Grading Texas

You may have noticed last week – among the bursts of craziness from the State Board of Education – the news reports that the state’s top three leaders decided against making cuts in already underfunded college financial aid programs. But hold your applause, please, because college students (current and future) and their parents will remain major victims of Texas’ budgetary shortfall.

Unless the tuition deregulation law – which passed the buck for higher education funding from the elected Legislature and governor to unelected university regents is repealed, tuition at state supported universities will continue to rise. Gov. Rick Perry, who signed the law in 2003, wants to keep it. It’s a lot easier (on him and lawmakers) than enacting a strong, dependable revenue source.

Middleclass families will continue to be squeezed because state financial aid is mainly reserved for lowerincome students. But many of them will suffer too because there isn’t enough aid to go around, a longtime problem that Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes discussed in a speech in Irving yesterday.

At present, the state has a firstcome, firstserved approach to distributing aid under the needbased TEXAS Grant program, but that must change, Paredes said. He wants the Legislature to change the rules to give priority to the lowincome applicants with the strongest academic records.

“We want to put these students at the front of the line and say, ‘If you want a TEXAS Grant, work for it,’” he told a group of business and education leaders, as reported in The Dallas Morning News.

Paredes’ proposal isn’t new, but it may receive more attention as legislators struggle with a projected $18 billion revenue shortfall next year.

To receive priority, students would have to graduate from high school with college credit or through the state’s distinguished achievement program. They also would have to meet one of the following criteria: have a “B” average; be deemed collegeready, based on a test; or graduate in the top onethird of their high school class.

More than 69,000 students will receive about $274 million in grants in 2010, with an average award of about $3,900. A family of four has to earn less than $45,000 a year to qualify. Thousands of eligible students aren’t receiving help because the state hasn’t appropriated enough money.

Here is a link to the Dallas News story:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/coppell_vr/stories/DNhighered_26met.ART.State.Edition1.498e683.html

Voucher advocates – those who would siphon state tax dollars for tuition to be paid to private schools – haven’t made many headlines in Texas in recent years, but they haven’t given up. One of their latest ideas calls for the Legislature to create a franchise tax credit to fund scholarships enabling parents, who are unhappy with their kids’ current public schools, to transfer them to other schools, public or private.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, has an article promoting the idea on its webpage. The article says 10 other states already have similar programs.

As envisioned for Texas, a “tax credit scholarship program” would be funded with donations from businesses. Businesses could make donations directly to any nonprofit, scholarshipgranting organization they chose and receive a credit against the franchise tax. The organizations would then provide scholarships to public school students for private school tuition, transportation costs to attend a different public school or even for home school instruction.

Call it what they want, folks, this is a first cousin (or closer) to a private school voucher program. The franchise tax already falls about $4.5 billion a year short of paying for the school property tax cuts that Gov. Perry and the Legislature ordered in 2006. Lawmakers have no business diverting more money from that already insufficient revenue source to boost the profits of private school owners.

We need to increase resources for the public schools, not steal from them. The public schools – not private schools or home schools – educate the vast majority of Texas’ children, and no voucher program (including one in disguise) is going to change that. Such diversions will only make the jobs of the public schools even more difficult.

Chairman emeritus of the Texas Public Policy Foundation is none other than James Leininger, the wealthy San Antonio businessman who already has spent millions of dollars trying to purchase a voucher friendly state government.

Here is a link to the TPPF article:

http://www.texaspolicy.com/commentaries_single.php?report_id=3071

The Texas Association of Business (TAB) released a report this week pointing out how Texas has fallen way behind the curve in educating its future workforce and remaining competitive in the high stakes global competition for jobs. There were no big revelations in the report. But it was interesting that TAB went to the trouble of compiling it, since TAB for many years now has been part of the basic problem.

The report lists the following serious deficiencies, among others:

* At all age levels, Texans are educated at lower levels than their peers nationally, and we’re losing ground.
* Only seven states have done a worse job than Texas in developing a welleducated work force among workers who are farthest from retirement age.
* The growing minority population fares the worst in Texas’ educational system. More than twothirds of the Hispanic population has no education beyond high school.
* At least onethird of Texas ninth graders drop out of school before earning a high school diploma.
* And, nearly onethird of students who enroll in college immediately after graduating from high school are deemed not ready for collegelevel work.

You can read the full report, entitled “Dream Big Texas,” by clicking on the link below. The report also recommends some limited solutions, including more collaboration between businesses and local school districts and some changes in the funding formulas for higher education.

Much of what the report proposes, however, is simply more rearrangement of the deck chairs on an education system that is sinking through no fault of educators. The overriding problem is a lack of political commitment to the public schools on the part of state leaders, a point the report fails to address. The report avoids any discussion of how the public school system is woefully underfunded and inequitablyfunded. And it dares not propose the essential, but politically distasteful solution – a reliable, fair tax system that grows with the state’s educational and other needs.

Moreover, TAB has been a major supporter and enabler of the current power structure in Austin, the state leaders who have persisted in giving the public schools a succession of “accountability” hoops while denying them sufficient funding.

TAB is a longtime supporter of Gov. Rick Perry, who has all but turned his back on the public schools and even denies the seriousness of the dropout problem cited in the TAB report. TAB also is backing Perry for another term. And in 2002, TAB was instrumental in the Republican takeover of the Texas House, which enabled the election of slashandburn Tom Craddick as speaker.

Dream big? Unless the leadership in Austin is changed, TAB can dream on.

Here is a link to the group’s report:

http://www.txbiz.org/uploads/dreambigedu.pdf

Since TSTA was the first group to call public attention to this issue, and I have written about it a couple of times before, I will note for the record that the State Board of Education has approved an amendment to the social studies curriculum standards to include President Barack Obama’s name. Earlier, the curriculum only referred to the election of the first black president without saying who he was. The change, though, came after Republican board member David Bradley tried to take a backhanded swipe at the president.

Obama’s missing name first received public attention when TSTA President Rita Haecker testified about it during a public hearing of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus a few weeks ago. Then several black legislators pressed the issue.

Click the following link to read the Fort Worth StarTelegram’s story on how the SBOE reacted:

http://www.startelegram.com/2010/05/20/2206066/texaseducationboardworksthrough.html