The Legislature is Coming! The Legislature is Coming!

Happy January in an odd numbered year in Texas.  Our state Constitution of 1876 requires our elected representatives to meet every other year for 140 days.  Wow.  So, at noon on Tuesday, January 13, 2015 our Legislature convened for the 84^th Legislative Session.  Given the size, the complexity, and the money involved it is very difficult to picture any group convening for less than half a year to serve every other year as a governmental body and be effective. 

 

Among the most important things they will do is pass a budget.  They will pass a budget that must be a balanced budget and must fund state functions for the next two years.  That in and of itself is scary as hell.  I could not project a two year budget for my family, much less the state.  Could you do that and not borrow money?  No house loans, no car loans, no higher education loans, etc.?  Whatever you earn is all you can spend.  How in the world do we know what the state will generate in terms of income generated mostly from sales tax beginning in September 2015 and ending in August 2017?  The Comptroller makes a guess and the Legislature is shackled by that guess.  They then pass a budget that shackles all of us.  More importantly, the Legislature’s priorities will be reflected in that budget.  For years we have heard state leaders talk about education as a very important component of their platforms while they have consistently voted to either decrease funding for education or to shift tax dollars from public education to private education experiments. 

 

And this January we have a new governor and a new lieutenant governor.  Governor Gregg Abbott has posted his proposed “improvements” to public education and it is one of the most off-base, outlandish, right-wing lists I have ever seen.  Clearly, Mr. Abbott does not know of what he speaks.  I suspect he did not talk with educators.  Like others of his ilk he talked to wealthy, conservative business people.  Wrong crowd to seek advice from on an operation that clearly resembles churches and families more than fracking.  Asking Bill Hammond how to improve education is worse than asking him for marriage counseling.  He is not qualified!

 

And, OMG, we have heard from Dan Patrick as well.  In what I perceive to be a declaration of war on Texas public schools, Patrick proposes to cut taxes, rate schools using an A to F scale and institute vouchers.  What in the world did public schools ever do to Patrick to earn such enmity?  Does he honestly believe that reducing funding for public education will somehow magically help public education?  Does he believe the same is true for the department of public safety, the highway department, and border patrol?  Does he believe that a state funded program will somehow improve if we reduce funding?  And giving schools a report card grade is so ludicrous it would be funny if I could stop crying.  It will be as simple as labeling every family as an “A” family or an “F” family.  Or using the same to label churches.  Schools are highly complex, multi-mission driven, social organizations that are labor intensive and child focused.  For such complexity there are simple solutions, and they are all wrong.  Finding another way to shame schools and educators accomplishes no gains for kids no matter how we measure such gains.  Other states have tried this and failed.  But why in the world would Patrick want to simultaneously decrease funding and increase accountability?  No one who can honestly claim to support the education of children would support either of these notions, much less both.  And all of that falls in line with Patrick’s support of charter schools and vouchers, both of which take money away from public schools and place it in the hands of private sector folks.

 

So, instead of the current political posturing regarding public education that is based solidly in pro-private sector models and anti-public school models, I propose some other ideas for the Legislature:  First, let’s increase the funding for public education.  If we really want to improve education for all our kids we must pay teachers more and we must reduce class size and we must put in place support systems for our kids of poverty.  We could accomplish some of that by ending this charter school experiment which has not shown to be any more effective than public schools.  And the voucher idea is worse as it will allow parents of wealth to receive public school dollars to support their tuition in private schools.  I do not know about you, but I perceive that to be immoral.  Throw money at it?  You bet.  That is exactly what I do when my kids get sick or my truck breaks down.  If you feel public schools are in trouble then surely you must recognize the need for more funding, not less.

 

Second, we need a hiatus on accountability and high stakes testing.  There are two main purposes to administer such tests:  one is to fund the Pearson oligarchy and the other is to collect data to shame schools.  Neither of these help schools and school people teach kids.  There is absolutely no sound instructional reason to give such a test.  The reasons are political, not educational.  We know that the schools that serve poor kids tend to do worse than the schools that serve kids of wealth.  We know that the schools that spend more money per pupil tend to do better than schools that spend less per pupil.    Shaming the victims of poverty and those who serve kids in poverty is not a motivator to somehow improve.  If one really believes that low performing schools exist due to a lack of motivation or professional competence of the faculty, then simply require that every low performing school swap teaching staff with a high performing school and see what happens.  (We know that the low performing school will perform worse, and the high performing school will perform better.)  The teacher is a large variable when it comes to student learning, but he or she is not the only variable nor is the teaching staff the variable of greatest impact.  Student wealth is the variable of greatest impact.  Finding another measure, like A to F, that confirms the correlation between wealth and outcomes will not help anyone improve.  Adding another gauge to the dashboard will not improve car performance without actually spending money on maintenance.  And, with kudos to Larry Lezotte, weighing the cow does not help it gain weight.

 

Third, honestly look at public school finance in Texas.  We know it is unconstitutional, even though round two of the court case will not be resolved until after the Legislative session.  We must fix this broken system now.  I think it will take an amendment to our 1876 Texas Constitution to do so, but the Legislature should have the guts to tackle it.  Among many problems large and small in public school finance is the basic notion that schools with high property wealth per kid should divest themselves of some of their local tax revenue to help fund schools with low property wealth per kid.  Sounds noble, but it is not.  Even when the wealthiest districts send money to the state they still have more money per kid than most school districts in the state, and the taxpayers in those districts highly resent sending “their” money to educate someone else’s kids.  No matter how much money poor districts receive from the state it is not nearly enough to provide a fair and equitable education, especially when compared to the high wealth districts even after they have sent money to the state.  In other words, the quality of public schools appears to be based on wealth, and the available money for schools is based on property values in a given zip code.  That is neither fair nor equitable.  To fix it I believe we need to fund all schools from the state based on a state collected tax.  That tax could be property tax levied and collected at the state level and returned to public schools based on numbers and needs of kids.  That tax could be a progressive income tax designated solely for the funding of public schools and returned to local public schools based on numbers and needs of kids.  Many will scream about an income tax, which really is the only fair tax, but even collecting the property tax at the state level will maintain current tax structures and rates as well as equalizing funding.  Wealthy districts will scream that they cannot live on the same revenue as the poor districts, assuming that such a plan would lower funding for public education to an average level.  It does not have to be that way.  We could leverage everyone up to the highest level if the wealthy people in the wealthy districts lobbied to increase taxes so that the funding pulls everyone up and pushes no one down. I do not think the Legislature has the guts to address this issue.

 

There is an array of other issues I wish the Legislature would address:  review the role of the school board vis-à-vis superintendents, review the rule allowing charter schools to dismiss students that are hard to teach or slow to learn, review and increase the funding for the teacher retirement system, review local district athletic expenditures versus instructional expenditures (funny to me that athletics is not a required program by the state and that school boards tend to understand that throwing money at athletics likely will result in improvement even if they do not believe the same is true for instruction,) review the requirements and the required training of school board members, remove the authority for approval of curriculum essential elements and textbook selection from the state board of education, update the transportation allotment, etc., etc.  Most of these topics will not be addressed, and those that will be will likely send us in the wrong direction.

 

A minority of Texas voters put these men in office.  Only 28% of registered voters in Texas bothered to vote in the November elections.  A victory was had by a mere 14% or more of registered voters.  And yet, we are now stuck with Abbott, Patrick and their ilk during a critical time in public education.  As the rest of the nation seems to be waking up to the negative impact of the so-called “reform” movement, Texas continues to not only embed that movement in law but to extend and expand.  So sad.  What’s good for business is not good for public education.  We are in the business of making every single kid successful.

 

Regardless, the Legislature is in session.  Hold on to your hats.  I predict we will continue to go down the wrong road even faster:  No brakes for kids, schools or educators.