Grading Texas

There is one thing you can almost always count on from most state legislators. They know how to throw out a good cliché, as Senate Education Chairwoman Florence Shapiro did yesterday during the umpteenth round of legislative handwringing over how to pay for the public schools.

“Rather than rearranging the chairs on the Titanic, which we have been doing all these years, why don’t we take them off the deck and look at things from a completely different perspective?” she told a special legislative committee on school finance, according to a report in The Dallas Morning News.

Shapiro, RPlano, apparently meant that the Legislature needs to find a better way to fund public education. We’ve heard that many times before, but with a revenue shortfall projected between $11 billion and $15 billion for next year’s legislative session, she also acknowledged a major part of the problem “There is no money.”

Sen. Dan Patrick, RHouston, quickly announced – also for the umpteenth time – that he wants to “fix” local property taxes, a major source of school funding. Property taxes are an easy political target, but the cuts that the Legislature ordered in those local taxes four years ago have heightened the school funding problem, and whatever savings that homeowners realized then have since been mostly eroded.

There are funding options out there, but there is little will among the current state leadership to tap into them to overhaul the school finance system, even as Texas continues to lag behind most other states in perpupil funding for instruction and inequities among school districts worsen.

State leaders are solidly against a personal income tax. And even if they weren’t, voters – who would have the final say over that option – likely would reject it. A legislative committee will look at closing some sales tax exemptions, but many of those are very popular and won’t be repealed easily.Lawmakers aren’t likely to expand the new business tax either. In fact, they increased the exemptions to the business tax only last year, even though it falls about $9 billion short each biennium of covering the revenue losses from the 2006 property tax cuts.

Despite a widespread public misperception, the lottery contributes only a very small percentage of the education budget, and that amount is offset by general revenue anyway. Expanded gambling in Texas, meanwhile, remains a pieinthesky proposition.

There will be no significant boost in education funding without a new revenue stream. Without new revenue, lawmakers are likely to tinker with things like class sizes and administrative overhead but avoid a real fix. They will keep using the same wornout chairs – until another lawsuit is filed and another court order puts the state back under the gun.

I live in Austin, and the sun came up here this morning. I bet it came up where you live too. Isn’t that amazing? The U.S. House passes health care reform, and despite the doomsday predictions of the Rabid Right, life goes on. More importantly, millions of Americans will soon have an opportunity at healthier lives, thanks to passage of this landmark piece of legislation.

You already have heard the national statistics. An additional 32 million Americans eventually will get health coverage, and consumers finally will get a number of important safeguards against insurance company abuses when the overhaul fully kicks in. One of the most important reforms will prohibit insurers from denying coverage to people who have preexisting medical conditions, the very people who often have the most critical need for health care.

Although you can’t tell it by listening to the state’s Republican leadership, Texas stands to receive some of the biggest benefits from the new law, mainly because Texas leads the country in the percentage of residents who currently have no health insurance. The new law eventually will mean coverage for more than 4 million of the 6 million Texans who now lack coverage, according to some estimates. Many of those will be children in public school classrooms. Healthier children will be better able to learn.

The Texas State Teachers Association and the National Education Association fully support the new law. Texas teachers and other school employees already have access to health insurance, either through their districts’ own policies or through the Teacher Retirement System’s ActiveCare program. But the new law may enable many educators to find more affordable coverage. And teachers, like all consumers, will benefit from the new consumer protections.

Despite these prospects for a healthier Texas, all of the state’s Republicans in the U.S. House and one Democrat (Chet Edwards of Waco) voted against the health reform bill, claiming, among other things, that it will bankrupt consumers with higher taxes (it won’t) and will penalize small businesses that don’t buy insurance for their workers. In fact, businesses with fewer than 50 employees will be exempt.

Continuing to fan misinformation after the bill had passed, Gov. Rick Perry characterized expanded health care as an expansion of “socialism on American soil.” McCarthylite lives!

And Attorney General Greg Abbott announced he would sue (using your tax dollars) to try to block the new law. He said his challenge would “protect all Texans’ constitutional rights,” believing, I guess, that we have a constitutional right to get sick and not be able to afford a doctor.

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.