Grading Texas

Every time the Legislature convenes with a huge budgetary shortfall, as it will in January, you can bet that the progambling folks will be out in force, promising to put the state on easy street if lawmakers vote to expand gambling. Once again, efforts will be made to legalize fullblown casinos or, at least, video slot machines for racetracks. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Jim Dunnam of Waco already is proposing a bipartisan study of the issue.

But you also can bet that expanded gambling will continue to be a hard sell, mainly because of the twothirds vote requirement in the House and the Senate to put the necessary constitutional amendment on the ballot. That’s a high hurdle in the face of opposition not only from antigambling groups but also from the owners of casinos in neighboring states who want Texans to keep driving over to bet – and lose – in their establishments, not at home.

Even though Republican House Speaker Joe Straus owns part of a racetrack, most Republican lawmakers historically have opposed more gambling. And, Republicans will continue to control the Senate and may very well still control the House in January. And even if legislators vote to put a gambling amendment on the ballot, its impact on the upcoming budget would be zero to minimal because of the time necessary to win voter approval and get the new casinos, etc. up and running.

In the notsodistant future, though, the public schools and school teachers could be big beneficiaries of new gamblinggenerated revenue, or so the gambling advocates will tell us. ThenGov. Ann Richards used that promise – the state’s lottery proceeds will be dedicated to education to help convince the Legislature and the voters to create the Texas Lottery in 1991.

It was one of the most successful political deceptions in modern Texas history. Texans automatically began to associate the lottery with education, believing that every time they purchased a lottery ticket they were sponsoring another kid’s journey to graduation.

The only problem was, it wasn’t true. It wasn’t until 1997 that the Legislature finally got around to actually dedicating lottery revenue to education. Previously, it had gone into the state’s general revenue fund to be divided up among dozens of programs.

Today, the lottery generates about $1 billion a year for the public schools. That’s a lot of money, but the total state appropriation for public education this year is $23.5 billion.

Teachers may want to listen to what the gamblers have to say, but be wary of pieinthesky promises. Fool us once, shame on you. But you better not even think about fooling us twice.

I don’t know how many school districts operate crisis hotlines for students suffering from depression or other emotional or psychological problems, but one that does is the Fort Bend ISD, which launched its “Talkline: You Share, We Care” program during the 200809 school year. It provides middle and highschool students anonymous access to a staff of certified counselors trained in crisis intervention.

This school year, the hotline’s second, it received an award for excellence from the Texas School Health Association. It will be back for a third year of helping students in 201011. After that, though, it may be history, still another victim of tightening education budgets, according to a recent article in the Fort Bend SunNews.

The hotline has been funded by the federal government through a Safe and DrugFree School entitlement grant. But that grant soon will become competitive, forcing FBISD to find another source of funding or scrap what apparently has been a very positive program.

“We are looking at federal competitive grants as possibilities for continued funding, but we will be fighting with all of the other school districts to try to get some of that money,” Bob Conlon, the district’s director of student support services, told the newspaper.

More and more, it seems, both the federal and state governments would rather see school districts spend an increasing amount of time fighting each other, rather than educating kids. And turning to Austin for help could be particularly futile in the face of a budgetary shortfall expected to hit $15 billion or more by the time the Legislature convenes in January.

The Fort Bend hotline averages 350 calls a month. Fortyfour percent of calls involve depression or sadness. Six percent relate to thirdparty suicide, 3 percent concern abuse or neglect, 3 percent relate to pregnancy and 3 percent to bullying.

TSTA and other educator groups, dozens of legislators and scores of authentic history experts all have urged the State Board of Education to either delay final adoption or revise the new social studies curriculum standards set for a final board vote in about three weeks.

These, of course, would be the muchdebated (and ridiculed) curriculum standards that seek to posthumously punish Thomas Jefferson for insisting upon the separation of church and state and seek to diminish the roles of Hispanics and African Americans in U.S. and Texas history. They even omit Barack Obama’s name while noting the election of the first black U.S. president

Now, according to a story in the Houston Chronicle, trustees of the Houston ISD, the state’s largest school district, have weighed in, passing a resolution urging the state board to pass “rigorous, balanced and manageable” social studies standards.

The HISD resolution avoided politically charged statements but urged the state board to make the standards less detailed in the number of teaching objectives to be covered and the number of historical figures who must be mentioned. The numbers, a significant increase over the current curriculum, are too many for meaningful instruction, HISD warned.

“We’re hoping that the State Board of Education comes to their senses and gathers input from all venues,” said HISD Trustee Manuel Rodriguez Jr., who proposed the resolution.

We all can hope, Mr. Rodriguez, but don’t hold your breath, as long as the state board’s right wing bloc continues to dictate the board’s agenda.

Here is a link to the Chronicle story:

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6982516.html

TSTA President Rita Haecker created a stir among legislators today when she testified, at a hearing hosted by the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, that the State Board of Education, in its recent rewrite of social studies curriculum standards, had refused to name President Barack Obama.

That bit of news seemed to catch several lawmakers by surprise. They already knew that the rightwing bloc on the board had attempted to rewrite history. But to go so far as to omit the name of the historic, first African American president of the United States seemed preposterous, even by conservative leader Don (the Earth is 5,000 years old) McLeroy’s standards.

Haecker was correct. Barack Obama’s name, so far, has not been included in the history curriculum standards on which the SBOE is scheduled to take a final vote next month. The standards do note the “election of first black president” as a significant event of 2008, but they don’t say who that black president is.

Haecker urged legislators to make changes, if necessary, to the curriculum setting process to protect educator input and ensure that “scholarly, academic research and findings aren’t dismissed or diminished at the whim of a board member’s own political or religious view of the world.”

State Education Commissioner Robert Scott accepted the caucus’ invitation to voluntarily testify on the curriculum adoption process. He said his and the Texas Education Agency’s role was mostly in technical support of the SBOE.

Board Chairwoman Gail Lowe of Lampasas, who also had been invited, declined to attend, even though the caucus had offered to pay her travel expenses.

Predictably, Lowe was skewered for her failure to show up by the mostly Democratic legislators who attended the caucus hearing. Lowe must have figured it was better to be skewered in absentia than in person.