Grading Texas

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.

Remember what happened about this time last year, when a large number of fearful parents and nervous school administrators – egged on by rabid rightwing pontificators were predicting the end of Western civilization?

Well, maybe the furor wasn’t quite that bad, but it was bad enough when President Obama decided to use the Internet to address school kids across the country. Many school districts refused to let students watch the speech – at least live – and others required parental permission.

After all the buildup about the president’s alleged designs to bend the minds of his impressionable young audience, his speech (comparatively) was a dud. All he did was encourage students to study and work hard – good, sound advice but hardly the rhetoric of a political Pied Piper.

Now, Obama is planning a second address to students tomorrow (Tuesday, Sept. 14). So far, this speech hasn’t attracted much attention, although some schools again will require permission slips from parents before students are allowed to watch it.

Teachers should have the ultimate decision for determining whether their students – those with signed permission slips, anyway – should watch the presidential address during their class periods. Does it fit with the lesson plan? Does the teacher believe it has educational value, etc?

I agree that parents also should be part of the decision, but I have trouble imagining why any reasonable parent would forbid his or her child from listening to the president of the United States make a speech geared to students. Parents would have encouraged the opportunity during my childhood, had there been an Internet then. But last year’s uproar and the fact that school officials still feel obliged to require permission slips are more indicators of the increased, unhealthy polarization of our country.

Some parents also were upset last year at a White House suggestion that students write essays about “what they can do to help the president.”

I don’t know if any students will be writing essays this year, but the best thing young people can do to help the president – and the entire country – is to convince their parents and other adults to return some civility to the political process. Those would be essays worth reading.

Here is an Austin AmericanStatesman story about how some Central Texas school districts plan to handle access to the president’s speech tomorrow:

http://www.statesman.com/news/texaspolitics/districtspreparingforobamaspeech912231.html

As you may have heard by now, the state of Texas’ application for $830 million in federal education jobs money has been rejected by the U.S. Department of Education because Gov. Perry tried to change the rules. Specifically, the application, submitted by Education Commissioner Robert Scott, didn’t provide the assurances required by federal law that the state will sustain its own funding commitment to the public schools over the next three years.

According to a story in Quorum Report, Texas still may have a chance at getting the money. If so, that probably would be next year, after the Legislature has had a chance to make the commitment that Perry claimed he didn’t have the authority to make.

By the time the next budget is written, this school year will be over, and the $830 million, if still available to Texas, would be distributed during the 20112012 school year. It would be a case of better late than never, provided state officials – who will be trying to fill an $18 billion canyon in the state budget don’t find a way to divert the money from education. That is what Congress, led by Texas Democrats, was trying to avoid.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, DAustin, who sponsored the amendment requiring the special assurances of state funding, said Perry deliberately had an altered application submitted to Washington, knowing that it would result in federal aid being delayed – or worse.

I think Doggett has Perry’s ploy pretty well figured out.

Educators – and other taxpayers as well – should keep Perry’s gamesmanship in mind when they cast their votes for governor this fall.

The Texas Connections Academy, a hightech replacement for the traditional classroom, may fancy itself the wave of the future, but its lessthenimpressive performance for the Houston Independent School District has left about 800 students high and dry.

The academy is a forprofit company that contracts with HISD to run a virtual campus for 1,000 students in grades three through eight. And, according to a story in the Houston Chronicle, it also may be something of a small (probably very small) profit center for HISD. The district receives $7,826 a year from the state for each student enrolled in the academy provided the child completes required courses and passes the TAKS. HISD pays Connections only $6,500 per student and deposits the difference in the district’s general fund.

HISD wanted to expand the program, but the Texas Education Agency nixed the idea because students in the academy had a TAKS passing rate that was 20 percent below the state average. HISD lost its third appeal to TEA this week, meaning about 800 extra students who had signed up for the program are looking for an alternative.

Through the academy, which HISD began in December 2008, the district attempted to attract parents who had been homeschooling their kids but wanted more structure. The tuitionfree cyber school lets students take courses online while working with a certified teacher over the phone or via computer.

“What Connections Academy found was, they had a high proportion of students that were coming from home school environments that did not have a structured curriculum. They had big deficits in math,” Nancy Manley, HISD’s school compliance officer, told the newspaper.

“When you have up to a threeyear deficit in math, you’re not going to catch up students in one year,” she added.

Math deficits in homeschooling? Why am I not surprised?

Here is a link to the Chronicle story:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7192215.html