_nullify_federa.html

To be absolutely clear, TSTA believes every school district that owes the state money under the socalled Robin Hood school finance law should pay up – and pay up on time. But one East Texas district’s delinquency serves to refute the old, wrongheaded cliché that spending more money on education doesn’t improve classroom quality.

That moldy oldie was repeated as recently as today by Talmadge Helfin, former budgetcutting legislator and now honcho of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a Libertarianleaning think tank that would like nothing better than to privatize most public services to the detriment of millions of low and middleincome Texans. Its leadership includes some of Gov. Perry’s biggest contributors.

“It makes the point that just putting money into education is not going to do the job,” Heflin was quoted in today’s Austin AmericanStatesman, in a story reporting that school districts are likely to see their state revenue cut by $3 billion to $5 billion over the next two years.

Heflin’s remark to the contrary, guess what happened, though, when the Hallsville ISD withheld $8.5 million in Robin Hood funds from the state and spent the money instead to help hire more teachers and make other improvements? According to an Associated Press report, the district raised its accountability rating from an unimpressive academically acceptable to exemplary. I don’t think the improvements were coincidental.

Yes, money makes a difference in educational quality. And, the education budget cuts the governor and legislative leaders are planning now will lower that quality because those cuts will mean fewer teachers and more crowded classrooms. Suggesting, as Heflin and the governor like to do, that those cuts will come strictly from administrative “fat” is perpetrating a fiction. Texas’ perpupil expenditures already rank in the bottom third among the states.

The Irving ISD, for example, is among districts already planning for big budget hits. District administrators already have proposed about $9.3 million in costcutting steps next year. Some administrators, nurses and technology specialists would lose their jobs, but the most lost positions by far – 95 – would be teachers.