Texas School Business: Cover Story

Ask conservative Republicans what they thought, and most likely you’ll hear that the state did well because it balanced the budget without raising taxes or dipping into the state’s $9.1 billion rainy day fund. That rainy day money needs to be saved, they say, to help make good on a promised property tax cut in 2011.

Ask progressive Democrats what they thought, and you’ll probably hear what a shame it was that the state didn’t expand pre-kindergarten education to all day — and fund it. Even the proposal that passed — whittled down in committee to $25 million and just enough for an all-day pre-K pilot project — was vetoed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry.

State Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, said the vetoed bill to improve pre-kindergarten and early childhood education “was a very conservative investment that would have been a tremendous benefit to help get kids ready to learn and contribute to the economy.”

United Way’s state leader, Karen R. Johnson, had written in a newspaper column before the veto that a study at the Bush School for Government and Public Service at Perry’s alma mater, Texas A&M University, found that each dollar spent on high-quality pre-kindergarten brings $3.50 back to communities.

“Savings for taxpayers are realized long-term because children who experience high-quality pre-K have higher rates of high school graduation, higher earning power as adults, fewer referrals to special education, and significantly less involvement with the criminal justice system,” Johnson wrote.

Stimulus money for teacher pay hike
Ask superintendents around the state what they thought about the Legislature’s success — or lack of it — in meeting school needs, and you’re liable to get a stern stare, or worse.

The good news was that legislators authorized giving teachers, school librarians, speech pathologists and counselors a raise of at least $800 a year.

The bad news, a number of superintendents say, is that the budgeteers required that the pay hikes come from federal stimulus funds, rather than from income from appreciating property tax values.

Earlier this summer, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, warning him that millions of dollars may be withheld from states that use stimulus money to avoid spending state money or raising taxes. Duncan warned Rendell that his state could hurt its chances to receive extra stimulus money if it planned to use it to “backfill budget holes” while protecting state dollars, according to the Associated Press. Pennsylvania — like Texas — has a rainy day surplus that hasn’t been touched, which was part of Duncan’s concern.

Perry sent word that he was confident Texas’ application for $4 billion in stimulus funds — $3.25 billion of it for public schools — would get federal approval. But he waited until July 1 — the last possible day — to submit the application. Texas was the last state to apply. Well more than half the states already had their applications for spending stimulus funds approved by the time Texas even asked for the money.

“It’s very frustrating,” Lou Spiegel, Mansfield ISD associate superintendent for business, told the San Antonio Express-News. “Our employees would like to know … what’s going to happen with the raise. Well, we can’t tell them what’s going to happen with the raise.”

Some nervous school officials are making two budgets. One assumes the stimulus dollars will be approved for the salary boost, and the “what if” budget tries to account for how the raises would be funded if the stimulus money isn’t approved.

The federal money would boost the state’s education spending by about 2 percent, with half of that earmarked for pay raises. Perry also asked the federal government for $338 million for higher education and $400 million for education services.

On July 8, TEA spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said that federal officials likely would make a decision on Texas’ stimulus package within two weeks. (Editor’s note: The July/August issue of Texas School Business went to press before an announcement was made.)

Of charter schools, taxes and standards
The Legislature resisted an effort to pass a bill overhauling charter schools. It would have lifted the cap on the number of charter schools in Texas and given the state education commissioner more ways to hold charter schools accountable for sub-par performance. Both were key goals of the Obama administration.

And while school districts in many parts of Texas are tightening their belts and cutting extracurricular activities, the Legislature failed to pass legislation that would have allowed districts to raise their tax rates by more than four cents without putting the proposed tax hike before voters.

The Legislature did pass House Bill 3, spurring Texas to start including college readiness as an element in the accountability system.

“There are new standards of requirements incorporated in the various foundation subjects in an effort to get students better prepared for college,” says Ratcliffe, noting that foundation subjects include math, English, science and social studies/economics.

The bill allows for more flexibility in course choice, but students still must have four credits in each of the four foundation subjects to graduate in the Recommended High School Program or the Distinguished Achievement Program.

Students also can graduate under the Minimum High School Program if they get written permission from a parent or legal guardian and either a school counselor or school administrator. Under the new law, students must meet one of the following: be at least 16, have completed two credits in each of the four foundation subjects or must have failed promotion to the 10th grade at least once. The new stipulations are intended to deter students from following the minimum program.

When it comes to electives in the recommended program, the bill increases the required number of credits to six. Also required are one credit of physical education, two credits of a language other than English and one fine arts credit. The distinguished program now requires five elective credits, plus one credit of physical education, three foreign language credits and one fine arts credit.

By increasing electives, students are given more opportunity to tailor their academic careers to their liking, which hopefully will lead to pursuing those interests in college or post-secondary training programs.

“If a kid chooses a course, he or she is more likely to be interested in it and probably will do better in it,” stated House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, in The Dallas Morning News. “That was one of the goals of the legislation: to make our course requirements a little more market-friendly for students.”

Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott sent a letter in July to school superintendents, advising them that the new graduation requirements would apply immediately to all high school students, not just incoming freshmen. The one exception being the 2009-2010 seniors, who have been following the previous standards requiring three years of math and science. School districts also have the authority to add additional requirements for graduation, Scott wrote.

End-of-course exams will be used to ensure student learning in the four foundation subject areas. The education committee chairs and others felt that having students tested immediately after taking a course was preferable to having an end-of-school, all-inclusive test, which often included subjects taken two or three years earlier. End-of-year exams won’t be required until the class that begins high school in 2011-2012.

For fifth and eighth graders, state barriers to social promotion to the next grade level will remain, based on the students’ scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test. However, legislators relaxed the consequences for students in the third grade who perform poorly on the test. Extra consideration will be taken into account for promotion to the fourth grade, and failing the TAKS reading test will no longer block promotion to the next grade.

Digital learning tools and the state board
The Legislature passed House Bill 4294, which allows public schools to use their state textbook funds for a much wider range of instructional materials and tools to meet their students’ needs. Approved materials include computers and digital books, which often supplant textbooks that are out of date by the time they reach classrooms.

Moreover, efforts to lessen the controversial State Board of Education’s role in textbook approval for electronic materials failed. Perry, in signing the bill, also issued an executive order that the education commissioner and agency “shall adopt rules necessary to ensure the State Board of Education is an integral part of the digital content review process” to make sure it meets the TEKS requirements set out by the state board.

Children’s Health Insurance Program
Although it may be considered somewhat afield from education, the Legislature’s inaction on expanding eligibility to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will affect 84,000 schoolchildren who would have been covered under the new measure. The legislation would have expanded eligibility from 200 percent to 300 percent of the federal rate of poverty for a family of four.

On July 3, the day after the two-day special legislative session concluded, five Democratic lawmakers, led by state Rep. Garnet Coleman of Houston and Sen. Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio, told reporters that they are calling on federal lawmakers to pick up the ball state legislators dropped on expanding CHIP.

Public schools are expected to continue to be a hot topic with the Texas Legislature. Already, it’s being touted as the main priority for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Schieffer of Fort Worth, a former legislator and ambassador to Australia and Japan.

He says in his many travels abroad he has witnessed impressive progress among nations, and it’s largely attributed to the way those nations are educating their youth. Schieffer says he and other concerned citizens “worry that the children starting to school next year in Texas won’t be able to compete in 20 or 30 years with the kids starting to school in China and India and South Korea.”

DAVE McNEELY writes a weekly column on Texas politics and government for several Texas newspapers.