The Texas Speaker of the House, Tom Craddick, is blaming the states' school superintendents for the failure of the Legislature to find more money for Texas schools.
Of course, the Republicans had no intention of giving the schools more money; they were much more interested in giving tax breaks to 10% of the population while sticking it to the other 90%. Between the rich and the poor, who do you think was going to get the big tax breaks?
The full story is here.
It amazes me that he is griping about superintendents while he and his buddies basically tried to rape Texas public schools. Among the many "reforms" they tried to pass were:
- no education experience needed to become a principal, only management experience (they will need scores of new principals as NCLB sanctions boot the professionals out the door in the coming years).
-NEXT year's accountability standards determine if you are successful for this year. In other words, your school would have been accountable to next year's standards for this year's scores. Principals whose schools did perfectly well on this year's test could have been removed anyway b/c of next year's standards.
- after two years of adequate (by state standards, but actually one) performance a private management company could be brought in to take over a school, if the school failed to meet federal AYP goals (100% by 2014). Guess who the people who own these management companies are friends with? I'll give you a hint; not the Democrats.
- a "raise" for teachers that would have actually amounted to only $500 a year, after the restoration of the $1000 insurance stipend (which was supposed to be restored this year anyway).
I'm proud to say my super was one of the people who led the fight against the Republican proposals.
I guess all of us teachers were supposed to just shut up and teach.
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3 comments:
But hey, they managed to pass the telecom bill SBC wanted...
Maybe all that talk about ed funding was just a smokescreen?
I don't think it was a smokescreen, I think they really and truly wanted to destroy public education while making some of their buddies rich. The problem was they couldn't stick enough of a tax increase on most Texans to pay for the tax breaks for their buddies. "Reforming" was never in their intentions, destroying was.
They mistakingly thought business would happily shoulder some tax increases and when they found out they wouldn't the whole thing fell apart on them. If they really cared about the schools they would have let the Hochberg Amendment become law.
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