Grading Texas – Page 76 – Texas State Teachers Association

Voucher students cost more, perform worse

People who really value public education already knew that diverting education tax dollars to private school vouchers – aka education savings accounts, tax credit scholarships or “school choice” – is a bad idea that ultimately will harm public schools. Now, here is some new information about how bad the idea can be.

Taxpayers, students and educators in Wisconsin, the state with the longest-running voucher program, are paying dearly. On average, voucher students are getting more general state revenue than public school students and are scoring lower on proficiency tests.

During the 2015-16 school year, Wisconsin state government gave an average $7,353 in tax revenue to each voucher student attending a private school. This figure from the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau was based on the percentage of full-time equivalent students in the Milwaukee, Racine and statewide voucher programs enrolled in grades K-12.

By contrast, the average student enrolled in a public school received $5,108 in general state aid.

Clearly, Wisconsin – under the short-sighted, anti-public service administration of Gov. Scott Walker – is short-changing its public school students. But they still are scoring, as a whole, significantly better than voucher students on standardized tests.

The scores weren’t even close on the first administration of the new Wisconsin Forward Exam, which debuted last spring. It is that state’s version of our STAAR.

According to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, 42.5 percent of public school students scored proficient or better in English language arts, compared to only 19.1 percent of voucher students. Some 42.3 percent of public school students were proficient or better in math, compared to only 14 percent of voucher students. And 50.1 percent of public school students were proficient or better in science, compared to 21.6 percent of voucher students.

Yet, here in Texas, vouchers are one of many bad ideas that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick refuses to quit peddling. He doubled down after most members of the House Public Education Committee renewed their hostility to them in a public hearing last week.

Patrick would rather waste time and rhetoric on so-called “school choice” and other gimmicks than give public schools and their students what they really need – an adequate and fair funding system that gives all children an opportunity to succeed in the classroom and beyond.

That includes the low-income children for whom Patrick claims to advocate but who suffered the most when he voted to slash $5.4 billion from school budgets in 2011.

Now, while many school districts are still struggling with overcrowded classrooms and other fallout from the cuts, Patrick wants to divert more money from them to benefit a handful of families with grants of tax money to spend on private school tuition or home-school expenses. This isn’t “choice.” This is cherry-picking.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of school kids will continue to be educated in public schools that Patrick continues to short-change.

Patrick also repeated the erroneous argument that vouchers won’t hurt public schools because when a student takes a voucher and leaves, the school won’t need the money. Baloney.

There are set costs – buses, bus routes and utilities, to name a few – that can’t be proportionately reduced, and those costs are significant.

Texas taxpayers can’t afford to pay for two education systems, one public and one private. The state constitution allows for only a public education system – with no provisions for cherry-picking.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/10/20/patrick-digs-heels-school-choice-fight/

Legislator: Schools have more money than they need

Maybe state Rep. Gilbert Pena of Pasadena knows more about the state of education in Texas than educators do, but I doubt it, particularly when he makes a statement like this: “I feel that schools get more than enough funding.”

Huh?

Yes, that is what he said, quoted in the Houston Chronicle story linked below, when a reporter asked him about education funding in a state that spends about $2,700 less per student than the national average, ranks near the bottom in that category and has thousands of overcrowded classrooms. Pena also wants to squeeze school district budgets even more by eliminating the business franchise tax, a major source of state funding for education, which he voted to reduce last year.

Pena also criticized the Robin Hood law that requires property wealthy school districts to share their tax revenue with poorer districts. But he is part of the problem with this outdated law that now threatens to take tens of millions of dollars from Houston ISD’s budget, even though most of the district’s students are low-income and in need of more classroom resources.

Robin Hood should be replaced, but it is still on the books because the governor and members of the legislative majority, including Pena, refuse to enact a new school finance plan that adequately and fairly funds all of Texas’ public schools.

Pena has been in the Legislature only one session, but it is time for the voters of District 144 to retire him and return his opponent, former Rep. Mary Ann Perez, to Austin. TSTA is supporting Mary Ann because as a House member she was a strong advocate for public schools and voted in 2013 to restore much of the school funding that had been cut in 2011.

Unlike Pena, Mary Ann gets it. She understands that educators and school children need more than plaudits and pats on the back. They need adequate financial support, and she will work to get it.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Challenger-wants-her-seat-back-in-tight-Texas-9967897.php#photo-11437998

Education, the Supreme Court and Trump

Now that we know which presidential candidate really should be locked up – and it’s not Hillary – it is interesting to observe the rationalizations that some partisan officeholders and hypocritical Christian religious “leaders” have for holding their noses and sticking with Donald Trump.

“Interesting” is not the word I wanted to use, but it will have to do.

One of the often-repeated excuses for putting an admitted sexual molester in charge of our country’s future is that he would appoint the “right” ideologically inclined people to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In truth, we don’t know who Trump would appoint to the Supreme Court or anything else, for that matter, since about every other sentence that comes out of his mouth is a distortion, fantasy or outright lie. But if you want to take him at his word on the high court issue, educators and parents should consider that one of the potential Supreme Court nominees on the “short list” he released a few months ago is Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett.

Willett is among the nine justices who recently turned their backs on Texas public schools and millions of school children suffering from under-funded classrooms.

Willett wrote the grandiosly worded but mealy mouthed Texas Supreme Court opinion that admitted the state’s school funding system is awful but concluded that it didn’t violate the state constitution. That decision gave the governor and the legislative majority a free pass to continue short-changing school kids.

I wonder if Willett will be joining other partisan officeholders and voting for Trump. Maybe, maybe not. During the Republican presidential nominating follies, Willett repeatedly mocked Trump on Twitter.

So, let us hope the justice’s interest in the future of our country is stronger than his apparent lack of interest in the future of public education in Texas.

There is no “civil right” to attend a charter school

Gov. Greg Abbott is confused. Maybe it’s because he has been listening to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick too much. In any event, he was parroting Patrick this week – there ought to be a law against that — and calling expansion of charter schools a “civil rights issue.” In truth, most of the interest in adding more charter schools comes from business interests eager to cash in on the public’s education tax dollars.

Yes, technically, charter schools are public schools, and, in reality, they are when they are organized and operated by a school district or a truly non-profit organization. But the charter school movement in Texas is attracting a great deal of interest from corporations and entrepreneurs with buildings to lease, computers to sell and for-profit management companies to take over school operations, all funded with your tax dollars. And those tax dollars are coming from your already under-funded traditional neighborhood schools.

Some charter schools are quite good, but others are very bad, little more than conduits for state tax dollars to flow into private bank accounts. On average, studies have shown, charters are no better or worse than traditional public schools. And evidence indicates that some corporate charter chains try to cherry pick the best students, despite denials by many charter advocates.

The Texas Education Agency is responsible for regulating charters and has closed down some chronically bad ones. But considering the governor’s and the legislative majority’s history of under-funding public education, it is not clear that TEA has enough resources to do its job effectively.

Nevertheless, in an address in Austin to the Texas Charter School Conference, as reported by WOAI Radio, Abbott said: “This is a civil rights issue.”

The governor is wrong. Parents don’t have a “civil right” to use tax dollars to send their children to a charter school or a private school. Even using that term is an insult to minority Texans who remember the days when privatization was a route used by many white families to avoid sending their children to public schools that were being integrated during the real civil rights era.

Parents do have a right under the Texas Constitution to send their children to a free public school, and they have a right to expect their neighborhood public schools to be adequately and fairly funded.

Abbott and the legislative majority have ignored that constitutional right. During the 2015 legislative session, they gave a higher priority to tax cuts than school funding, even though many districts still hadn’t recovered from $5.4 billion in school budgets cuts imposed four years earlier. Texas spends, on average, $2,700 less a year to educate a child than the national average, and many of the children being short-changed are low-income, minority kids.

All Texas school children have a right to adequately funded public schools, not hollow, meaningless promises about “civil rights” to attend a charter school.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30