Education - The Effort To Keep Texas At The Bottom

The Republicans in our state leadership and on the State Board of Education won't admit it, but education is a mess in the state of Texas. According to the Houston Chronicle, "Of the 50 states, we're no. 49 in the percentage of adults who've completed high school; and it's estimated that a third of our Texas high school freshmen don't make it to graduation." With numbers that bad one would think the state leaders would be eager to take drastic measures to save the Texas educational system. But they aren't.

It's not that Texas doesn't have any good schools. There are some excellent schools, but they exist mainly in the richer areas (the areas where the Republican leaders and their friends send their kids to school). Schools in poor and working class areas are the ones that are sadly lacking. These are also the schools that are being ignored by our Republican leadership. One of their favorite sayings is that "more money doesn't mean a better education" and so they continue to underfund these schools (while making sure the schools their children attend have all the dollars they need).

The federal government has offered to help. They tried to give Texas $700 million dollars for education last year, but our Republican governor turned the money down. He turned it down because Texas would have had to meet national education standards. He has already said he will turn down a similar amount from the federal government again this year.

If they accepted this money, they could no longer teach the right-wing fundamentalist propaganda in Texas schools such as creationist ideas in science classes and a rewriting of history that includes such things as a glorification of the Confederacy, a rehabilitation of the scandalous behavior of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, elimination of Thomas Jefferson as a prominent figure in the Enlightenment (and elimination of the Enlightenment also), and the denigration of important American writers like Upton Sinclair.

The State Board of Education has decided to propagandize Texas students rather than teach them to be critical thinkers, and Republican leaders like Rick Perry have decided that appealing to their political base of fundamentalist right-wingers is more important than properly funding all Texas schools. Together their endeavors will assure that as a whole the Texas educational system lags far behind that of the other states.

Oddly enough, it seems that the current recession will save Texas students from at least some of this Republican chicanery. Poor and working class schools will remain underfunded, but it looks like the new efforts at propaganda may be at least partly thwarted. Texas is currently facing a deficit in the next biennium of between $15 and $18 billion dollars.

This means that Texas will most likely be unable to afford new social science textbooks with the new right-wing propaganda in them. They may have to make do with the current history books that teach a more realistic view of history. They also may not be able to afford the creationist pamphlet detailing the "failings" of evolution that was meant to be issued with science textbooks.

There is no hope of Texas education being improved under the current Republican leadership, but it looks like the recession may prevent it from getting a whole lot worse. Who could have known that the recession would have a small silver lining (at least for school students)?