Issue Position: Legislative Issues

Issue Position

1. Texas Republican legislators deliberately, unnecessarily, and maliciously underfunded its own public education system to weaken and damage it for the purpose of making it possible for private religious education to qualify for public funding. Another motive for these policy is to defund a constituency--public school teachers--that would be expected to oppose most Texas elected officials: Republicans. The deliberate and willful attack on the Texas public education system by the state's own legislators is disgraceful, unethical, and will greatly damage the achievement of our citizens. Since most students in the Texas public school system are minorities, the Republican attack on schools is also racist. This publicly-authorized bigotry must be stopped.

2. The Republican-dominated Texas Legislature is refusing to fund the adoption of new and updated instructional materials, claiming lack of financial resources. This is nonsense, of course. Texas suffered much less than most states because of the recession. A structural deficit created by the Legislature allowed it to justify shortchanging public education, and billions of dollars are available in a Rainy Day Fund now to immediately fix the problem. The Legislature itself is responsible for the problem and could fix it if it wanted. Among the curricula not funded is that of Earth and Space Science. This new course discusses the origin of the Earth, of life, and of fossils. It also discusses alternative energy resources, pollution, and climate change is quite a bit of detail, including reasons for the drought our state is experiencing. These are topics that many Republican state officials don't want students to learn about because the public officials themselves possess a great deal of the responsibility for causing the problems in the first place. This anti-social attitude needs to change.

3. Knowing it would force enormous budget cuts on school districts, the Legislature tried in addition to end class size mandates, freeze and even cut teacher pay, reduce previously-mandated minimum salaries, allow unpaid teacher furloughs and layoffs, allow last-minute notice of non-renewal of teachers' contracts, and allow layoffs of higher-paid veteran teachers in favor of new teachers with minimum salaries. In essence, the Legislature tried to pay for its education budget cuts by cutting the salaries of public school teachers. These policies are a disgraceful way to treat some of the most important and hardest-working state employees.

4. The long-standing educational policy in Texas has been to under-fund public education and provide inadequate instruction for the millions of Texas students. Texas must import its highly-educated work force from other states who have invested their public tax money for the proper education of their citizens. This selfish and demeaning Texas public policy must end. Texas must stop being an education parasite off other states and start contributing to the cost of maintaining a civilized society. One result of this policy is that poorly-educated state students often turn to crime to make a living when they find they are unqualified to find good jobs in Texas. This creates an enormous criminal population of young Texas citizens, the largest in the United States among all the states, which must be dealt with at even greater financial and social cost than educating them properly in the first place. This long-standing educational policy is the deliberate result of a political ideology that is dominant in Texas: a reactionary ultra-conservative ideology that is hostile to the educational, social, and economic emancipation of members of the working and lower middle classes of Texas citizens and that seeks to defend the power and privileges of public officials and the wealthy against movements demanding freedom, fairness, and equality.

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