Milking the Sacred Cows

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2011



Despite the rhetoric of our state leadership regarding how well Texas came through the Great Recession, the bottom line is we are hurting. It becomes increasingly clear to me that the agenda of the current regime is not pro public education. We are expensive, and a great deal of the money spent is to help poor kids learn. We have now seen both the House and Senate versions of an appropriations bill and panic ensued. Guess I can't remain quiet on such a topic for long.

Texas is almost wholly dependent upon sales tax for a revenue source. Public school districts are very dependent upon local property tax for a revenue source, but not nearly so much as they used to be. Frankly, our Legislature has consistently taken the easiest possible way out when it comes to opportunities to ensure an equitable revenue stream to public education. Or, as some call it, government schools.

Yes, we are the government, so every time you hear someone say they want to shrink government and reduce revenues, please know what they are saying is they want to reduce funding for public education, the insurance and health care for poor folks, and a host of the human services that are designed to improve the quality of life for our most needy. The people who resent this the most are those who have the most and want more. Go figure.

At any rate, when the Legislative plan to fund public schools was declared unconstitutional in November of 2005, our leadership could not figure out how to get out of the bind created by simultaneously equitably funding public schools, lowering taxes, and fulfilling the constitutional requirement to allow flexibility on the part of local boards to set a tax rate. So, they punted:

They required local districts to lower their tax rates on property from $1.50 to $1.00. Yeah Legislators!, (she says tongue in cheek.) They promised to make up the loss in local revenues with state dollars. Clearly, they would need more state dollars, but they really didn't design a system to generate those dollars. They passed a Margins Tax that was designed to bring in sales tax dollars from businesses that had never paid sales tax before, but then they set about exempting most of those businesses in the next session. They were approaching crisis in 2009, but the Obama administration bailed them out with stimulus dollars that they spent on local schools via the state formula, rather than funding local schools by sending the money on to local districts as the feds planned. (I am sure you have heard lots of praise by our state leadership for the Obama administration and the stimulus funding since they saved Texas Public Schools and bailed us out of a crisis, she says again tongue in cheek. Both my tongue and my cheek are getting sore.)

Now the stimulus dollars are gone. The T Party has arrived, and we are going to reduce government, balance the budget, and absolutely not increase state revenue. OK, we are in the hole about $26 billion, and it looked like, from the preliminary budgets, that public ed. was taking a big hit. Superintendents state-wide began to calculate what the worst case scenario might be, and began announcing cuts in staff. Now the Legislature, getting a glimpse of the huge economic impact of thousands of teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians, custodians, even administrators, is back-peddling. In many districts, however, the damage is done.

If I were teaching poor third graders and just learned that I will likely not have a job next year, then I become increasingly preoccupied with my own state of affairs, and much less concerned about how my kids, my school, my district will perform on the standardized test that is coming. I absolutely oppose incentives because they do not work for teachers. I do recognize, however, that the antithesis of pay incentives does work: if you tell me I do not have a job next year than to hell with my performance this year.

Perhaps the most amazing discussion these past few weeks has been the adamant position from our leadership that we must not only maintain the state accountability system, we must increase the rigor, a.k.a., introduce a new standardized testing system. They propose to do this when they cannot generate enough money to maintain the current system. If there was ever a clear indicator that the state's current leadership resents and restricts public education, then this is it.

If the state wants more from public schools, then they should fund it more. If they cannot come up with the dollars to fund what we currently have, then asking fewer people with less money to do more for the children of Texas is so ludicrous I am tempted to stand on the curb and scream, "The Emperor is Naked!"

Despite the crisis at the state level, public school people remain so good-hearted, so dedicated, so mission-driven that even if the worst case scenario plays out, school systems will function. Buses will run, bells will ring, kids will show up in classes taught by teachers and life will go on. We will not have Wisconsinesque demonstrations or Cairoesque calls for new leadership. We will serve. We will work harder. We will be successful. And, in some ways, that really ticks me off.

So, here is what I propose we do immediately to solve the funding issues in Texas:

1. Place a two-year moratorium on all state accountability. If we can't afford teachers in every classroom then we surely cannot afford to increase the demanded outcomes of the surviving teachers. Stop the new STAAR test, do not buy textbooks, do not continue the current TAKS test, and file a waiver with the feds to suspend the PBMAS system. This move will free up the opportunity to reduce administrators instead of teachers because it is the administrators who are employed to make sure the accountability system is implemented.

2. Relieve schools of all the requirements to fix society: Drop the nutritional standards in the lunchroom so schools can prepare meals that taste better and cost less. Drop the requirement to administer a fitness gram every year to measure body mass and physical fitness. Drop the requirement to screen every child for dental, eyesight, hearing, spine, etc., so that schools can staff clinics to attend to the sick and injured rather than perform functions best left to parents. Drop the requirement to provide school counselors and librarians. Principals do most the counseling and a paraprofessional can handle the scheduling and testing. A district could give every kid a Kindle and be economically ahead in two years.

3. Eliminate the 22 to 1 student to teacher ratio requirement. Period. If schools continue to be held accountable they can figure out ways to staff to ensure student success. One teacher can teach a class of 60 kids if there are two aides to help, etc.

4. Eliminate the mandated teacher/counselor/nurse salary schedule. Merit pay doesn't work, but if a school system really could get by with one math teacher who taught 150 kids with paraprofessional support, then pay that teacher $60,000 and let the others go.

5. Eliminate the requirement to provide alternative education for misbehaving students. If kids cannot behave, lets put them at home and charge the parents with the responsibility to manage them.

6. And, finally, generate more revenue for the state by passing either a state-wide property tax or a state income tax. The former would ensure more money equitably distributed and eliminate all the problems associated with rich vs. poor districts; and the latter would not only generate more money to spend in Texas by Texans, but would reduce the amount Texans pay in federal income tax via the deduction that citizens in most states take advantage of on their federal forms. Besides, last time I checked, I pay all my taxes from my income.

If the current leadership is serious about balancing the budget and takes their constitutional responsibility to provide free, equitable, public education to kids in Texas, the above must be considered.

Let the sacred cows begin to moo.

POSTED BY EILEEN GOOD AT 11:45 AM

LABELS: PUBLIC SCHOOLS

1 COMMENTS:



Anonymous said...

Eileen, I was right there with you until you said to drop librarians. We do so much more than check out books, which a para can do with ease. My colleague, Joyce Valenza, says it with much more eloquence than I can: "My kids do well on their bubble tests. But I am also here to ensure that our kids become information and media literate citizens. I am here to ensure they become transliterate.

Our library is not a sacred cow. It is a growing, vibrant, central element of my school’s learning culture. but we are vital to the learning in schools." http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/neverendingsearch/2010/11/27/what-librarians-make-a-response-to-dr-bernstein-and-an-homage-to-taylor-mali/