Grading Texas

State officials in Maryland, including Gov. Martin O’Malley, are promoting a proposal to make environmental education a requirement for high school graduation in that state, according to an article in Education Week. If the idea is adopted by the Maryland State Board of Education this fall, it apparently would be the first time a state has imposed a graduation requirement focused on environmental literacy.

The proposal wouldn’t require students to take a particular course but would ensure that environmental literacy is “threaded through” the curriculum.

I have difficulty imagining Texas following Maryland’s lead, and maybe we shouldn’t, at least not until we have a different State Board of Education to write our curriculum standards. As long as conservative ideologues keep driving the SBOE train here, I can easily imagine “environmental” curriculum standards such as the following:

# Global warming is a fairy tale.

# Cap and trade is the work of the Devil.

# Carpooling is a form of socialism.

# Rapid transit spreads disease.

# Every Texas family should drive at least two SUVs, and preferably three. Biggerthanlife people need biggerthanlife cars, and the busier our refineries, the healthier our economic environment.

# Water pollution is harmless because you can buy the bottled variety at the store.

# The BP oil spill was an act of God.

# And, BP CEO Tony Hayward was an environmental hero for sacrificing a large chunk of his life to help feed the nosy media’s morbid curiosity.

Some education supporters may have breathed a little easier this spring when Marsha Farney of Georgetown, a former teacher and school counselor, defeated Brian Russell for the Republican nomination for the District 10 seat on the State Board of Education.

Russell clearly was a rightwinger, eager to join in the ideological mayhem that ultraconservative board members have been inflicting on the public schools for the past several years. He even had been endorsed by incumbent Cynthia Dunbar, who is stepping down from the board after being an outspoken leader of the rightwing pack.

Farney, however, remained something of a mystery, at least until recently. On her webpage, she promises to work for a strong curriculum and quality education, but that doesn’t tell us very much. She declined to respond to a candidate questionnaire from TSTA, which is supporting Democratic nominee Judy Jennings in the district, which stretches from north Austin to the Houston suburbs.

TSTA believes Jennings, a former employee of the Texas Education Agency and longtime worker in the education field, is a strong supporter of the public schools.

Now, teachers, parents and other Texas taxpayers who would like to see the State Board of Education work to improve the public schools rather than promote political viewpoints have even more reason to be leery of Farney.

According to an item in the Austin AmericanStatesman, now making the rounds of the blogosphere, Farney showed up at Tea Party rally on July 4, where she told the conservative crowd that she would rather be there “than with those Americabashing Democrats.”

Americabashing Democrats?

Sounds like the message Cynthia Dunbar and the other ultraconservatives on the SBOE have been dishing out for quite a while now. And, it sure sounds more ideological than educational.

http://blogs.chron.com/texaspolitics/archives/2010/07/americanbashing.html

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.