Grading Texas

The IDEA charter chain’s high-flying business model for public education had to make an emergency landing after public outrage over what CEO Tom Torkelson admitted were some “really dumb” ideas. Ideas like spending $2 million a year to lease a private jet for the convenience of IDEA officials and paying $400,000 a year for a luxury box and tickets for San Antonio Spurs’ games.

The Spurs’ box and tickets supposedly were used to reward IDEA employees for reaching employment goals and reward students for good academic work, but you will have a difficult time convincing me that state legislators and other public officials also weren’t invited to enjoy the amenities of the luxury suite while their influence was being peddled to benefit IDEA’s ambitious expansion plans.

This is still another example of how corporate charter chains think they can operate in Texas’ insufficient regulatory climate. I wonder if any of the charter regulators over at the Texas Education Agency ever enjoyed IDEA’s hospitality for an NBA game.

IDEA – like other corporate-style charter chains – is classified as “public” by state law, but it is operated by a private board of directors who are not answerable to the taxpayers. IDEA Public Schools is what the chain calls itself, but it is “public” mainly in the sense that it gets state tax dollars for every student it enrolls, including those it takes from traditional public schools.

Charters are now taking about $3 billion a year from Texas’ underfunded school districts because where the students go, the tax dollars go.

Because of the public outrage – and not the Texas Education Agency – IDEA has jettisoned the private jet idea and, Torkelson says, will quit spending money on Spurs’ entertainment after this NBA season ends.

The CEO said all the money spent on the Spurs — and what would have been spent on the jet – would have come from private donations, which supplement the tax funding. Donors to IDEA have included the Walton Family Foundation and other organizations dedicated to expanding the privatization of public schools throughout the country.

But every donated dollar spent on a jet or basketball ticket is a dollar not spent on educating children.

The Houston Chronicle reported that IDEA also will end insider business deals with its own leaders and their relatives for supplies and services to the charter chain, a practice that often ends in criminal indictments if uncovered in most public school districts.

IDEA now enrolls about 51,000 students in about 50 schools in Texas, mainly in the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio and Austin, but it has ambitious expansion plans in Texas and elsewhere. It claims great academic success, but questions have been raised about its claims. And, like other charters but unlike traditional public schools, IDEA can cherry-pick its students. It refuses to take students with serious disciplinary records, for example.

Torkelson, who co-founded IDEA, is a former Teach for America teacher. According to Source Watch, his total compensation in 2016 was $465,015, higher than most, if not all, public school district superintendents in Texas.

The CEO said IDEA’s aim is to be “entrepreneurial and different from traditional education systems.” Public education, though, needs fewer high-flying entrepreneurs who seem to be more interested in their “business models” than their students.

—Clay Robison

This is “School Choice Week” in Texas, so proclaimed by Gov. Greg Abbott, but this is less about parental choice, as Abbott and his allies would have you believe, than about a growing nationwide effort to divert billions of additional tax dollars to enrich private school owners and charter school operators. And the campaign has picked up steam with an education commissioner in Texas who prefers to promote charters rather than regulate them and a right-wing ideological bloc on the U.S. Supreme Court that seems eager to open state treasuries to private religious schools.

But educators and parents who truly value public schools – real public schools – can still have the final say, and the final say is more than grousing or hand-wringing. The final say is voting, voting in large numbers and voting for genuine, pro-public education candidates for the Legislature, school board and other key offices.

Sound simple? It is. But it requires a lot of work persuading other teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, parents and other people who value our neighborhood public schools to register to vote, go to the polls and not be derailed by other issues or deceived by candidates who claim to be pro-education but fully support the privatization agenda. During this election cycle alone, our school privatization foes will be spending millions of dollars promoting candidates who supposedly will campaign for school children but, if elected, will vote for vouchers and charter expansion.

Even as we prepare for the March 3 party primaries, which will kick off the election season in Texas, Education Commissioner Mike Morath is proposing the relaxation of rules that will make it easier for charter chains to expand in Texas, without regard for their necessity or the financial impact on school districts, which already are losing about $3 billion a year to charter schools.

Meanwhile, many educators fear that a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to approve the expenditure of tax dollars (vouchers) for private religious schools, overriding constitutional restrictions in many states, including Texas, against spending public money to benefit religious institutions. It all depends on the outcome of a case from Montana, which the high court heard last week and is expected to decide later this year.

The solution for Texas to any adverse Supreme Court ruling is to continue to hold the line against vouchers for any type of private school, religious or secular. The only way to do that is to elect state legislators who will continue to vote against vouchers.

The only way to curb Commissioner Morath’s advocacy for charter chains is to elect legislators who will enact tough laws clamping down on charter expansion in Texas and clamping down on any attempt by the commissioner to water-down those laws.

TSTA has endorsed pro-public education candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, for the Legislature and other state offices in the March 3 party primaries. Here they are. Our only issue is education, and we will be making more endorsements before the general election.

If you are not registered to vote, please do so before the Feb. 3 registration deadline. Here is how to do that.

If you are already registered and live in House District 28 in Fort Bend County, please vote tomorrow (Tuesday, Jan. 28) for Eliz Markowitz in the special election runoff for an empty Texas House seat. Eliz is the pro-public education candidate in that race.

Educators elected pro-public education candidates for the Legislature in 2018, and lawmakers responded with several billion dollars in additional state education funding in 2019. If we want our voices heard again during the 2021 session, we have to turn out in force again and keep electing pro-public school candidates this year.

As we are reminded by “School Choice Week,” we still have a lot of work to do.

—Clay Robison

There are several ways in which Education Commissioner Mike Morath’s proposed charter proliferation rules threaten public education and the taxpayers who pay for it. I am referring to the relaxed standards by which an existing charter operator could be deemed “high-performing” and allowed to open new campuses.

One standard is so relaxed it would allow charters to hire teachers without college degrees and still be considered “high performing.”

Charters would be rated under a new “performance framework,” and those charter holders that score 80 percent or more on the framework would virtually be given carte blanche freedom to open new campuses without considering the academic need for the new schools or the negative financial impact on the school districts in which the new campuses were located.

The proposed penalty, if you want to call it that, for a charter chain that breaks the law and hires teachers without college degrees would be the loss of only one point – one point — on the commissioner’s new performance framework. Not only could the charter continue to operate, but it also could expand, provided it met enough other requirements to meet the required score of 80.

As my colleague, TSTA policy specialist Carrie Griffith, testified in a hearing against the rules changes, the same charter chain “could replicate across the state and might even erect a $20,000 taxpayer-funded billboard promising ‘highly qualified teachers.’”

Carrie also pointed out that a charter chain that fails to meet federal requirements for special populations or English learners also could be rated “high performing” and allowed to replicate because those failed responsibilities, which are critical to thousands of Texas school children, are worth only one point to the commissioner’s office. That’s the size of the proposed penalty anyway.

And what about a charter school that fails to file PEIMS data in a timely manner or fails to handle STAAR materials or student records promptly? Again, the penalty is just one point.

“It is almost absurd that this is where we’ve come with all this, but it is the recommendation of the Texas State Teachers Association that charter schools in the state of Texas not be allowed to break the law,” Carrie testified. “At minimum, their statutory compliance should be a threshold requirement for being allowed to submit an amendment, especially one for expansion.”

The commissioner has not yet made a final decision on these rules, but if they remain unchanged, they will let charters proliferate almost like flies.

You can swat flies. But unnecessary charters will keep sucking up tax dollars from an underfunded public education system.

There is a fact of life in Austin that every educator should remember. What the Texas Legislature giveth during one session can be taken away in the next session, and this includes teacher pay raises. Whether that happens depends on what happens in the in-between year – the election year.

The 2020 elections will begin with the March party primaries, but already legislative leaders in Austin are signaling that they are more interested in cutting taxes during the next legislative session in 2021 than they are in building on the 2019 session’s commitment to education funding.

In the biggest pro-education session in years, the Legislature last spring increased state education funding by $6.5 billion for pay raises and other important classroom needs.

But that was just a start, a down payment, toward lifting Texas out of the bottom half of the states in its commitment to public schools. Altogether the Legislature spent $11.6 billion on increased education spending and school property tax relief for the current two-year budget cycle, but the $5 billion or so spent to buy down property taxes didn’t increase overall school funding. It just transferred more of the funding to the state.

Much of the $11.6 billion came from a $9 billion revenue surplus that may not be available the next time the Legislature convenes. Meanwhile, the Legislative Budget Board has projected the cost of this year’s school finance bill will increase to $13.4 billion for the next budget cycle, and it will continue to increase in subsequent years if future Legislatures keep the new-found commitment to public education funding.

So far, though, I have detected no interest in the legislative leadership in finding significant new revenue sources for schools — or to improve educators’ health care and retirement benefits. Instead there are proposals to reduce existing revenue sources even more.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who will be back on the Senate podium in 2021 because he is not up for reelection next year, has asked the Senate Finance Committee to consider ways to further tighten the constitutional cap on state spending and reserve more money for “tax relief.” He also has asked the committee to consider more exemptions for some business property taxes.

Patrick has instructed the Senate Property Tax Committee to recommend legislation to “improve, enhance or complete implementation” of Senate Bill 2, the new law that strictly limits the ability of local elected officials to raise property taxes. Does he want to squeeze local budgets, including school district budgets, even more? He certainly doesn’t want to increase them.

House Speaker Dennis Bonnen has directed the House Ways and Means Committee to seek more property tax relief, “including potential sources of revenue that may be used to reduce or eliminate school district maintenance and operations property tax rates.”

This would be replacement money, not new revenue.

Meanwhile, some members of the business community will be seeking further reductions in – or a phasing out – of the franchise tax, and many legislators will be receptive.

The leadership already has backed a constitutional amendment, Proposition 4, which Texas voters approved in November, to make it more difficult to enact a state personal income tax. The same proposition abolished a constitutional provision that dedicated revenue from a future income tax to education and school property tax relief.

The Legislature appropriated more funding for public schools this year because educators got out in force to vote in 2018’s elections, made education their priority and elected new education friendly candidates to the Legislature.

Now, many of those education friendly legislators will be facing stiff reelection opposition. So, educators must do even more in next year’s elections – or risk losing their hard-fought legislative gains.