Expert says education at risk if state's spending cuts enacted
Austin bureau
Feb. 23, 2011, 10:50PM
AUSTIN — For Texans to truly understand the state's grim future may require all 1,030 school superintendents to immediately cancel high school sports — including Friday night football, demographer Steve Murdock says.
Of course, doing so might get them all fired.
So, the lights still will shine on Texas high school football this fall. But the coming crisis will not go away, he said.
According to Murdock, unless state leaders address the current trend line, by 2040 three out of every 10 Texas workers will not have a high school diploma.
Education is the only remedy, he said, and the early budget plans would make the trend line much worse.
Public education stands to lose about $11.5 billion from current funding levels. The cuts likely would lead to larger class sizes and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs for teachers and education support staff. The budget proposals also would cut early childhood intervention, teen parenting eduction, reading, math and science initiatives, and programs to help students stay in school.
Pre-K, TEXAS grants
Murdock is particularly concerned about the two programs he says are most critical: high quality pre-kindergarten and TEXAS grants, which he considers the building blocks for elevating public education.
Both programs, however, face severe budget cuts.
The preliminary House budget plan would cut about $222 million out of Pre-K funding for the next two years affecting about 101,000 children currently in the full-day program. The TEXAS grant program faces a 41 percent budget cut, dropping the number of students who get college financial help from nearly 87,000 to 27,000.
"I am very concerned," said Murdock, a sociology professor at Rice University and the former state demographer who also served as U.S. Census Bureau director in the George W. Bush administration. "It's not like we have a lot of slack in the system where we can slip a little bit and still be OK."
Minority children now make up at least 66 percent of the state's 4.8 million public school enrollment, most from low-income families. In the last 10 years, the number of children from low-income families has increased by 893,055, surpassing overall enrollment growth during the same period.
Education is the single best predictor of income, Murdock says, and the combination of explosive Hispanic population growth and low academic achievement produces the sour forecast.
"We are lagging now and to fail to educate this population is a formula for long-term disaster for Texas," Murdock said. "The thing that is most important for us to recognize is that what we do today with these young people will determine the future for all of us."
Catching kids early
Proposed cuts to Pre-K funding disturb Spring Branch ISD school board member Susan Kellner. Spring Branch has had a model Pre-K program for years and a full-day program for 10 years.
Pre-K works, Kellner said, citing statistics showing that Spring Branch students perform 5 percent to 9.2 percent better on reading, math and writing tests if they attended Pre- K.
"If you catch them early, you catch any kind of learning disability, you catch any kind of family dynamic that you help them with, you catch speech problems, and you can remediate when their brains are so malleable," Kellner said. "You can change the way they learn. This is the way you get kids to college."
House Public Education Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said he cannot defend the proposed cuts in Pre-K and TEXAS grant funding.
"We have some serious, serious decisions to make," Eissler said. "If you predict the future based on today, it's not bright."
The consensus of Pre-K research is that Pre-K investment is the best place to spend education money because it delivers the greatest return, said Ed Fuller, an education researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.
Cutting education spending is like mortgaging the state's future, he said, and will take years to recover.
"Essentially," Fuller said, "we're going to end up with two groups of people: one who can afford to have their kids educated, and a much larger group of Texans who can't afford to have their kids educated."
In the long run, Texas will lose money as struggling students drop out, he said. They end up paying fewer taxes and needing more social services or end up incarcerated, he said.
I have been wondering lately if it would improve things any, or if it would save money to have each school more independent? Say your middle school totally independent from DISD. My thinking is there would not be so much administration and buildings and paperwork just supporting that middle school. ?? If instead you had a superintendent and principal for that school that had to answer to the families in that neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteOf course I think the best answer is vouchers and school choice. Take the money we are spending on each student and let them pick the school they want to go to(even private religious schools if they want, GASP!)
I do think that larger districts like Dallas need to be broken down into much smaller districts. I noticed a huge difference when I was in smaller districts like Irving and Garland...administratively, things were much smoother and it seemed like resources were distributed much more evenly. Dallas is a mess. It's just too big. I think that's the idea behind charter schools is to be more autonomous, which is successful in some scenarios and not so successful in others. There are mixed reviews on the success of charter schools, but I have seen some very effective ones, so I tend to think you're right in that the smaller the system the better.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I personally have big concerns about the school choice and vouchers approach. First of all, we have so many unacceptable schools that there aren't enough seats in successful private schools to accommodate all the vouchers that could potentially be distributed. In addition, many private schools cost much more than the voucher would allow for, so what would parents do in that situation if they can't afford the additional tuition? They might end up having to remain in a deteriorating public school with less resources than before. Also, because private schools have the freedom to be discriminatory in their selection process, they could reject students based on disciplinary problems, low achievement, or any host of reasons, thus deliberately segregating schools and making Brown vs. Board, which guarantees all children an equal, non-segregated education, obsolete. Public schools would become a dumping ground for the kids no one else wants. And while in our Christian perspective we might support the idea of private religious schools, we have to understand that some private schools might have a very different agenda with extremist views, racist views, etc. and would we want public money to support those kinds of agendas? Also, I'm just a believer in public school and that all children should be able to attend a decent school in their neighborhood, regardless of academic ability or ability to pay a fee. I think public school is one of the things that ensures that a democracy can thrive and to me, the voucher system undermines public schools.
I think most of your concerns with private schools could be overcome pretty easily. Anti-discrimination legislation for example. Not allowing vouchers to go to religious schools if that would make people happier. It would force private schools to compete to have the best education at the lowest cost. As it is now there is NO competition to have the best school because they know every year they will have a new crop of students no matter how badly they perform.
ReplyDeleteFor example if I start private school Embry Education Inc.: We don't discriminate on acceptance other than no criminals allowed. We have the best teachers that can also be fired for under achievement. Our students have the highest testing scores. We don't teach any religious messages. We charge exactly what the state will pay for educating one student for one year. Oh, BTW if you are falling behind in your studies you will not get summer vacation until you get caught up.
If competition is wrong, and won't help, why do colleges try so hard to be the best?