Editorials

The education lobby is already hard at work, although the 2009 legislative session is still five months away. The call for more "resources" for education -- that's money -- is being sounded from South Texas to the Panhandle.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation's William Murchison recalls an analogy he heard once involving alchemists.

"A Hoover Institution scholar, Roger A. Freeman, in bygone times observed wryly that popular support for dumping more and more public dollars into public education called to mind the alchemists of yore, who never managed to turn base metals into gold, but, say, what did that prove? Only -- so far as the alchemists themselves were concerned -- that the experiment hadn't been tried long enough," Murchison says.

"The emotional linkage of alchemy and the more-money-for-public-schools movement is an unhappy one -- a reminder that baseless and unwarranted faiths can be as stubborn as, well, education lobbyists, making their umpteenth pitch for another financial transfusion," he adds.

But the public is catching on.

"Consider a brand new poll by The University of Texas-Austin's government department and Texas Politics Project," Murchison reports. "The poll -- which shows opinion evenly divided on the quality of the public schools -- indicates that just 37 percent of Texans see increased funding as the remedy for the schools' record of stagnant or declining achievement. By contrast, 56 percent see more accountability as the answer. There we go at last. At a minimum, we're pointing in the right direction -- away from money as plasma for laggard schools, toward insistence on performance in exchange for such money as the schools receive."

Money does matter, of course -- teachers need adequate pay and students need books. And accountability has issues of its own, Murchison acknowledges.

"There's a difference, all the same, between merely setting standards and actually using them as prods to steady improvement," Murchison says. "The Texas Education Agency reported Aug. 1 that 66.6 percent of school districts and 43 percent of campuses received the 'academically acceptable' rating -- a grade, in effect, of C. Thirty-seven districts and 217 campuses came in as flatly 'unacceptable.'"

Murchison cites Texas Association of Business head Bill Hammond, who has lamented the lack of enforcement of educational standards.

"Hammond accused the Texas Education Agency of disingenuousness in setting standards with so many escape clauses that not to attain a particular benchmark requires some craft -- or some plain old-fashioned incompetence," Murchison noted.

A third of our high school students cannot graduate high school in four years, he notes.

"It all suggests how much more there is to real improvement of the schools than simple recognition of their problems," Murchison says. "And yet, when a clear majority of Texans profess to see accountability as the likeliest remedy for improvement, as contrasted with perhaps the least likely remedy, that of turning on the money spigots -- well! Even an alchemist or two might be moved by the sight."

()