Grading Texas

Senate Education Chairwoman Florence Shapiro got some attention last week by announcing the obvious – Texas needs to scrap its school finance system and rebuild it. Hope may spring eternal, but I would be more encouraged were it not for a couple of things, namely:

# A revenue shortfall now forecast as large as $21 billion – It could inspire courage and creativity under the big pink dome in downtown Austin, particularly if there is a new governor next year. Or, it could spark blind, slashandburn panic.

# The current state leadership – Gov. Rick Perry and legislative leaders have known for years that the school finance system was in trouble but have largely ignored it, unless nudged by the courts. Perry made things even worse in 2006 (only four years ago) by insisting on legislative approval of a law that gave more emphasis to cutting local property taxes than funding schools. The result was a state finance scheme that falls $4.5 billion short each year of fully paying for those tax reductions, while many school districts struggle to balance their budgets.

Talk, even from legislative chairs, is inexpensive. Following through with positive action won’t be. Meanwhile, Texas’ future is on the line.

As reporter Gary Scharrer pointed out in the Houston Chronicle, Texas spends about $50 billion a year – in state, local and federal funds – to educate nearly 5 million children.

But the system is still heavily dependent on local property taxes. And, thanks to wide disparities in property wealth throughout the state, there are still large inequities in funding among school districts, despite the “Robin Hood” school finance law. Many schools are underfunded.

Rep. Scott Hochberg, a Democrat from Houston who understands the school finance system better than most of his colleagues, noted that previous efforts to calculate the true costs of education have been unsuccessful.

“When we get that information, we have historically ignored it because it’s too expensive,” he said.

Charles Miller, a financial expert from Houston who serves on a school finance study committee with Shapiro and Hochberg, proposed the creation of a new, independent policy center to provide legislators and taxpayers with recommendations for making public education more efficient and productive.

That may be a good idea, provided the Legislature doesn’t use it to simply delay providing some overdue financial assistance to school districts next session.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7204962.html

Sometimes, there is a very thin line between being political and being disingenuous, and the Republicans who purport to represent the best interests of Texas taxpayers in Washington have crossed it.

First, they thumb their noses at thousands of Texas educators and millions of Texas school kids by voting against the $830 million allocated to Texas in emergency federal education funding because of a Democratic amendment to ensure that the education dollars are actually spent on education.

Thanks to a Democratic majority, Congress passed the bill a few weeks ago anyway. But Texas’ money is still held up because Gov. Rick Perry has refused to assure the federal government that the education dollars will be spent on education.

What’s wrong with spending education money on education? Absolutely nothing, unless, apparently, you would rather monkey around with your constituents.

Now, the congressional Republicans are pushing for an amendment to strip the “education dollars for education” requirement from the funding law and allow the $830 million to begin flowing – sooner or later to Texas.

The ploy may work. But without a written restriction in the federal law, there will be absolutely no guarantee of a net gain of $830 million for Texas classrooms. The current state leadership – barring significant changes on Election Day more than likely will deduct at least part of that $830 million from state education funding, which is what congressional Democrats were trying to prevent.

Trust us, the Texas Republicans in Congress are saying.

But why should anyone in the education community trust the GOPers? First, they voted against educators. Now, I suspect, they are trying to fool them.

Most of you, I am sure, have never heard of Randy Rives. He is a rightwing businessman from Odessa who ran for the State Board of Education last spring but was defeated by Bob Craig of Lubbock, the more moderate incumbent, in the Republican primary.

He ran. He lost. End of story, right? Not exactly.

Rives apparently is still on a mission to “protect” the public schoolchildren of Texas from too much exposure to Islam. And, in case you haven’t heard or guessed by now, his likeminded advocates on the State Board of Education are ready to give him a forum.

According to The Dallas Morning News, the SBOE will consider a resolution next week warning publishers not to promote a proIslamic, antiChristian viewpoint in world history textbooks. The resolution was prompted by Rives.

A preliminary draft states that “diverse reviewers have repeatedly documented gross proIslamic, antiChristian distortions in social studies texts” across the United States and that some previous social studies textbooks in Texas also have been “tainted” with proIslamic, antiChristian views.

Some conservatives also claim that Middle Easterners are buying financial interests in textbook publishers.

The books about which the draft resolution complains no longer are being used in Texas schools. And, if adopted, the resolution won’t be binding on future boards adopting new textbooks.

The rightwingers pushing the resolution contend they want “balance” in the historical treatment of religion in the classroom, when, in truth, they do not. They want about as much “balance” as they gave to Hispanic and black historical figures in the recent rewrite of Texas’ social studies curriculum standards.

This is a slap at Islam, a religion practiced peacefully by millions of people worldwide, including many Texans. The resolution is promoted by a group of fearmongers who also deny the separation of church and state because they believe wrongly that the United States should be a Christian theocracy.

The main thing from which our school kids need protection is the State Board of Education.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091510dntexeducation.28d07a4.html

In catching up on my weekend clips, I noticed that Rick Perry, our accountability dodging governor, has been waxing colorful, although not particularly insightful, about state government’s budgetary problems.

“You’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to understand that we have a major financial crisis on our hands,” he said, as reported by The Dallas Morning News.

OK. So how does he plan to deal with it?

By “making prioritizations,” he replied.

And, by blaming President Obama. Federal spending under Obama, he said, is to blame for a looming revenue shortfall in Texas that now may have grown from $18 billion to $21 billion.

Perry didn’t explain exactly how the president is to blame. Presumably, he was talking about the rising cost of Medicaid and other federally driven programs. But those programs predate Obama (a president from Texas was in office for the previous eight years, I recall) and are only part of Texas’ budgetary picture. What about the worsening budgetary problems affecting the public schools?

Let’s see:

# Did Obama engineer that property tax reduction scheme in 2006? The one that Perry and the Legislature fell about $4.5 billion a year short of fully funding and has created a severe “structural deficit” in the state budget. No, Obama wasn’t even president then. That was a Rick Perry electionyeargimmickturneddisaster.

# Has Obama consistently refused to enact an adequate, equitable system for funding Texas schools during the almost two years he has been in the White House? That responsibility, of course, doesn’t belong to the president. It belongs to the governor and the Texas Legislature. And in 10 years in office, Gov. Perry hasn’t even tried to adequately fund the public schools.

# Under whose watch are average state expenditures on perpupil instruction an embarrassing 38th? Rick Perry’s.

# Who has been AWOL on adequate funding for higher education, passing the buck instead to students in the form of everincreasing tuition? Not Obama.

Obama, instead, recently tried to help out the governor and Texas taxpayers, signing a new federal law to allocate $830 million to Texas school districts for educators’ jobs. Who put the money in limbo because he refused to provide the necessary assurances that Texas would keep up its part of the school funding effort? None other, of course, than Rick Perry.

To paraphrase the governor, you would have to be politically blind, sound asleep – or otherwise oblivious to reality – to blame Texas’ budgetary plight on the current resident of the White House. Perry, however, finds that easier than defending his own resume.