Long time, no blog. Austin is still beckoning for most of my time. But more sadly, it’s the recent passing of two authors that I’ve greatly admired since stumbling onto some of their signature work that serves as a cause to drop a note here.
I’ve only made my way through Dallas Willard’s “The Divine Conspiracy” once. And for a brief number of years, I made it a habit of reading through Brennan Manning’s “Ragamuffin Gospel” around Christmas time. As much as I’ve made it a tendency to talk myself out of spending money after deciding to browse through a bookstore, each of these authors have proven to be two that I’m happy to drop that habit for.
Session ends on the 27th. I’m sure that there’s some reading in store for me.
Many of us in the church have been impacted by Dallas through his teachings and writings that are often categorized as being about ‘spiritual formation,’ although his real preoccupation and concern was focused on the ‘kingdom of God’, or what he would often speak about as the ‘with-God life.’ He said the four great questions humans must answer are: What is reality? What is the good life? Who is a good person? And How do you became a good person? His concern was to answer those questions, and live the answers, and he was simply convinced that no one has ever answered them as well as Jesus.
These ‘spiritual’ writings of Dallas almost never used a technical vocabulary, but they had a density to them that makes them slow-going for most of us. I think the main reason for this is that any given word Dallas uses is a compressed summary of the history of human thought which he has digested and distilled. Words which are vague for most of us were precisely calibrated by him.
Brennan told us that we spoke of grace, but we didn’t really believe in it; we spoke of forgiveness, but we didn’t really believe in it; we spoke of love, but we didn’t really believe in it. The failure of individual Christians to embrace the radical love of God, the failure of the Church to embody that love, broke his heart, over and over again. God loves us as we are, not as we should be, Brennan taught. Because of that, he wrote, “Any church that will not accept that it consists of sinful men and women, and exists for them, implicitly rejects the gospel of grace.”
Brennan knew about grace first-hand, and he showed us that grace by telling his own story of his life as a Roman Catholic priest who left the priesthood to marry, of his struggles with alcohol and his first-hand knowledge of suffering, sin, and redemption.
Unlike every other debate that has unfolded recently in a bitterly divided Washington, the gun debate is much more about geography than party. The dividing lines are not between Democrats and Republicans, but between rural lawmakers and those who must cater to urban and suburban constituencies.
This explains why Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the gun-control group financed by New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), has been airing television ads in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Las Vegas and such Ohio metropolitan areas as Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, sensing opportunities to sway Republican senators.
The rural-suburban divide was evident in the role played in recent weeks by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a gun-rights backer. Democrats looking for a Republican partner to broker a bipartisan deal on background checks first turned to Coburn, a staunch conservative with a penchant to reach for compromise. Coburn spent weeks negotiating with Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), but the talks stalled as the Oklahoman faced intense lobbying pressure from gun advocates in his heavily rural state.
Democrats then turned to Toomey, whose political survival depends largely on winning over suburban voters in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas.
The geographic divisions are playing out among Democrats, as well. Two of the Senate votes on Thursday against proceeding with debate on the gun-control legislation came from Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Democrats whose home states remain largely rural.
In the end, the compromise plan on background checks drafted by Toomey, Manchin and Schumer fits the centrist nature of the suburbs, where polls show voters to be mixed on gun-control issues.
Finley and his fellow officers started noticing the gangs on sites like YouTube, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook about five years ago, he said. Social media have given them the ability to communicate swiftly and boldly and recruit members across geographic boundaries, making turf all but meaningless.
The officers are now so used to watching gangs do business online that they have created their own fake social media profiles to go undercover.
To make this point, Finley pointed to another Anne Arundel cop, white and middle-aged. “See this guy right here?” the detective asked. “On Twitter, he’s an 18-year-old African American Bloods female.”
A bit of context here from a book I’ve been trudging through recently. It’s not 100% tied into the recent debate here in Texas about whether Algebra II is vitally necessary for producing college/career-ready graduates. Plus, while much of the author’s writing is informed by research, it reads more like a Tom Friedman column full of opinion and hypotheses. But it still manages to add a bit of context to the debate and captures much of my own sentiment on the topic …
Many business leaders today – Bill Gates among them – claim that our high school graduates lack adequate preparation in science and math; others say that for the United States to remain globally competitive, we need to produce more engineers and scientists. As a result, beginning next year, the NCLB law adds science to the list of subjects that must be tested in elementary, middle, and high school. In addition, in August 2007, Congress passed new “competitiveness” legislation, which establishes federal grants to improve teacher recruitment and training in science and math. Yet employers across a wide range of businesses, including high-tech companies, appear to place comparatively little value on content knowledge in either math or science as a prerequisite for work today.
Clay Parker and others talked about the relative importance of technical knowledge versus critical thinking and people skills in the first chapter. In the major study of 400 employers’ expectations for new employees who are high school grads, two-year college grads, and four-year college grads that I cited in that chapter, knowledge of mathematics did no even make the top-ten list of the skills employers deemed most important for any of these groups. Indeed, it ranked only 14th or 15th on the list of the most essential knowledge and skills needed for success – just ahead of science and foreign language comprehension. What the report referred to as “applied skills” dominated the top-ten list of the most important skills for all three groups of students, a list quite similar to the Seven Survival Skills: “professionalism and work ethic, oral and written communication, critical thinking and problem-solving, teamwork and leadership, reading comprehension, and ethics and social responsibility.” All of these came ahead of knowledge of both science and math in the survey ranking.
Here’s a possible explanation for this finding: While all employers need workers who can solve problems, they do not find that students who have taken the usual math and science courses and passed the tests can apply this content to solving real problems. Yet we continue to teach the same tired content in the same old ways because it is supposed to be developing students’ “problem-solving skills.”
So-called advanced math is perhaps the clearest example of the mismatch between what is taught and tested in high schools versus what’s needed for college and in life. It turns out that knowledge of algebra is required to pass state tests, as you saw, because it is a near-universal requirement for college admissions. But why is that? If you are not a math major, you usually do not have to take any advanced math in college, and most of what you need for other courses is knowledge of statistics, probability, and basic computational skills. This is even more evident after college. Graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were recently surveyed regarding the math that this very technically trained group used most frequently in their work. The assumption was that if any adults used higher-level math, it would be MIT grads. And while a few did, the overwhelming majority reported using nothing more than arithmetic, statistics, and probability.
No one whom I’ve interviewed has been able to explain to me why advanced math is a college admissions requirement whereas probability and statistics are not. The implication seems to be that advanced math trains us to become better problem solvers. Back when I was in high school, I was told that Latin should be studied because it trained the mid, too! But was is the evidence to support either claim? Some educators point to studies showing that students who take advanced math in high school do better in college. But this conclusion actually ignores one of the essential laws of statistics: the importance of distinguishing between results taht show cause and effect versus a mere association. There is absolutely no evidence that knowledge of calculus causes greater success in college; there is only an association. I’m willing to wager that if we required four years’ study of the Greek language, we could show it had at least as high an association or correlation with success in college. Taking any academically challenging course in high school will show an association with success in college.
For Democrats, the reflexive resistance to entitlement reform is questionable not only economically but also politically. By prioritizing entitlements over discretionary spending, they are favoring the predominantly white senior population, which cast about three-fifths of its votes for Republicans in last year’s presidential and congressional elections, over the diverse millennial generation, which voted about three-fifths Democratic on both fronts. “Obama is ahead of his party on the future of the coalition,” Rosenberg says. The president’s budget could threaten congressional Democrats in the 2014 election if Republicans, obscuring their own Medicare and Medicaid plans, rally seniors against his entitlement proposals, as some GOP House leaders have already signaled. But Obama’s positioning could help Democrats deepen their grip on millennials, who will approach one-third of eligible voters by 2016.
The problem for Republicans is simple: They built relatively durable, ideological coalitions immediately before a new generation of socially moderate and diverse voters completely upended the electoral calculus. In 2012, voters over age 30 went for Romney by 1.5 points—a result that shouldn’t surprise observers of the Bush elections. But the persistent and narrow GOP lean of the 2000 and 2004 electorates was overwhelmed by Obama’s 24-point victory among 18-to-29-year-olds. Democratic success with young voters is a product of demographics, not just Obama’s fleeting appeal or Bush’s legacy. Just 58 percent of 18-to-29-year-old voters were white in 2012 and 19 percent said they have no religious affiliation; in comparison, 76 percent of voters over 30 were white and only 10 percent were non-religious.
The ascent of millennial voters has turned the Bush coalition into a coffin—and the coffin could be sealed in 2016. It was frequently observed that a Romney victory would have required a historic performance among white voters, provided that Obama could match his ’08 performance among non-white voters. Bush’s 2004 performance among white voters wouldn’t get it done anymore. In 2016, the math gets even more challenging. If the white share of the electorate declines further, Republicans won’t just need to match their best performance of the last 24 years among white voters, they’ll also need to match their best performance of the last 24 years among non-white voters. If they can’t make the requisite 16-point gain among non-white voters—a tall order, to say the least—then the next Republican candidate will enter truly uncharted territory, potentially needing to win up to 64 percent of the white vote just to break 50 percent of the popular vote.
Ezra Klein also takes a riff off of Brownstein’s column. And, for what it’s worth, I consider it an interesting thought experiment to square the column posted here with Brownstein’s earlier column on how Rick Perry’s resistance to Medicaid expansion might nudge Texas toward a bluer future.
Three demographic signposts that I wouldn’t want a hectic schedule to keep me from slapping on the blog. As luck would have it, they all come from the same news outlet.
A new book, “The Global Pigeon,” by Colin Jerolmack, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who spent three years hanging out with pigeon fliers, makes the point that pigeon breeding brought Italian-Americans and other ethnic whites “into contact with people of a different ethnic and age cohort with whom they were not voluntarily associating before.”
“African-Americans in Bed-Stuy who mostly hang out with other African-Americans, because they keep pigeons wind up being friends with these 85-year-old white guys they would not usually associate with,” Dr. Jerolmack said in an interview.
It’s no surprise to the average New York parent that so-called cram schools, once the cultural domain of Chinese-, Korean- and Russian-American students, have gained traction with non-Asian parents hoping to grab slots in competitive gifted programs and coveted middle and high schools by improving their children’s test scores.
But whereas five years ago owners of cram schools were surprised to encounter non-Asian students in their waiting rooms, now they are muscling one another for their business, handing out book bags with the names of their schools scrawled across the front, attending summer camp fairs in synagogues and school cafeterias, hiring receptionists who speak English, and aggressively pitting themselves against the Japanese cram school behemoth, Kumon, which dominates the local market.
Some are even changing their names. Horizon, a well-reputed cram school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, known among Chinese-American families for funneling students into Stuyvesant High School and NEST+m, was recently rechristened Gifted Kids New York City. “It’s a little more appealing to Caucasian parents,” said the owner, Andrew Chan, who tells prospective parents from Park Slope and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that he is offering “Chinese rigor” with Western-style teaching methods.
All across Mexico’s ruddy central plains, most of the people who could go north already have. In a region long regarded as a bellwether of illegal immigration — where the flow of migrants has often seemed never-ending — the streets are wind-whipped and silent. Homes await returning families, while dozens of schools have closed because of a lack of students. Here in El Cargadero, a once-thriving farm community of 3,000, only a few hundred people remain, at most.
“It’s not like it used to be,” said Fermin Saldivar Ureño, 45, an avocado farmer whose 13 brothers and sisters are all in California. “I have three kids, my parents had 14. There just aren’t as many people to go.”
Sad news for the day, but we knew the day was coming. It would probably be enough for me to look at Pardee’s track record at my alma mater and be proud enough to claim the Aggie as a sports hero. There were a number of great players developed by Pardee on the field around the time I went to school there. And while the team fared poorly after he left for the Oilers, there was still some great talent that he brought in. All good and well.
But what I remember most about Pardee’s time was the aftermath of the Jeff Alm suicide in 1993. By every account, that was a moment when Pardee’s character was needed most and by all the recollections that I have of the era, the players spoke highly of his handling at the time. That it came in the midst of a season with David Williams’ “Babygate” episode and the Ryan v Gilbride sideline boxing match during the same season should have been enough to phase most teams. But it’s hard to image many things that would phase Pardee. Texas lost a good one this week.
I can’t say I’m crazy about the fit, but it’s a gig and as good of an opportunity that I think Kolb can find these days. I’m not sure what kind of offense Chan Gailey runs up north, but I’ve always seen Kolb as a good fit for anything that favors a high-percentage passing office (Philly’s West Coast style was as good as the NFL offers). Injuries, of course, are perhaps a bigger issue with Kolb. Proving he can go through a majority of the season as the designated starter would be a very welcome first.
But in any event, I’ll be watching Bills games with more interest than I have since Jim Kelly left the USFL.
You can watch the full interview here. It was mostly tame and civil until Ross Ramsay sought out a friendly GOP questioner who inquired about the voucer legislation carried by the two Republicans on the panel.
Notice the reaction when Gene asks Scott Turner whether he’d accept an amendment that stipulated that a private school accept any student with a “scholarship” and that they not charge tuition above and beyond the value of same? Yeah. So how many poor parents do you know of who can make up the difference between a $5k “scholarship” and a $12k tuition bill each year? Maybe things are different in Frisco and New Braunfels. But it doesn’t mesh with anything in Houston.
Furthermore, I had no idea the schools in Frisco, Texas were so bad that Scott Turner had to put his nephew in a private, Christian school. Actually, the very law that Scott Turner is carrying would not apply to his nephew, since it turns out that Frisco High is doing better than his bill would allow before a “scholarship” is awarded. Of course, this bill isn’t really about kinds in Frisco … it’s about the imagined scenarios in other locations.
Of course, reality is much harder to deal with. The choice that has been made by an overwhelming number of parents is that they want a quality school for their kid in their neighborhood. It’s more than a little baffling why that choice isn’t respected by the likes of Turner and Campbell. Houston ISD attempts to close schools with some regularity (see here for a recent example). What they find out is that, for whatever problems the school may have, parents seem to prefer that the problem be fixed, not given up on. That choice, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to register with a certain wing of today’s GOP.
At the end of the day, we’re tasked with educating everyone. If some want to focus on how the cream of the crop are educated, that’s their prerogative. But it doesn’t do enough to address what’s in the state constitution, what’s just good public policy, and what makes common sense. There are plenty of third world countries that only concern themselves with the education of the wealthiest. I’d just as soon not see Texas fall to that level.
One topic I’ve been negligent to dive deep into has been Jeremy Bird’s Battleground Texas. Not for lack of interest, mind you. But one topic I wanted to crunch some numbers on before the first dive is what impact apartment voters might have on Harris County … and possibly beyond.
Since starting to look at election math and demographics in the earlier years of this blog, the high percentage of apartment-based population in Harris County has always stood out to me. Also to blame is that I live in an area that has 80% of it’s population in apartments. In my initial, albeit modest, efforts to learn more about my State Representative district, I discovered that it was only a recent situation whereby the 137th had crossed the 50% mark in terms of the share of voters from apartments. And that was an area where Dems had a nominee who worked diligently at voter registration and turnout in apartments.
There have been two elections since then that have taught me a bit more about the importance – and unfortunately, the under-utilization – of apartment voters. One was Michael Skelly’s 2008 Congressional campaign. There were obviously two clusters of apartments where there were numbers to move the needle: north of Westheimer and the FM1960/Jersey Village area. The numbers demonstrated at least a little life as each of the precincts identified ended up swinging blue in November 2008. Granted, it’s obvious that more of that had to do with Obama than anything else and I have no idea how many (or even if any) votes were left on the table.
The final example of the 2012 election in HD137 offers a bit more insight, since it involved more than just the initial research. If nothing else, it’s clear to me that there is a great deal of work that I just don’t see a lot of effort being put into. And with all due apologies for vagueness, I’ll leave the specifics of what that work entails for the appropriate parties offline. For now, I think there are some numbers that bear this lesson out.
First off, I wanted to see what counties have the kind of apartment situation that Harris County has. I didn’t expect to see a great deal of replication elsewhere. But the similarities in the larger counties (highlighted) is encouraging:
And for those wondering why Travis County didn’t get a highlight as a big county, I’ll offer the rationalization that it’s a college town. A great deal of the apartment situation is driven by student population. That doesn’t mean Travis doesn’t deserve the same registration/turnout effort that a Dallas or Harris County deserves. It just means that it should be treated more like a lot of other college towns are treated. That may mean, for instance, more registration on campuses than at apartment doors. For all I know, there may be a similar rationale for treating military towns differently, as well. I haven’t gotten far enough into those counties to know their situations well enough.
But given that Dallas and Harris Counties lead the pack once those are accounted for, I think that’s a good enough place to start when thinking what kind of impact any dedicated program could have. That sent me digging through VAN for some more research.
I opted to look at one of the most GOP-friendly places in Harris County: HD130 in the northwestern corner of the county. Simply put, this district won’t be turning blue with anything short of multiple miracles. But part of the approach outlined by Bird, and one that I feel like I’ve been beating my head against a wall on, is that it is just as important to raise some areas from 25% Dem to 35% Dem in order to improve the overall showing. Having driven through HD130 on the way to/from Austin, I noticed that there were a few new apartments along Highway 290. I’m also familiar enough with the area to know that there are some hubs of apartments full of kids moving out from mom & dad’s place.
In just a quick scan of apartment complexes, I ended up with four quick sample studies. One was a Senior complex, but I opted to leave it in to prove a point that any perceived GOP tilt among seniors in a heavily GOP district wouldn’t harm the overall showing. The five units I ended up with had a score of 67% Dem based on Clarity‘s partisanship score for 2012. For all apartments in HD130, the score came to 52.4% Dem. So while there are certainly good and mediocre targets within the district, comparing this to a district that gave Obama 23% of the vote in 2012 shows a far healthier target for where to improve.
Furthermore, we have some valuable data from apartments: namely how many units there are in each. For the five complexes I identified, the turnout clocked in at 25% of apartment units turning out to vote. The traditional metric of turnout comes in at 45.3% turnout of registered voters. How to increase these numbers comes down to what you believe. If you believe that the registered voters track pretty closely with actual, current residents in the complex, then you face a turnout issue. But if you’re like me and believe that the registered voters track significantly less with actual, current residents, then you have to add a voter registration component to the mix in order to capture the new voters and replace the old, out-of-date information.
Neither of those efforts are free. But I’m inclined to think that there’s little effective work put into this approach countywide. The video below is of a Center for American Progress event. In it, Bird offers a great deal of insight into the short-term goals and data that feeds his belief of how impacting counties like Harris and Dallas will play a big role in moving Texas’ overall numbers. I definitely like the sound of a 55% Democratic Harris County. But if it’s going to get there sooner rather than later, I hope that apartment voters are getting the right style of work put into registration and turnout. I’ll be making it out to a couple of Battleground’s events in the next few weeks. I’m sure there’ll be some good info to share from it.
ADD-ON: (h/t Kuff) David Jarman at DailyKos was apparently thinking the same thing, just with some regression analysis thrown into the mix.
I had only a brief moment as a wrestling fan and they all happened while living in Mississippi in the late 70s. International Championship Wrestling came on every Saturday morning, showing matches recorded Friday night in Greenwood. One of the highlights of my time in Mississippi was making a pilgrimage to the Sportatorium (actually just a big metal shack that held a few hundred folks) to watch a live recording.
There are a handful of characters that I can recall quickly from watching those matches. Some of them went on to the big time as many of the independent wrestling circuits of the time folded into the Ted Turner enterprise. In later years, I’d occasionally end up leaving the channel on TBS for too long, with wrestling going on as my background noise. Every once in a while, I’d take notice when Terry Gordy would be announced, instantly remembering his Mississippi days. Another that made it to the big time was a manager going by the name of Percy Pringle III. The Mississippi circuit was one of his first television breaks. He would have been doing this just after leaving the Air Force. Pringle would eventually change characters and go by what would become his biggest: Paul Bearer, manager for the Undertaker.
I left wrestling behind when my family left Mississippi. Nothing could replicate what I saw then. I know that I was aware of Percy Pringle still being involved in the Turner/McMahon era of wrestling. But it wasn’t enough for modern-era wrestling to capture my interest. In the age of Google, however, I did find myself taking an interest in Pringle’s blog. On one occasion, I emailed the man himself, asking for some reminders of names and characters of other wrestlers that I grew up watching and he was gracious enough to respond, closing with an even more gracious:
It’s memories like yours that really make me appreciate what I do.
Take care.
~PP3
With all that said and done, I was saddened to learn of William Moody’s passing as I ended up leaving the television on another channel for too long this evening. Sad, but a little bit happy to see that they included a bit of footage from his younger, blonder, Pringle days. I’m guilty of doing a YouTube search on some of the early wrestling footage of my earlier years once every blue moon and ending up watching some interview with Moody instead. He’s as good of a story-teller as he was a character actor. And every instance demonstrated a very authentic person who loved what he did. I’m glad his work was a part of my childhood.
A simple and straightforward clearing of the cache. Happy reading if you’re into that sort of thing. There are redistrictingmaps out for the session, but I think most folks are hoping there are no fireworks that accompany them. But just out of curiosity, I’ll probably find a little time to convert them to a Google map and roll out some data.
In case anyone wasn’t aware … Ben Hall really, really wants to be mayor. We’ve now gradually gone through the various iterations of “I’m thinking about it” here, here, and here. If you were wondering if this fourth entry in the slow-motion marathon of Hall’s announcement tour through Houston was now complete, the story tucks away the best part toward the end of the article:
No candidate has formally filed for mayor; filing begins July 29 and ends Aug. 26.
So, wild hunch here: July 30th will be another round of “Really, seriously, this time I mean it … I’m running” stories.
In fairness to Hall, I do think he makes something of a valid critique of Parker on the “leadership vs manager” argument. But that’s also a fairly easy argument for Parker to rebut. The bigger, tactical mistake is Hall attempting to recreate the “Pincer Strategy” that didn’t work terribly well for it’s original practitioner, Gene Locke. There’s a big difference between winning broad Anglo GOP support and having a GOP consultant along with a fringe Republican Kubosh brother by your side at one of the way-too-many announcements of your candidacy.
California’s system of nonpartisan redistricting created the 17th Congressional District, where Asian-Americans total 51 percent of the population. Asian-American politicians and activists had long sought such a district from which to build power nationally.
Although the district includes parts of San Jose, suburbs like Cupertino, Milpitas and Fremont have the highest concentration of Asian-Americans, especially the most recent waves of immigrants, said James S. Lai, the director of ethnic studies at Santa Clara University. Institutions like the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific American Democratic Club remain under the leadership of more established groups like Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans. The San Jose airport, for example, is named after Norman Y. Mineta, the Japanese-American politician.
But newer Asian-American groups have begun exerting influence. Democrats and Republicans have especially courted Indian-Americans, many of whom work in Silicon Valley and have proved formidable fund-raisers.
“The question is what Asian Indians feel ideologically aligned with,” Mr. Lai said. “This election could be an example of whether Asian Indians see themselves along the lines of pan-Asian, progressive politics that are part of what Mike Honda stands for, or whether they will they go for his challenger’s politics, which are more conservative and pro-business.”
Of course, this reminds me that I’m overdue to read through Professor Klineberg’s work on his more local reading on Houston’s Asian population. But in the meantime, this is interesting on a few different levels for me. The biggest is that it highlights the rise in the Asian-Indian population. One of the points I had intended to shelve for a post on Klineberg’s survey is worth previewing here. Namely, the increasing share of Asian Indian population has been an aspect of the rise in Asian population that hasn’t gotten enough mention. Fort Bend is a major case in point. For the longest time, the understanding was that Fort Bend’s Asian population was predominantly Chinese. But the latest Census information paints a new understanding of Fort Bend – Asian Indians are now the plurality among the Asian population there.
I’d have to go back to older data and see what the movement was from the 2000 Census and relevant long-form data from back then. I’d expect to see a significant rise in Harris County’s share of Asian Indians up to the current 18% share of the Asian population. I suspect that the relatively long-standing Vietnamese plurality is enough to hold up over another decade or more. But I’m curious to see what the growth has been like over the decade.
Obviously, California’s CD17 may be a very different animal altogether. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see a fairly substantive growth of Asian Indian population in a high-tech business environment. What also wouldn’t surprise me is that any primary election among two different Asian candidates will likely be settled by non-Asians. So a little reporting on how contests such as the still-undecided contest in this story would be interesting to read about from that angle. It seems to me that there was an opportunity for a related story in Houston’s own runoff in Senate District 6, where 40% of the vote and 45% of the voter-eligible population is not Hispanic/Latino.
Just noting these articles since they’re a bit relevant to some ideas that may make a little noise here in Texas. Although I’d like to see these ideas given some serious thought, I’m a little skeptical that they’ll go far in our own Lege this year. Online voter registration is certainly much more doable today, so maybe there’s hope for that. One bill that might have a shot at moving forward is Donna Howard’s feasibility study.
Some interesting participants for this year’s rally …
Many speakers — including Diane Ravitch, a Houston native and former assistant secretary of education to President George H.W. Bush who is now an outspoken opponent of vouchers and high-stakes testing — called out Senate Education Committee chairman Dan Patrick by name.
…
Among Ravitch’s concerns was the senator’s attempt to pass a “parent trigger” law in which local school boards could vote to convert to a charter school. It would more aptly be called a “parent tricker” law, she said.
She urged members of the crowd to support efforts to roll back student testing in the state. “The testing vampire started here,” she said, referring to the Texas origins of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. “Kill it.”
Former Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott also spoke at the rally. Scott, who stepped down from the agency in July, made national headlines last year when he told an annual gathering of 3,000 public school administrators that the state’s testing and accountability system had gone too far.
On Saturday, he said the state’s $90-million-a-year test-development contract was influencing the “totatilty” of public schools.
“Now, some of you may look at that and see that as the tail wagging the dog a little bit, wouldn’t you? I don’t,” he said. “I look at it as the flea at the end of the tail of the dog trying to wag the dog.”
He said that realization was part of his decision last year to speak out against the direction of state education policy.
Some background on former Commissioner Scott’s point of departure can be read here. And, of course, there was this guy …
Kuff tackles some of this already. It’ll be worth watching to see if the charter cap removal risks getting hung up by the property forfeiture that Dan Patrick’s bill demands of public school districts. There are other bills that limit themselves to dealing with the cap on charter schools in a much simpler form. And it’s worth remembering that the charter cap didn’t get past the House committee last session. So we’ll see whether the odds for it change this session. One aspect of the charter cap issue that hasn’t gotten much attention is the fact that the Texas Education Agency is the entity tasked with inspecting poor-performing charters and begin the process for closing them down. One of the impacts of the $5.4B education cuts from 2011 was that around 300 TEA employees were laid off. Guess which department got gutted. Now guess which one isn’t on the table for restoring funds to.
I had the pleasure of attending a Sharpstown Democrats meeting on Saturday with Scott Hochberg as the guest speaker. Among the topics of discussion were charter schools. A point brought up by Scott that’s worth seconding is that, if charter schools believe in “competition”, then why not have an old-fashioned, band-style competition whereby new applicants are required to submit a plan for how they’ll be better than an existing poor-performing charter school, give them a year or so to … ya know … compete. And whichever school ends up doing better (however you want to define that), gets to keep their charter. And the one that loses gets shut down. Sounds like a worthwhile idea to me.
I’m not much of a fan of the Politifact approach to what used to be called journalism. But this column by Gardner Selby included one tidbit that I couldn’t resist. That tidbit was a chart of public education spending broken out by local, state, and federal dollars in the state from FY2004 through FY2013. Two good attributes of the data are that it was provided directly by the Legislative Budget Board and that it details their methodology for factoring in inflation.
What’s missing from that data, and would have made Selby’s take a bit more noteworthy, is that when you divide by the number of students enrolled, you get a spot-on view of the problem with education spending in Texas.
The 2013 total ($5,998) represents only 78% of “peak” funding in FY2009 ($7,665). Granted, the only reason that peak exists is because it also represents “peak” stimulus dollars. But even if you discount for stimulus funds out of the federal dollars, you’d still be looking at anywhere from flat-to-declining dollars. If you simply choose to look at the recent count as being 87% off of the pre-stimulus peak in FY2008, I’m not sure that it’s a boatload better.
Also, in case you’re wondering what it would take to ratchet Texas up to the national average of per-pupil spending … to accomplish this feat, it would basically take a doubling of the state portion of education dollars (which has fallen from $20B to $16B in the last four years).
Just pure, raw linkage this time. A few of these, I may come back to at some point during the week. But for now … read ‘em yourself. Committee hearings are picking up here in Austin, so there’s much fear and loathing to contend with. Reminds me: why is it that Hunter S. Thompson never thought to cover the Texas Legislature?
Today, I’m off to settle into a new workspace and a temporary residence in order to work with my new State Representative, Gene Wu, in Austin. Before anyone thinks to call, comment, or text about how exciting any of that is, you should be reminded that I was raised to loathe all things Austin. While [...]
I missed out on commenting on the Chronicle’s coverage of the recent update on Census data. This comes from the American Community Survey’s annual rolling update to their population counts. I’ve only scratched the surface and updated some of my counts on how the total population translates down to citizen voting age population. Here are [...]
Up till now, I’ve generally subscribed to Jim Carville’s maxim that “I wouldn’t want to work for any government that would be willing to hire me.” But this is Texas … we seem to need a bit of help. So, starting in January, I’ll be working in the legislature for Gene Wu. He won the [...]
PDiddie: A timely echo of this at the Great Orange Satan:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/17/1192930/-Renters-make-good-Democrats-and-other-demographi...
Anna: Austin doesn't sound really terrifying. I am sure there are far worse places to be "stuck" in. Anyway, good luck and blogging about the whole thing wo...
adman757: Robbins came close in 105, and so did Miklos in 107. It will take another Presidential to win them. We need good Democratic candidates with strong roo...
Greg Wythe: Thanks. But I don't know what influence you speak of. I'm more of the workaholic, dam-building eager beaver ... who requires a nap after lunch....
