Night of the Living Ed: The Complete Transcript
The following is the complete transcript of a roundtable discussion on public education hosted by TEXAS MONTHLY and published, in edited form, in the May 2011 issue.
Carol says: "Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch was once an early advocate of No Child Left Behind, school vouchers and charter schools. In 2005, she wrote, "We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act. ... All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents’ generation." But four years later, Ravitch changed her mind. "I came to the conclusion ... that No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education," she tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools — or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not — because I always knew children’s test scores are far more complicated than the way they’re being received today." "In the neighborhood where I live in Brooklyn, there was a school that was considered a bad public school and it enrolled many children from a local public housing project," she says. "But parents in the neighborhood who were middle-class parents and were educated people banded together and decided, ’Well, if we all send our child to the local public school, it will get better.’ And it did get better and it’s now one of the best schools in the city. So yes, you can change the neighborhood school. ... But school officials have a particular responsibility to make sure there’s a good school in every neighborhood. And handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them. It’s simply a way of avoiding the public responsibility to provide good education." Source: "NPR Interview with former Assistant of Education Diane Ravitch" www.npr.org/2011/04/28/135142895/ravitch-standardized-testing-undermines-teaching; accessed 29 April, 2011. (April 29th, 2011 at 12:44pm)
The participants in the conversation were David Anthony (the superintendent of Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, the third largest ISD in Texas); Bill Hammond (a former state representative and the president of the Texas Association of Business); Louis Malfaro (the secretary-treasurer of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest education union); Scott McCown (a former district judge and the executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities); Robert Scott (the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency); and Arlene Wohlgemuth (a former state representative and the director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation). The conversation was moderated by Jake Silverstein, editor of Texas Monthly, and Nate Blakeslee, a senior editor at the magazine.
Jake Silverstein: We all know that Texas is facing a severe budget shortfall, and we know that some of the plans put forward this session include pretty drastic cuts to education, anywhere from $4 billion to $10 billion. But I want to start by talking about how we got here. I know there are different ideas for how we got here. Scott, I want to start with you. Give us your take on how we got here. And I’ll start with a simple question. True or false: Are we here where we are today because of the tax swap in 2006?
Scott McCown: You moved from a big question to a little question.
Silverstein: You can feel free to move back.
McCown: I think we are where we are today because Texas has always been a low-tax state and yet it’s always been a state that believes in education, and those two commitments have been in collision for years. How do you have a strong public education system and give Texas children an economic opportunity and do that in the context of a low-tax state? And I think that’s been the struggle, and that struggle has in this session intensified because of the Great Recession, which is responsible for a portion of our shortfall. But it comes on top of the 2006 creation of a structural deficit, so it was a double whammy, and we’re trying to deal with that now. So I guess that’s the short answer.
Silverstein: Is that how other folks at the table see the narrative of how we got to where we are today?
David Anthony: Well, one of the analysts for Standard & Poor’s in Dallas has indicated that the biggest problem in Texas right now is the property tax buy-down in 2006—an inept business tax to buy-down that tax break of $14 billion—not the recession, even though the down economy certainly has an impact with what’s going on in the state. But those two combined—if you look at the failure of the business tax to generate $5 billion at the biennium, that’s a $10 billion hit right now, and that would look good if that $10 billion were in the Rainy Day Fund right now.
Robert Scott: The scope of the problem is far beyond even those two items. It’s not just that the tax swap of 2006 failed to deliver. It’s not just that the Legislature didn’t appropriate enough. It’s that you also have growth factors in the formulas and student growth at 70,000 to 80,000 students per year. So that’s contributing to the gap that we see right now; it’s not just the tax swap. You go back to the fundamental reason the Legislature was put in the position to do the tax swap. It was the litigation in West Orange Cove that said originally the lawsuit was brought about in terms of equity between districts, adequacy overall, and an unconstitutional statewide property tax. What the Supreme Court gave the legislature as a problem to solve was the unconstitutional statewide property tax, and they solved that problem. They compressed tax rates down to a dollar, and they solved that problem. The combination of the Great Recession and the lack of the business tax to generate what it anticipated plus enrollment growth and property values are what has contributed to the whole thing, so I think it’s more of a three-pronged issue than just about the tax swap or what the Legislature was able to generate with the business tax. You’ve got to look at the growth. So there are a whole bunch of different factors in there that are contributing to the gap right now.
Bill Hammond: It wasn’t the tax swap; it was the method for paying for the tax swap that created that problem. But you’re right: A two percent decrease in property value across the state is a huge factor in looking at this problem.
Scott: As a matter of fact, when the comptroller was able to revise that a couple of weeks ago, that put $300 million back on the table that the Legislature is able to use right now. So as the economy improves, that piece of the gap will improve. It’s whether or not we can address the business tax and enrollment growth. This will be the first session since Gilmer-Aikin that we haven’t funded enrollment growth. The question is whether we can live with that.
Anthony: But it’s the perpetual $5 billion or so structural deficit that goes on from biennium to biennium.
Hammond: $5 billion a year or $5 billion a biennium?
McCown: $5 billion a biennium.
Hammond: Well the problem is obviously a lot larger than just that amount of money that we’re dealing with this time. Depending on how you calculate it, the judge says its $27 billion, right, Judge?
McCown: Right, the shortfall.
Hammond: The shortfall established by the tax not producing as much money as the comptroller estimated it would is 20 percent of the problem. Everybody keeps talking about the structural deficit based on the franchise tax, which no one likes. I agree with that, but that’s like the commissioner just said: I mean, that’s a relatively small part of the problem; I mean, you’re creating a new Fort Worth ISD every year.
McCown: Its not 20 percent, I don’t think. I think it’s a full third. We’ve got a structural deficit that’s $10 billion; we’ve got a shortfall that’s $30 billion. So that would be a third.
Louis Malfaro: It’s a $5 billion annual shortfall.
McCown: That’s the cost of maintaining current services.
Arlene Wohlgemuth: That’s the cost of the LAR [Legislative Appropriation Request], and the Legislature has never funded all of that.
McCown: No. It’s not the cost of the LAR. It’s the cost of what the LAR says they need to maintain current services. It’s not the wish list beyond that.
Wohlgemuth: But even that has never been fully funded. Even in good years.
Scott: How do you analyze those LARs? I mean, I submitted an LAR with no exceptional items. I didn’t ask for anything extra, and so the only thing that could have been considered extra in my LAR is enrollment growth and property-value fluctuations. Is that where your analysis comes from, because that was my original projection as to what the formulas would drive? Well, the Legislature pushed the budget and said were going to put a school finance system that lives within our means. So when I did my restoration, I could only add $6 billion, because I didn’t know what that legislation would look like and that took $3.8 billion to $4 billion off the table.
McCown: Well, I think you’re supporting my point, because what I think I hear you saying is that your LAR doesn’t actually capture all the costs that would go into current services under current law. So that’s why we have always said that the shortfall is at least $27 billion. It’s actually more than that. But Arlene is right. The legislature from biennium to biennium has struggled and been unable to fund current services, which is why government’s been contracting and why public education has been contracting and doesn’t have the money that it needs. So that goes back to your point.
Malfaro: Going back to your broader point for a second, I think Scott raised an interesting issue, this tension in Texas between wanting to be a low-tax state and wanting to be a leader in education reform. So you look at the Quality Counts report that Education Week comes out with every year. Now, in “Standards” they give us an A because we have built an academic system with high expectations and a way to measure how kids are doing. On “Implementation” we get a C because we’re not reaching those standards. On “Funding” we get an F, benchmarked against other states around the country.
Scott: I think it was a D. I don’t think it was an F.
Malfaro: When I am done eating my salad I will get up and go check. But clearly the funding is where we are falling down. So a lot of us feel like, for the money that’s being spent, Texas is actually doing fairly well. The problem is we’re a laggard when it comes to real investment in education.
Hammond: I don’t agree with that for a minute. In the first place I don’t think there is any relationship between funding and academic performance. I don’t think anybody has ever shown that. I believe that if you look at funding over a ten-year time and you look at the growth in student population, inflation, and then the increase in low-income kids who are more expensive to educate, then you’re still $5 billion above all those factors for ten years from the state to the local school districts.
Wohlgemuth: Well, not only that but the personnel has increased a little over 70 percent, or at least it did from 1989 through 2009. And the enrollment only increased 44 percent. So we have some other problems in the local districts in addition to what’s happening at the state level.
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