Grading Texas

Having returned to the real world from a few days’ worth of vacation in San Francisco – still chilly out there, still hilly, still beautiful I am still trying to clear out a bit of the fog. But only a cursory reading of the news clips is enough to find Gov. Perry still dancing around accountability on a number of fronts, including an outrageously dishonest method of inflating school ratings.

Meanwhile, yesterday’s release of a statewide poll by the Texas Freedom Network reaffirms what most of us already knew – the rightwingers on the State Board of Education are embalmed somewhere in a medieval fogbank.

TFN actually released the results from two questions on the survey several weeks ago, when the board was bringing national ridicule to Texas by injecting dubious conservative political opinions into social studies curriculum standards. One shows that 72 percent of likely Texas voters want educators – not the board – deciding what students should be taught. Sharing that view were 84 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of independents.

The other major finding is that 68 percent of the respondents believe separation of church and state is a key legal principle. Remember all the efforts by conservative, selfanointed history “experts” to deny the existence of the separation of church and state? Obviously, most Texans – or at least those responding to the poll had history educations that were sounder than what the state board wants to provide today’s students.

Religion, however, is important to many Texans. Fortynine percent of respondents said religion should have more influence in public schools.

Public school teachers also should be particularly interested in another finding from the survey. Some 55 percent of the respondents oppose spending tax dollars on vouchers that would allow students to attend private and religious schools.

Other findings included:

# 80 percent of respondents agreed that high school sex education classes should teach “about contraception, such as condoms and other birth control, along with abstinence.”

# 88 percent thinks public schools should be required “to protect all children from bullying, harassment, and discrimination in school, including the children of gay and lesbian parents or teenagers who are gay.”

The survey of 972 likely voters was conducted May 412, shortly before the state board gave final approval to the new social studies curriculum standards.

http://www.tfn.org/site/News2?news_iv_ctrl=1&page=NewsArticle&id=6317

When you don’t have a solution to a problem, propose a study. Sometimes, a study can be a legitimate, productive approach to problemsolving. At other times, though, a study is simply a way to continue dancing around a problem, and that is the approach the Texas Republican Party is taking to one of the biggest consumer problems facing thousands of Texas families, including many middleclass parents – rising university tuition.

Ever since the Republican leadership – notably thenSpeaker Tom Craddick – forced enactment of the socalled “tuition deregulation” law in 2003, tuition at statesupported universities has soared. That’s because it is no longer set by elected legislators, who are accountable to voters, but by appointed regents. The bill, which Gov. Rick Perry heartily endorsed (and still supports), passed much of the buck for university funding during a budget crisis from the Legislature to students and their families.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bill White has attacked the high tuition, and the Texas Democratic platform calls for the Legislature to restore the higher education appropriations slashed by the Republicans and roll back tuition and fees to “affordable levels.”

The Republican platform calls for the state comptroller to conduct a “complete review of the tuition deregulation law for the purpose of validating whether it is accomplishing its stated goal.”

Stated goal? I’m not sure there was one, other than to help Republicans close a $10 billion revenue shortfall in 2003 without raising state taxes and to continue to shortchange universities on appropriated tax dollars. Those goals were accomplished, but neither had anything to do with improving higher education in Texas or access to it.

If the goal was to price young people out of college – or force them to enter the work force with mountains of debt – that, too, was accomplished. According to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, average tuition and fees at statesupported universities increased from an average of $1,934 per semester in fall 2003 to $3,323 in fall 2009. That’s a 72 percent jump, and most of it was because of the tuition increases approved by regents.

Tuition at some universities will be rising even more this fall.

As part of the tuition law, the Legislature also increased financial aid for lowincome students. But lawmakers didn’t provide enough money to meet the demand, and most middleclass young people don’t qualify for the state aid.

Maybe someone should conduct a study of how you can possibly prepare for the future by backing away from it. That would be an imaginative piece of fiction.

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I don’t plan to back away from the future, but I will be backing away from this blog for the next week or so to go on vacation. See you when I get back.

Texas Democrats adopted a new party platform at their state convention last weekend, and as I predicted a couple of weeks ago, the education section is similar to previous Democratic platforms and is strongly supportive of the public schools

The Democratic Party, as an institution, has such a high regard for public education that its platform addresses that issue first, right after the preamble. By contrast, the Texas Republican platform, which I summarized after it was adopted earlier this month, reflects a skeptical and, at times, hostile attitude toward the public schools. It was written by archconservatives with a strong interest in promoting homeschooling and private education.

I don’t want to repeat everything I already have written, but here are a few key, fundamental differences:

# Democratic platform writers recognized a basic problem: the public schools are underfunded and inequitably funded by state government. They called on state government to “establish a 100 percent equitable school finance system with sufficient state revenue to allow every district to offer an exemplary program,” while reducing the “Robin Hood” raids on local tax dollars.

Republicans ignored the funding problem and proposed that state government squeeze the public schools even more. That would be the net effect of GOP platform proposals to put more restrictions on local property taxes, repeal the new state business tax and require a twothirds vote of the Legislature to raise any other taxes.

# Democrats proposed raising teacher and support staff pay to levels exceeding the national average and extending quality statefunded health insurance to all education employees. Those goals would be impossible to meet under the Republicans’ plan for drying up tax revenue.

# Democrats recognize the severity of the dropout problem and propose several attacks on it, including expanded access to early childhood education programs that target atrisk students, matching more highly qualified teachers with atrisk students and enforcing daytime curfew laws to reduce truancy. The new Republican platform doesn’t say a word about dropouts, but it would worsen the problem by abolishing governmentsponsored early childhood development programs and opposing daytime curfews for juveniles.

# Democrats would reign in the ideologydriven decisions of the State Board of Education over curriculum standards and textbook content, while the Republican platform would give the board even more authority over public education, including oversight of the entire Texas Education Agency.

For more differences, you can check out my blog posts for June 15 and 18 or click on the links below for each party’s platform and scroll down to the education sections.

Here is a link to the new Democratic platform:

http://www.txdemocrats.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/06/TDP2010Platform.pdf

And here is a link to the Republican platform:

https://www.18889322946.ws/TexasGOP/EContentStrategy/userfiles/2010_RPT_PLATFORM.pdf

As a longtime acquaintance and professional observer of U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, I believe I can accurately say that he is a strong supporter of integrated schools. But some nonTexans who may have read his remarks about Thurgood Marshall yesterday may have doubts. During the opening session of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, Cornyn called the legendary, former Supreme Court justice a “judicial activist” who had a “judicial philosophy that concerns me.”

Some of Cornyn’s Republican colleagues on the panel made similar statements in an effort to suggest that Kagan, who long ago clerked for Marshall, also may become a liberal “activist” on the high court.

Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice, operates in a different political world than Marshall did. But it is time for him and other conservatives to leave Marshall alone.

For one thing, Marshall has been dead for a number of years. But more importantly, his place in history is secured by two giant contributions. He was the first African American to serve on the nation’s highest court, and, as an attorney, he successfully argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit that resulted in the integration of the nation’s schools.

He is a huge, positive role model for young people, not a punching bag for political ideologues whose own names soon will be forgotten.

Even the State Board of Education recently voted to keep Marshall in Texas’ curriculum standards, despite the recommendations of two “expertsintheirownminds” reviewers that his name be dropped.

Here is a link to a Washington Post column by Dana Milbank suggesting that Marshall, preposterous as it may seem, couldn’t win Senate confirmation today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062805129.html?hpid=topnews