Grading Texas

Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush belongs to one of America’s most established political families. He is the grandson of one U.S. president, the nephew of another and the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, but because his mother was born in Mexico, he has felt the sting of racism.

Now, following the El Paso shootings, which targeted Hispanics, Bush has written an oped in The Atlantic denouncing white-nationalist terrorism as a “real threat to our country.” As a conservative Republican, Bush wrote, he wanted to “charge my party to take this challenge seriously.”

He also made some good points about “leading by example” against domestic terrorism and speaking honestly about the threat.

“Conservatives must defend all Americans from all threats,” he wrote. “There are no second-class Americans. All of us help make this country great.”

Very true. But Bush didn’t go far enough. He failed to confront the leader of his party, the president of the United States, whose immigrant-bashing rhetoric, attacks on minority members of Congress and racially tinged remarks have encouraged white supremacists to emerge from the shadows and act on their hatred.

Elected Republican officials in Texas refuse to criticize President Trump, at least in public, regardless of how low the man stoops. Trump isn’t responsible for white supremacism, but he keeps feeding the flames of bigotry, racism and divisiveness.

You may recall that George P. Bush endorsed Trump for president, even after Trump had ridiculed the land commissioner’s father, a Trump opponent in the 2016 race for the Republican nomination.

“From Team Bush, it’s a bitter pill to swallow,” the commissioner admitted at the time. “But…you get back up and you help the man that won, and you make sure that we stop Hillary Clinton.”

That was politics. But the war against racism and white supremacy is about more than the next election.

Trump must stop promoting hatred, and Bush and his Republican colleagues – beginning with John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick — need to find the courage to set partisan politics aside and demand that Trump stop his dangerous game.

If they don’t and Trump persists, George P. Bush and people who look like him won’t be welcome in the Republican Party much longer, and our country will become a very dangerous place for everybody.

Hostility toward a state income tax has always been deep in Texas, which is why Texas voters in 1993 overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the state constitution forbidding the Legislature from ever enacting a tax on personal income without the approval of Texas voters in a statewide election.

So far, we haven’t come close to having such an election.

Most school teachers and other school employees probably dislike the idea of a state income tax as much as anyone else. And I am not proposing one, at least not now, even though an income tax could reduce most teachers’ share of the state and local tax load, while forcing wealthy and super-wealthy Texans to pay more.

The average Texas teacher pays anywhere from 7 to 9 percent of his or her annual income in state and local taxes, based on household income-level calculations by the state comptroller’s office and the Center for Public Policy Priorities. Many school bus drivers and cafeteria workers pay 17 percent or more, while the average Texas millionaire pays 4 percent or less. That’s because the sales and property taxes that are the foundation of the Texas tax structure are more regressive than an income tax would be.

Moreover, an income tax could provide a significant increase in funding for public education while reducing school property taxes, and, sooner rather than later, the Legislature is going to have to find more state funding for public schools or force cuts in programs. This year’s additional funding was just a down payment on what needs to come as enrollment continues to grow.

The 1993 amendment, championed by the late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, dedicates two-thirds of the revenue from any future income tax to reducing school property taxes and the remaining one-third to education.

Now, the current state leadership and legislative majority want to repeal the 1993 amendment. To that end, they have placed Proposition 4 on the November constitutional amendments ballot. It is unnecessary and one of the more short-sighted measures to emerge from the recent legislative session.

At present, only a legislative majority would be required to submit the income-tax issue to voters if the need for a new revenue source were to arise. Proposition 4, if adopted, would wipe out the 1993 amendment and its provisions for property tax relief and additional education funding. It also would make it much more difficult for future Legislatures to enact a personal income tax for any reason – education, transportation, health care or whatever future public need may arise.

Under Proposition 4, two-thirds of the House and the Senate would have to approve an income tax before the question could be submitted to voters. That means, even in a budgetary crisis, a minority of monied or ideological interests could exert enough political pressure on a minority of lawmakers to deprive voters of the opportunity to weigh in on a potential solution – and a fairer tax structure.

Current state leaders think it is good politics to bury the idea of a state income tax, and many voters will applaud them now. But eventually, if Proposition 4 passes, their successors will be cursing their short-sightedness. So will many educators and parents of school children.

In Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 struck a strong blow against racism by ruling that racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional. Although, 65 years later, many schools in Texas and elsewhere are still segregated because of economic and racial disparities among communities, the landmark ruling nevertheless has long been considered the established law of the land and a goal that we must continue to work to achieve.

But in Trumpworld, where racism is winked at and encouraged by the Tweeter-in-Chief and education is an afterthought, even something as fundamental as equal opportunity in public schools is being questioned.

For months now, many of President Trump’s nominees to federal judgeships, including several from Texas, have refused in Senate confirmation hearings to declare without reservation that the Brown v. Board of Education case was correctly decided.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights believes an affirmation of the correctness of the Brown decision should be a requirement for Senate confirmation of any judicial nominee.

“The refusal by some nominees to say that the decision was correctly decided sends a dangerous signal to all Americans – especially African Americans – that Brown could someday be overturned and that our nation could return to the disgraceful days of racial segregation,” the conference’s president and CEO, Vanita Gupta, has told senators in a letter.

“Affirming Brown is an essential principle of racial equality that must be endorsed by all who seek a lifetime appointment on our federal courts. Regrettably, it is not, and that should be disqualifying,” she said.

Ada Brown, an African American on the Texas 5th Court of Appeals in Dallas who has been nominated by Trump to be a federal district judge, acknowledged that she has benefited from the Brown ruling.

“Because of Brown v. Board of Education, I went to an excellent integrated school where my father went to a very poor segregated school,” she said at a Senate hearing.

But she is among the Trump judicial nominees who have refused to comment on the correctness of the desegregation decision because, they claim, a judicial canon prevents them from commenting on court decisions.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who has been asking nominees to answer the Brown question, said the judicial canon they cite was “completely inapplicable” to established decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh answered similar questions about the Brown decision at their confirmation hearings. Both said it was correctly decided.

Fearful their confirmations were in danger, some nominees have begun to break their silence in favor of offering support for Brown, but the civil rights group lists 23 nominees around the country who are still refusing to answer the question.

Does this mean they are segregationists? Probably not. But for whatever reason, they are playing politics with an issue at the heart of the American sense of fairness and equality. And when judicial nominees refuse to declare the importance and correctness of the Supreme Court’s Brown ruling, they are encouraging racists who want to tear it up.

Most Texas school districts are getting more state funding, teachers all over the state are getting pay raises and one school privatization group in Austin, which thinks it knows more about education than educators do, doesn’t like it.

This, of course, would be the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a pro-voucher, pro-testing outfit that believes teacher pay should largely be based on test scores. During the legislative session earlier this year, TPPF’s senior policy advisor, Kara Belew, told the media an across-the-board teacher pay raise would be “wasteful.”

The Legislature didn’t approve across-the-board raises, but it did provide extra funding and order school districts to provide raises without tying them to STAAR scores.

The raises aren’t big enough, but many teachers soon will have enough extra cash to “waste” on things like health care, groceries, student loan payments, child care, rent, car payments or maybe a vacation or an extra night out.

The Legislature increased per-student funding by several hundred dollars and also provided extra money for critical programs like full-day, pre-kindergarten for low-income children and students with dyslexia and other special needs.

And TPPF is grousing because, as Belew writes in a new oped, the districts can spend a lot of the money “nearly as they wish.”

Imagine that, locally elected school boards and educators being allowed to decide how to best spend education money for education programs, rather than have to “earn” extra dollars through improved STAAR scores or some other data-driven formula.

Some mistakes may be made, but that is what school board elections are for. And public school educators, as a whole, are a better judge of what works in the classroom than a so-called “think tank” in Austin that has consistently promoted the under-funding of public schools in favor of privatization.

TPPF argues that there is no evidence that extra funding alone will improve student performance. Extra funding, though, will provide additional resources, including pay raises, that will encourage more teachers to stay in the classroom and allow some districts to take steps like reducing class sizes. These are the kind of improvements that will improve student performance, not more STAAR testing.

Extra funding hasn’t helped in the past, TPPF argues. The truth is that Texas’ public education system has been woefully under-funded for years, and so have the health care and social support systems so crucial to academic success for the low-income students who now account for more than half of our public school enrollment.

What the Legislature did this session is only a down payment on real school finance reform. Lawmakers must provide more resources – not test-driven “incentives” – the next time they meet.