Grading Texas

Over the years, I have been mostly amused – and occasionally annoyed – by the Texas chauvinists who strut around wearing the Lone Star on their shoulders, as if their Texanness has magically bestowed upon them some type of superiority over other, lessfortunate humans as well as the right to be obnoxiousatwill. I, too, am a Texan, nativeborn, but have mostly tried to maintain a moredetached view of what we should and shouldn’t be bragging about.

These days, it seems, most of that chauvinistic boasting comes from football fans and politicians, including the current occupant of the state’s highest office. To boost his reelection prospects, Gov. Rick Perry continues to brag about the ability of the Texas economy to weather (so far) the national recession in comparatively strong shape, downplaying, of course, the thousands of Texans who still don’t have jobs.

He was at it again this week, when his campaign posted a link on its webpage to a new Brookings Institution report showing that Texas’ major metropolitan areas were performing quite well, economically, compared to most other cities around the country. The posting then bragged about “record job creation, low taxes” and other “businessfriendly” steps that would help Perry and Texas “lead the nation out of recession.”

Even if I were to concede, which I don’t, that Perry deserves much credit for the current Texas economy, there are ominous warnings – all widely reported in the news media – that Texas’ state government and many school districts are in for a worsening financial storm. Teachers and other education professionals could be among those most adversely affected, and, in this case, policies promoted by Perry are clearly a major cause of the problem.

For starters, the Legislature is expected to face a budgetary shortfall next January projected (so far) at anywhere between $11 billion and $15 billion. Although the recession is partly to blame, a major cause of the problem are the minimal school property tax cuts that Perry convinced the Legislature to enact during his 2006 reelection campaign. Remember those? Or, were your savings so small, you forgot about them already?

Collectively, however, those cuts produced a huge, recurring hole in the state budget – about $9 billion every two years because the revised business tax and higher cigarette taxes that Perry promoted to replace them came up short. The governor who would “lead” the nation out of recession has ordered state agencies to trim budgets. Health care, education and other critical public services are on the line.

The financial plight of many school districts, meanwhile, continues to worsen. The governor and the Legislature forced property tax cuts upon them without adequately repaying them or helping them prepare for everincreasing enrollment. Now, many school officials are warning of costcutting steps such as larger class sizes and faculty and staff layoffs. With Texas already ranking an embarrassing 44th in perpupil spending on instruction, what kind of message does that send to employers seeking a 21st century workforce?

And, we can’t forget (much as we might wish we could) that other national embarrassment, the State Board of Education. Perry is a political ally of the rightwing faction that removed Thomas Jefferson from the world history curriculum, and he once appointed Don McLeroy, a leader of the effort to rewrite history, as the board chairman. The SBOE certainly is doing its part to transform Texas from bragging state to laughingstock.

It didn’t take long for the selfanointed education “experts,” many of whom haven’t darkened a classroom door since graduation day, to jump all over the real experts – teachers – for criticizing President Obama’s “blueprint” for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Obama may want to retire the “No Child Left Behind” name, but, unfortunately, he wants to breathe new life into some of the bad ideas that made No Child Left Behind such a failure. They include things like an overreliance on highstakes, standardized testing to identify winners and losers among school kids and teachers alike and requiring states to compete for education resources rather than assuring more funding stability for all the schools. The competitive grants approach is particularly dicey in the current poor economy and for a state like Texas, which already lags behind in perpupil spending on education.

Like his predecessor’s approach to education, Obama’s blueprint is a topdown approach with insufficient opportunity for collaboration with teachers and parents. In short, teachers would continue to bring up the rear of the line for resources but anchor the front of the line for blame. So, if teachers and their union representatives aren’t going to call the administration’s hand, who is?

The National Education Association and the Texas State Teachers Association want to be partners with the administration in improving the public schools. But we won’t be silent partners. As NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said earlier this week, “We intend to engage in a productive dialogue to meet the needs of students, educators and public schools.”

That dialogue has begun.

There has to be a better way. In fact, there probably are several better ways to write public school curricula than the slapstick routine performed (once again) this week by that preposterously misnamed creature, the State Board of Education. Trying to rewrite history to fit your own narrow, ideological view of the world is not education, my friends.

Some of the current board members could have taught Larry, Moe and Curly a few things about the finer points of piethrowing. But Larry, Moe and Curly were supposed to be ridiculous. The board is charged, unfortunately, with setting curriculum standards for 5 million Texas schoolchildren.

Last year, it was science. This year, it is social studies being forced under the theologytinted review of a bloc of rightwing, selfprofessed academic experts. And one day, Democrats can hope, it may be a clique of leftwingers seeking to rewrite our kids’ history books. But that wouldn’t be the way to set educational standards for kids either.

It is past time for the Legislature to step in and impose some academic discipline on Texas’ curriculum development and textbook selection processes. Several bills to rein in the board were proposed last year, but they went nowhere, mainly because Gov. Rick Perry and many Republican legislators are playing politically to the same conservative voters who elected the board’s conservative bloc.

This week’s shenanigans all but guarantee the same bills, maybe more, will be filed during the 2011 session. But their fate, in all likelihood, will be largely affected by the outcome of this November’s legislative and gubernatorial races.

One of the bills that died last year was SB2275 by Sen. Kel Seliger, RAmarillo. It would have transferred the responsibility for curriculum development from the State Board of Education to the state education commissioner and required the commissioner to seek guidance from teachers and parents, among others. That bill may not be the only solution to an increasingly embarrassing problem, but it is certainly worth a serious look.

There has to be a better way.

Yesterday’s blog item encouraging votes against Republican legislative candidates who support school vouchers prompted one teacher, Betsy, a voucher supporter, to ask me for a nonpolitical, “issuesbased piece” on my antivoucher position.

This may not be what she is looking for, but, for me, the bottom line is this. The vast majority of Texas children who receive an education are educated in the public schools, not in charters, not in private schools and not at home.

Yet, state government’s record of supporting the public schools is extremely poor. In 2008, the most recent data I have, Texas ranked 44th among the states in per pupil spending for instruction and 33rd in teacher salaries. Those numbers beg for improvement. Texas needs to strengthen its commitment to the public schools, help them strengthen their programs for all students – including the disadvantaged and not siphon off tax dollars for a relative handful of children.

There is more to a quality public education than money, you say? True enough. But money, obviously, is a crucial part of the equation.

I am reminded of a former state senator who, years ago, was debating one of his tightfisted colleagues on the Senate floor over education funding. “You say we can’t solve the public schools’ problems by throwing money at them,” he barked. “How do we know? We’ve never tried.”