Grading Texas

School safety may be easy to campaign on, but….

Gov. Greg Abbott used the school safety issue and the fear of gun violence to receive some positive publicity for his reelection campaign during a visit to Nacogdoches the other day. Has Abbott actually done anything to protect schools from gun violence? Not much. But in the political game that doesn’t always matter. Or so Abbott hopes.

Perception often trumps reality in politics, and the governor projected a positive perception during a locally televised public appearance in which he was asked what he was doing to keep kids safe at school.

“It’s imperative that the State of Texas do everything that we can to make sure that our schools are as safe as possible,” Abbott said.

He apparently reminded his audience that in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school tragedy, he ordered the Texas School Safety Center, based at Texas State University in San Marcos, to make sure that schools across Texas are compying with school security plans.

What he didn’t tell the parents and other voters in Nacogdoches though was that last year he signed a budget that cut the School Safety Center’s budget by 30 percent, restricting the center’s ability to do its job of providing school districts with security training, resources and technical assistance.

And he didn’t remind the folks in Nacogdoches that he and his legislative allies continue to under-fund their public schools, making it difficult for some school officials to do everything they would like to do to keep their students and employees safe.

Abbott instead has proposed that more schools arm their teachers. That would sell more guns, and some people would like that, but it wouldn’t be doing, as the governor would say, “everything that we can to make sure that our schools are as safe as possible.”

And arming teachers is not a meaningful answer for the thousands of students, parents and educators who this week will continue their demonstrations against gun violence.

Gov. Abbott talks school safety at legislative summit in Nacogdoches

Spreading lies about teachers and education funding

It was inevitable, about as inevitable as Donald Trump spewing his next lie. Super-wealthy rightwingers who don’t care about public education, except what they can squeeze from it, have organized a campaign of lies against teachers who have been participating in strikes and other demonstrations against the pitiful state of education funding in their states.

The Guardian published a story this week about a “messaging guide” put together to try to turn public sentiment against the teachers and their cause. According to the Guardian, the rightwingers are trying to portray the walkouts as harmful to low-income parents and children.

One of the sponsors of this drivel is the Walton Family Foundation, whose benefactors, the family that brought us Walmart, has enriched itself by under-paying thousands of the low-income parents they now purport to care so much about. Other sponsors include the Koch brothers and the billionaire DeVos family, which, like the Walton Foundation, view public schools as privatization opportunities to be harvested, not pathways to success for the children they pretend to champion.

The DeVos family, of course, includes Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education intent on privatizing every school in sight.

All these people are also very anti-union.

The anti-teacher message developers admit that it is “challenging” to deny the fact that schools in many states are in poor financial shape. That’s because the same people who are now attacking the teachers engineered tax cuts that created the funding crises, and that was their intent. Cut funding from public schools, declare them failures and then move in and privatize them.

In the end, all children, including children from low-income families suffer, and profiteers profit.

This is what Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and his allies have been trying to do in Texas for years. They claim to want to help low-income children with vouchers and corporate charters. But they cut state funding for neighborhood public schools, where the vast majority of these children will continue to be educated in overcrowded, under-equipped classrooms. And they force teachers to waste their students’ learning time with preparations for standardized tests.

The privatization people, not coincidentally, are the same people who have been trying to intimidate Texas educators from voting in this year’s elections, and they may be doing the same thing in other states.

Teacher protests are an important step in the fight to save public education from privatization, but the battle ultimately will be won through elections. That is why it is critical that educators turn out in large numbers in this election year and vote for one issue and one issue only – public education.

Vote Education First!

The “best” school district in Texas doesn’t represent Texas

When it comes to educational quality and student success, money does more than just talk. It screams. And I don’t mean just the money spent on education, although that is critical. I also mean the family financial resources available to students.

These facts were emphasized –once again – in an article published this week on 24/7 Wall St., an online site that publishes financial news and opinions on a number of issues, including education. This particular article rated what the author, Mike Sauter, considered the best school district in each of the 50 states, based on school funding, graduation rates, students enrolled in AP classes, student-teacher ratios and various socioeconomic factors, such as student poverty and the education levels of adults living in the district.

The article concluded that the best school district in Texas was Eanes ISD in Austin. With about 8,000 students, Eanes is one of the smaller urban school districts in Texas. It also is one of the wealthiest and whitest.

Some 56 percent of Eanes households make more than $100,000 a year. One-third make more than $200,000. An estimated 86 percent of its students are white. Eanes also has one of the highest graduation rates in the state and one of the highest levels of adult residents with college degrees. That means most Eanes students are from families with comfortable (or better) financial resources and an environment that nurtures educational attainment.

But Eanes ISD doesn’t represent the future of Texas. It doesn’t even represent the present.

Most students in Texas public schools (about 60 percent overall) come from poor families, and most (52 percent) are Hispanic. White, non-Hispanic students accounted for only 28 percent of Texas’ public school enrollment in 2016-17, the most recent data available. Almost 13 percent were African American. The percentage of Hispanic students, in particular, will continue to increase in Texas, as the percentage of Anglo students declines.

Hispanic and African American families have a higher poverty rate than Anglo families, and that poverty makes a significant difference in educational success. Most Eanes families have a legacy of educational attainment, and most Eanes parents can afford the luxury of tutors or whatever it takes to improve the educational outcomes for their children.

Meanwhile, many poverty stricken Hispanic and African American parents in Houston ISD, Dallas ISD, Austin ISD and hundreds of other Texas school districts are too busy holding down two or three jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table and don’t have the money for tutors or the time or educational background for something as simple as helping their children with homework. Many of their children also are having to take jobs that interfere with their school work and put them at risk of dropping out. Inadequate health care also is an issue that affects their educational progress.

Almost one-fifth (19 percent) of Texas students are English language learners, immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, who are going to continue to come to Texas in search of economic opportunity despite all the presidential blathering about a border wall. And how well they are educated will be essential to Texas’ future.

Low-income students and English language learners generally cost more to educate than affluent students, and many of them are in districts that are much poorer than Eanes, districts that don’t have Eanes’ property tax base to help compensate for the inadequate funding they receive from state government.

Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and their legislative allies, who persist in short-changing Texas’ school children, love Eanes and other property wealthy districts that continue to take up part of the slack for their own neglect. And then they pretend to cry over high property taxes.

I suspect that even the well-heeled taxpayers in Eanes are getting tired of that charade.

Your teacher voice is your vote. Use it.

I saw a news photo the other day of Kentucky teachers marching to save their pensions from an insensitive, short-sighted state government and noticed that one teacher was holding a sign that read, “Don’t make me use my teacher voice!” In truth, she and her colleagues already were using their teacher voices, and so are growing numbers of other educators around the country.

The only way that educators will force the people in power to listen to them is by using their teacher voices, their bus driver voices, their cafeteria worker voices, whatever educator voice they have. It is encouraging and impressive to see thousands of educators in West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma march, protest and walk out to protect their hard-earned pensions and force recalcitrant governors and lawmakers to increase education funding. Legislatures in some of these states are taking notice, and the movement shows signs of spreading.

But we have a long way to go, and right now the loudest voice for Texas educators is their vote.

The Texas Legislature is not in session this year and won’t return until January. The upcoming election will decide what kind of Legislature it will be. If educators don’t use their educator voices and vote education first, we are going to be sorely disappointed again with insufficient funding, excessive testing, crowded classrooms, low pay and another fight over vouchers that we may very well lose.

Sure, thousands of educators marching on the Capitol in downtown Austin would be an impressive sight. But it would be far more impressive and productive to see tens of thousands of educators use their educator voices and vote Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick out of office.

Let’s be clear about one thing. Dan Patrick, the bane of public schools and local property taxpayers, didn’t get elected to the second highest office in state government without the votes of many educators. Neither did Gov. Greg Abbott. Educators have a right to vote for whomever they wish – and for any reason. But educators who voted for Dan Patrick or Greg Abbott didn’t use their teacher voices and didn’t vote education first.

Patrick will be on the November ballot, and he will have a true, pro-public education candidate, Mike Collier, running against him. Mike Collier has been endorsed by TSTA-PAC, and he deserves the vote of anyone who wants to strengthen our public schools. Abbott will be on the ballot too, even though we don’t know yet who his opponent will be.

Also crucial to the future of public schools, students and educators are races for the Texas House in which the winners will vote in January for the next speaker, following the retirement of Joe Straus. Straus was a strong advocate for public education and more school funding and opposed vouchers. Depending on how strongly teachers use their teacher voices in legislative elections, the next speaker may echo Straus’ concerns – or be a Dan Patrick-style disaster.

TSTA-PAC has endorsed pro-public education candidates in many legislative races and may endorse more before the November election. If you live in those districts, please plan to vote for these pro-education candidates and, if you have time, campaign for them.

Your educator voice is your vote. Use it for your students and your profession.

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