Grading Texas

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.

Gov. Rick Perry may not be the only candidate for state office trying to dodge a televised debate with his opponent this fall – if that’s what he’s really trying to do. (He may be just using his footdragging as an excuse to keep yammering away at a nonissue – Bill White’s tax returns.)

Aided and abetted by their state party chairman, two Republican nominees for the State Board of Education also may be trying to avoid televised, headtohead encounters with their opponents. And debates in those races arguably may be more critical to voters than a gubernatorial debate

Voters, except for those asleep under a log somewhere, already have a wealth of readily available information on which to base their decisions in the governor’s race. But State Board of Education races are of the stealth variety, leaving a lot of voters guessing among largely unknown candidates on Election Day – and then laughing at all the jokes about some quirky Texas education board on latenight TV a few months later. Voters need to see more of these candidates.

The Greater Austin League of Women Voters is planning a candidate forum, or debate, among candidates for SBOE Districts 5 and 10, which cover Austin, a large section of central Texas, San Antonio and part of the Houston area. The debate is to be moderated by a journalist and broadcast Sept. 28 on KLRU, Austin’s public television station.

For several months now, according to an item in Quorum Report, both Republican nominees have declined to respond to invitations from the league.

The District 5 Republican nominee is Ken Mercer of San Antonio, an incumbent member of the SBOE’s rightwing bloc that interjected its religious and conservative political beliefs into the social studies curriculum standards earlier this year. He has been one of the board’s major deniers of the separation of church and state principle.

The District 10 GOP nominee for an open seat is Marsha Farney of Georgetown, a former teacher and school counselor who defeated a seemingly more conservative candidate in a Republican runoff last spring. But then she showed up at a Tea Party rally on July 4 and told the crowd that she would rather be there “than with those Americabashing Democrats.” Sounds like she was trying to reserve a seat on the farright side of the SBOE table.

Mercer and Farney obviously want to pick their campaign audiences carefully. And, whether in consultation with the candidates or not, Texas Republican Chairman Steve Munisteri gave them some cover this week by issuing a statement urging them to skip the debate.

Munisteri contended the League of Women Voters, which has a long history of nonpartisan political education, couldn’t be trusted to host the event because the leaders of its Austin branch are all Democrats.

Munisteri is playing games and trying to perpetuate voter ignorance, which he believes will benefit the Republican SBOE candidates. The League of Women Voters, meanwhile, has extended its deadline for candidate participation from Sept. 1 to Sept. 10.

TSTA is backing Democrat Rebecca BellMetereau, a professor at Texas State University, in District 5, and Judy Jennings, a former employee of the Texas Education Agency, in District 10. Both are strong supporters of public education, and both are planning to attend the Austin debate, if there is one.

If there were some extra people wandering the halls at Bowie High School in Austin this morning, they probably were parentrefugees from Back to School night still trying to figure out the bell schedule and the campus geography.

I have lost count of how many of these annual events I have attended, but now I can add one more.

There isn’t much a teacher can tell parents in a 7minute meeting (the time allotted per class at Bowie last night), but at least we had a chance to put names with faces, get a brief outline of semester goals and jot down email addresses, phone numbers and websites.

I appreciated the teachers, who will be furthering the education of my son, Adrian, a sophomore, taking the extra time (without extra pay) to be there.

My favorite part of the evening, however, occurred on the way to Bowie, when I stopped at a sandwich shop down the road and ran into a Bowie math teacher who had done an outstanding job guiding Adrian’s older sister through the minefields of Algebra and preCalculus.

He was in his classroom every morning, an hour before school began, tutoring students who needed some extra help, and Taylor – an excellent student for whom math didn’t come easily was there when she needed to be. The extra attention paid off. She now is a predental junior at UTAustin and doing well.

I briefly interrupted the teacher’s dinner break to wish him well and catch him up on a former student. I’m not using his name because he doesn’t know I’m writing this and may not appreciate the attention. Taylor also had many other hardworking, dedicated teachers at Bowie, and I don’t want to try to list all their names.

I write a lot in this space about the politics of educational policy and about politicians, mainly political figures who profess to be educational experts but, in truth, haven’t a clue.

It is a pleasant change to write about real experts, the people in the classrooms who practice their professions every day and, with few exceptions, perform quite well, despite subpar – and often misguided support from the aforementioned pontificators

They may not accomplish much sometimes, but our state officials do love to pat themselves on the back.

“We have set the bar high for Texas students and educators,” state Education Commissioner Robert Scott said in budget documents released this week by the Texas Education Agency. He was trying to assure Texas parents and other taxpayers, I suppose, that state officials – including his boss, Gov. Rick Perry – are doing all they can to assure firstrate public schools.

Unfortunately, however, the remark was attached to $261 million in education budget cuts that Scott was proposing, including reductions in such critical areas as textbook purchases, dropout prevention, science labs, teaching mentoring and professional development and assistance for students having trouble passing standardized tests.

In short, Scott was proving that – educators and students aside – state officials still don’t have the courage to set the bar very high for themselves. Scott’s proposed cuts were in response to Perry’s order that state agencies identify 10 percent worth of spending reductions to help the Legislature close an anticipated $18 billion revenue shortfall next year.

If Perry and Scott have their way, the state’s woefully underfunded education system will take some more big hits. But, to Perry, that’s a lot easier than gutting up and finding the new revenue necessary for a realistic school finance solution.

About the time news of Scott’s budget proposals was breaking, Perry was leaving his $10,000 per month, taxpayerfunded rental mansion in Austin for a trip to West Texas, where he outlined what he called a “School Savings Incentive” for attacking school budgetary problems.

In truth, it is little more than a smokeandmirrors, bureaucratic shuffling of numbers that would have a negligible impact on most school district budgets. As Scott’s budget proposals demonstrate, if the state continues to dodge the necessity of new revenue, additional, painful cuts affecting real people – school kids, educators and local taxpayers – are in store.

For a more detailed look at the budget cuts outlined by TEA, check the news section on TSTA’s website, www.tsta.org.