Grading Texas

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

Gov. Rick Perry loves to play politics with federal funds, even at the expense of his taxpaying constituents. The most infamous example, so far, was his rejection of about a half billion dollars in federal unemployment funds last year, even as the state’s jobless rate was rising and the state’s jobless compensation fund was running low.

At that time, Perry apparently felt it was worth some sort of political benefit to bash the Obama administration rather than accept the help. He, of course, didn’t need an unemployment check. He had a nice job, and a taxpayerpaid, $10,000 per month rental mansion to go with it.

For a while, over the past few weeks, he also sounded as if he were going to turn down $830 million in emergency federal funds allotted to Texas for teacher jobs. Late last week, however, acting through Education Commissioner Robert Scott, Texas applied for the education money.

The difference? Perry still has that nice job and that nice house, but this year that job is on the line.

With school districts throughout the state grappling with budgetary problems and school board members, superintendents and teachers demanding he take the money, the governor wasn’t going to turn down $830 million only two months before Election Day, his faceoff with Democratic challenger Bill White.

But he still isn’t above playing politics with educators’ jobs. He still refuses to assure the federal government, as the federal law requires, that the state will sustain its own funding commitment to the public schools over the next three years.

Perry says only the Legislature can do that and is trying to win Washington’s assurance that the $830 million can be held for Texas’ use in the 201213 budget, not the current year, as Congress intended.

Spending the money next year certainly is better than losing it. But if Perry is still governor when the next state budget is drafted in 2011, will he comply with the federal law and spend the money on education jobs? Or, will he try to divert it to fill other budgetary gaps? That’s what the fuss has been all about, and if Perry can find a loophole, he will – if, of course, he is safely reelected.