Grading Texas

In a welltimed story in the Houston Chronicle over the weekend, Austinbased reporter Gary Scharrer offered a good look at the changing, evermoreHispanic face of Texas’ public school classrooms.

I say “welltimed” because this is the week the State Board of Education, most of whose members like to believe Texas’ schools are as Anglo as they were 40 or 50 years ago, comes back to Austin to wreak more havoc on the social studies curriculum. Unfortunately, however, Scharrer’s story won’t have much impact on them because their narrow minds already are made up. They moved to largely deny Hispanics’ role in Texas history during the board meeting in March and aren’t likely to give any more attention to Texas’ new, emerging majority now.

But for those of us who appreciate wellresearched facts more than ideological delusions,
the story paints an important picture of our public education system and the legitimate challenges facing educators and policymakers.

You can read the entire story by clicking on the link below, but here are a few highlights:

• Hispanic children now make up almost 49 percent of Texas’ 4.8 million students in preK through 12th grade. About onethird of the students are Anglo.
• Some 349 school districts are now majority Hispanic. This is 18 more than last year and 104 more than in 2000.
• Texas has 670 Anglo majority districts, 97 fewer than a decade ago.
• Much of the Hispanic growth is in the suburbs.
• Hispanic families vary widely in income, education and length of residency in the United States. But many Hispanic students are poor, have limited English proficiency and are high dropout risks.

People can scream all they want about immigrants and immigration policy. But the facts are the facts. This is the new face of Texas, a face that offers promise but also requires a greater investment of state funds for bilingual education and other educational programs. State leaders can pony up now for the future, or they can continue to stick their heads in the sand and make the future even more difficult to prepare for tomorrow.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7007046.html

Attorney General Greg Abbott today released an opinion prohibiting school districts from deducting contributions to political action committees from employees’ paychecks. TSTA views the ruling as an assault on teachers’ constitutional rights to political participation.

The opinion halts a practice that has been going on for years without any noticeable problems. All the deductions have been voluntary, and the TSTAPAC contributes to both Democratic and Republican candidates. The only criteria are strong support for the public schools, teachers and school kids.

Here is TSTA’s official response:

TSTA Public Affairs Director Richard Kouri strongly objected today (May 14) to a ruling by Attorney General Greg Abbott prohibiting school districts from deducting contributions to political action committees from school employees’ paychecks.

The opinion was in response to a legislative inquiry about the legality of paycheck deductions for the TSTAPAC and the National Education Association Fund for Children and Public Education. TSTA is a state affiliate of NEA. The deductions are strictly voluntary.

“This practice, which promotes a school employee’s constitutional right to political participation, has been going on for 20 years without any problem,” Kouri said. “We can only conclude that Attorney General Abbott is playing politics in an election year by impeding teachers’ First Amendment rights. But why?”

School districts make deductions from employees’ salaries for a wide range of purposes, including health care and professional memberships. But a strict reading of Abbott’s opinion indicates that no deduction is legal unless it is expressly authorized by the Legislature.

“Has the Legislature specifically authorized every deduction that every school district makes from a worker’s check? I doubt it,” Kouri said. “TSTA will explore every option available to allow educational employees to continue participating in the political process.”

Whenever right wingers find themselves short of facts to support an argument (and that happens a lot), their favorite, wornout alternative is simply to bash the American Civil Liberties Union, a group that they like to blame for almost every problem – real and imagined – that has ever befallen this country. Nothing apparently gets the conservative juices flowing like some antiACLU redmeat rhetoric.

Predictably, the ACLUbashing has erupted in the continuing debate over the State Board of Education’s attempted rewrite of history. (And that was before the ACLU today released a report urging the Legislature to limit the ability of SBOE members to insert their personal ideologies into curriculum content. Now, the rhetoric will go into overdrive.)

Yesterday, a spokesman for the conservative Liberty Institute, which has frequently squared off against the ACLU – both in the courtroom and in the media – was quick to criticize a group of religious leaders for urging the SBOE to reconsider its efforts to downplay the separation of church and state when it takes a final vote on new history curriculum standards next week.

These religious leaders – the ecumenical Texas Faith Network – agree with most historians that the nation’s founding fathers did, indeed, want a “wall of separation” between religion and government in this country. They value their religious freedom and want the SBOE to require high school students to be taught the reasons behind the prohibition of a state religion in the Bill of Rights.

The SBOE’s rightwing bloc rejected that requirement in March. It also attempted to demote Thomas Jefferson’s role in history because of his strong advocacy for a separation of church and state. The board’s conservatives want to promote their view that America was founded as a fundamentalist Christian nation.

As quoted in the Austin AmericanStatesman, Jonathan Saenz, an attorney and spokesman for the Liberty Institute, criticized the moremoderate religious leaders for trying to “pressure the SBOE to adopt an ACLUendorsed strict concept of separation of church and state language in the social studies standards.”

The Liberty Institute also has an ACLUbashing section on its website, complaining primarily about the ACLU’s recent involvement in samesex marriage and other gay rights issues.

More often than not – and often to the chagrin of rightwingers the ACLU, during its 90 years in the legal and political arena, has been on the right (as in correct) side of history, as determined by court decisions in a string of important civil rights decisions. Several of those have had a direct impact on education.

In 1925, in the Scopes “monkey” trial, the ACLU secured the services of famed attorney Clarence Darrow to defend a Tennessee schoolteacher for teaching evolution. And it continues to fight efforts to require the teaching of “creationism” or “intelligent design” as alternatives to evolution. Now, I am pretty sure we know what the Liberty Institute thinks of those cases.

But what does the Liberty Institute – and, for that matter, the State Board of Education’s rightwing bloc – think about desegregated public schools?

Surely, they support them. But perhaps they didn’t know – or have just forgotten – that the ACLU joined the NAACP in the lawsuit that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation decision in 1954 –Brown v. Board of Education.

The ACLU’s work, though, is never done. Now, it is contending with the State Board of Education’s hijacking of history and the democratic process. Here is a link to the new ACLU report criticizing the SBOE for a “systemic abuse” of power and asking the Legislature to clip its wings:

http://www.aclutx.org/files/051310ACLUofTexasSBOEReport.pdf

The Dallas Morning News, which broke the story the other day about a likely legislative effort to repeal the 221 studentteacher ratio for kindergarten through the fourth grade, also has published a strong editorial explaining why the 26yearold cap is so important and must be preserved.

“Here’s something that makes you cringe: Lawmakers in Austin are kicking around the idea of lifting the classsize cap for primary grades,” the newspaper wrote, noting that the 221 standard has “stood as a bulwark against reverting to the days when Texas was an educational backwater.”

The proposed repeal or loosening of the cap should make every educator and every parent cringe too. Check out the full editorial here for more strong arguments for keeping the limit:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/DNclasses_12edi.State.Edition1.2c11be8.html