The Republican Club of Sun City NEWSLETTER

November 2012 Everett Schmidt, Editor Sun City Texas

STATE COMPTROLLER TO ADDRESS CLUB

Susan Combs, the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, will address the club during its dinner meeting scheduled for Thursday, November l5 in the ballroom of the Social Center in Sun City. She was elected to her first term in 2000.

A primary duty of the Comptroller is to collect virtually all of the more than 60 different types of taxes owed to the state. But another responsibility is one which places the Comptroller squarely in the middle of Texas’ highly political legislative budget process, one which is to begin in earnest with the arrival of a new biennium. It comes about because of a requirement of the Texas Constitution. That requirement directs the Comptroller to certify to the Texas legislature the amount of available cash on hand and the anticipated revenues for the next biennium, the two year period beginning August 1 of odd-numbered years.

In sharp contrast to the practices of Congress, the Legislature is not permitted to appropriate any funds in excess of the Comptroller’s certified amounts. (There is some flexibility in cases of emergency).

There is another responsibility which has some pleasant aspects to it – if the economy is sound. Inasmuch as Texas uses a unified collection system for those taxes assessed by both state and local governments, the Comptroller is thus responsible for collecting and then remitting the local portion of such tax revenue to the various cities, counties and special districts throughout the state.

Recently, tax allocations to cities, counties and other such entities have been increasing. For example, September sales tax allocations were up 15.5 percent compared to September of 2011. The state’s sales tax revenue for fiscal 2012 was $24.1 billion, about 12.6 percent higher that the previous year.

The Social Period, Dinner and Program. A social period will begin at 6:00 PM. The dinner will begin at 6:30 PM, and will be followed by the program. The dinner will consist of meatloaf, buttered potatoes, green beans and salad.

Cost. Cost is $16 per person. Checks made out to The Republican Club of Sun City should be mailed to: The Republican Club of Sun City, 1530 Sun City Blvd., Suite 120, Box 227, Georgetown, TX 78633.
The deadline for payment or reservations is Friday, November 9.

Club treasurer Dorothy Carlyle has set up a special collection box on her front porch at 173 Whispering Wind for individuals wishing to hand-deliver payments, provided delivery is made by the Friday deadline. For information about reservations, contact Dorothy at 864-0353 or dcarlyle@suddenlink.net

VISITORS ARE WELCOME!

CLUB WILL NOT MEET IN DECEMBER

Following a practice of long standing, the club will not meet during the month of December. The next meeting of the club (after the November meeting) is scheduled for Thursday, January 10. A calendar of meetings scheduled for 2013 will be provided in the January newsletter.

OTHER CLUB NEWS

Nominating Committee chairman Julian Bucher announced during the October meeting the following slate of officers recommended for 2013: President – Harlow Fisher; First Vice President – Robert Fears; Second Vice President – Bill Chiles; Treasurer – John Congdon; Secretary – Barbara Wood.

Voting will take place during the club’s November 15 meeting. Nominations from the floor are allowed, provided the advanced consent of the prospective nominee has been attained, and provided written information about the prospective nominee is furnished to the president prior to that meeting. (See Article VIII, Section 2)

The club will vote during the November meeting on the proposed addition to the bylaws, (See September newsletter for details)

Club treasurer Dorothy Carlyle reports the number of attendees at the October meeting was 142.

SCHOOL CHOICE: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME? “There is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come” – Victor Hugo

Foreword. The Texas Legislature will, during its coming legislative session, consider several highly contentious matters including school finance, tax policies and immigration issues. And there is now another issue which has been latent in the past, but which has now become an “idea whose time has come.” That issue: school choice.

There are a number of reasons why this matter has surfaced. One is the Republican response to Proposition 1 on the Republican Primary ballot. By a vote of 1,176,965 to 219,127 – that’s 84 percent – Republican voters approved the following language:

The state should fund education by allowing dollars to follow the child instead of the bureaucracy., through a program which allows parents the freedom to choose their child’s school, public or private, while also saving significant dollars.

During the session two years ago, the issue of school choice didn’t get off the ground, and there was considerable resistance to it. Then-Representative Sid Miller offered legislation concerning school choice, but the proposal didn’t get out of committee. Further, Miller was defeated by an opponent who did not support his effort. In addition, Rep. Diane Patrick, no supporter of school choice, defeated then-House Public Education Chairman Kent Grusendorf, a vocal advocate of private school vouchers.

But now, suddenly, there has been a change in the dynamics of that issue, and prospects for legislative approval are better. Those dynamics will be discussed during the remainder of this report, and will include the following topics which are to be conceptualized as pertaining to state-wide educational systems and not to individual school districts:

• More that 30 states have passed versions of laws allowing the use of public money to fund private education, including those which are church-related. Programs which allow parents to use vouchers for either religious or nonreligious schools are constitutional. (See Zelman v. Simmons)
• The issue of vouchers has been brought to the national debate by the fact that presidential candidate Mitt Romney has submitted a proposal to allow students to use tax money for parochial and private- school tuition.
• There is now considerable anxiety over funding of public schools. In Texas, the court which is now considering the constitutionality of school funding has agreed to allow charter schools to be a part of the suit. (Charter schools are not private schools. They are publicly funded schools that families can choose instead of their traditional neighborhood public school. But unlike traditional public schools, charters are run by independent boards rather than a government bureaucracy).
• There has been widespread dissatisfaction with the standardized testing program.
• There is widespread dissatisfaction with the level of public school discipline.
• There is growing evidence that with the intrusion of federal Constitutional law in student affairs, not onlyhas the teacher-pupil relationship been corrupted, but also, indirectly, the parent-child relationship. Parents who wish the training their child receives to include morality and a recognition of the importance of religion to our form of government are denied that opportunity.THE GROWING NATION-WIDE VOUCHER MOVEMENT

  Forty-four percent of Americans now favor allowing students the option of attending private school at public expense. That is up 10 percentage point from a year ago, and suggests a significant trend. As was reported above, more than 30 states now have such programs.

  When considering a voucher program for Texas, the reader is urged to note the ethnic/racial makeup of the state’s students: Of the 48 million students enrolled in public schools, 48 percent are Hispanic (many with an English deficiency), 33 percent are white, 14 percent are African-American, and 4 percent are Asian or other.

  Lt. Gov. Dewhurst recently appointed Sen. Dan Patrick of Houston, a supporter of school choice, to lead the Senate Education Committee which has already held hearings when philosophical issues have surfaced. For example, pointing to the experience of states like Florida and Indiana, school choice proponents argued there would be both improved students performance and savings for the state. Democrat Senators asked how

state accountability measures (tests) would be applied to private schools accepting state funds; however, as will be discussed later, standardized tests are now highly controversial and of questionable use. With respect to savings for the state, it should be noted that Texans today spend more than $11,000 per child per year on public education. For comparison purposes, note that the tuition for two area private schools: At St. Helen Catholic School the tuition charge is $4,500 – $5,100 annually; at Grace Academy, the average tuition charge is $6,800. Some private schools do not charge tuition.

Since 2000 to the present, Catholic schools, nation-wide, have seen their school enrollment plummet by 23 percent, with 1,900 schools being closed. But with the current expansion of voucher programs and contributions, enrollment has been climbing – especially in Indiana which has an expansive voucher program.

Catholic schools welcome non-Catholic students, and, nationally, about 17 percent of students in Catholic schools are not Catholic. Those students, however, are not allowed to opt out of religion class or Mass. Many of the parents like the fact that Catholic schools are trying to teach high moral values. When it comes to talking about sex, the Catholic schools have no problem saying, “You’re too young; abstinence is the way to go.”

THE STATE’S STANDARDIZED TESTING PROGRAM

Over the decades, the effort to establish an accountability program through the use of standardized tests has produced the following sequence of events: (1) there was evidence (including some provided by business leaders) that high school graduates were lacking in basic academic skills, (2) the matter was deemed serious enough for the state to establish minimum levels of competence on standardized tests, (3) the state mandated that students who did not meet those levels of competence could not graduate, (4) but too many students – including a disproportionate percentage of minority students – failed the test and could not graduate, (5) various devices – including the lowering of standards – were then employed to improve the passing/graduation rates.

After this cycle was completed, the state found that it had arrived – again – at the first event described above. As veteran teachers can attest, the above cycle of events has been repeated for decades.

Providing some validation for the above described cycle of events is the recent report that the Florida State Board of Education lowered the passing grade on the writing portion of its writing test because “only about a third of students would pass.”

And there is more depressing news. There have been widespread indications that school personnel have been engaged in cheating to improve scores. Sometimes their actions are discovered. A federal judge sentenced El Paso ISD’s former superintendent to more than than three years in prison for his participation in a conspiracy to improve the district’s high-stakes test scores by removing low-performing students from classrooms.

The high scores of Atlanta school children attained fraudulently enabled the superintendent there to collect $600,000 in performance bonuses over 10 years to supplement her $400,000 annual salary. Two national organizations honored her with the title of Superintendent of the Year. (Press accounts did not report punishment, if any)

th

graders who took the STARR end-of-course exams this spring. Note not only the percentage of students passing the 2012 test, but also the number of correct answers needed to pass those tests. Also note what the passing rate would be for these students if the higher standards to be applied in 2016 were applied to them. Note that the number of required correct answers varies

from a low of 37% to a high of 65%.

Statewide Achievement on New Tests

Ninth-graders statewide took the new STARR end-of-course exams this spring. Eventually, most high schoolers must take, and pass, a total of 15 course-specific tests before graduating.

The following chart indicates test scores of Texas 9

English 1 reading English 1 writing Algebra 1 Biology

World Geography

83% 87% 81%

Number of correct answers needed to pass in 2012
29 of 56 questions (52%)
40 of 62 questions (65%)

20 of 54 questions (37%) 20 of 54 questions (37%) 31 of 68 questions (46%)

(Source: Texas Education Agency)

%meeting 2016 passing rate 46%
34%

39% 41% 40%

%meeting 2012 passing rate 68%
55%

THE STATUS OF SCHOOL DISCIPLINE

A recent study which tracked all of the state’s seventh graders – almost 1 million of them – for a period of 6 years was recently released. The name of the report: “Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Student Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement.” Various articles appearing in the Austin American-Statesman report on some of the findings in that report:

• “…school administrators are exercising their discretion to suspend or expel 60 percent of Texasstudents – including a shocking 83 percent of male African-American students – at least oncemore than half of those students had been on probation or incarcerated by juvenile authorities.
• Only 3 percent of the disciplinary actions were for conduct for which state law mandated suspension and expulsions [as weapons on campus]; the rest were made at the discretion of school officials primarily in response to violations of local school conduct codes involvingclassroom decorum.Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, noting that “the report tells us that more than 1 in 7 Texas middle and high school students have been involved with the juvenile justice system,” said he intends to convene a panel to study the findings. The report has thus triggered the involvement of the Texas court system.

  But it has also triggered the involvement of the Senate. Criminal Justice committee chairman John Whitmire has stated his committee will investigate the findings.

  THE FEDERAL COURTS AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE

  The federal courts have become involved in public school matters because, according to interpretation, public schools are a part of state government. (Private schools are not conceptualized as a part of state government)

  This means federal judges have become involved in school discipline matters. But it would be difficult to identify two settings more diametrically different from each other than a courtroom and a public school classroom: the judge speaks from an elevated position, thus symbolically conveying authority; the setting is formal with a bailiff available to enforce courtroom discipline; all present have an interest in what the judge has to say; a judge can – with full expectation of compliance – order an attorney to “stand while addressing this court.” None of this authority is now available to the classroom teacher. Yet the judge must make decisions regarding what the court has termed “appropriate discipline,” the standard for the public school.

  And there is more. The current membership of the Supreme Court consists of 9 Justices who have attended either Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the Justices are former tenured law professors. Only two have tried a criminal case. None has military or business experience, and none have ever run for elected office.

  Further, it would be a fair assumption to expect that they and/or their children went to a private school or a school in an area where quality education was expected. They lack exposure to the “real world” of today’s public school classroom as described by Bryan ISD Superintendent Tommy Wallace on a PBS show: “If a student tells a teacher to, you know, go F-themselves, calls them a B., or throws chairs or fights in the classroom, those are typical offenses.”

  FEDERAL INVOLVEMENT IN EDUCATION

  Tinker v. Des Moines School District: A Case That Spawned a “Sea Change.” Some background: In 1965, a group of Des Moines principals became aware of a plan for students, through the use of arm bands, to use the schools as a platform to protest the Vietnam war. The principals, out of fear of disturbance, banned the use of the arm bands and suspended students who did not comply. Some students then sued.

  The District Court, using the then-prevailing “reasonableness” test, concluded the action of school authorities was reasonable because it was based upon fear of disturbance, and dismissed the case. But the Supreme Court, in 1969, in a conclusion which was to have all sorts of ramifications to this day, said, in reversing the District Court, “undifferentiated fear or apprehension are not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression.”

th th between the 7 and 12

grades.
• “…about 15 percent of the students studied were suspended or expelled 11 times or more – and

While the opinion gives lip service to the undefined term, “appropriate discipline,” at the school, the court, as dissenting Justice Stewart noted, used a standard applied to adults.

The standard of court review of school discipline had thus changed. Whereas it once was that in the absence of a school regulation being found arbitrary, or found unreasonable, it was upheld. Now, in regard to constitutional matters, the maintenance of school discipline is far more complicated.

At one time, the complaining party had the burden of proving the school regulation was wrong. Now, as one court stated, “where rules infringe upon the freedom of expression, the school officials have the burden of showing justification.” Given today’s nebulous understanding of “disruption,” this can be difficult, particularly for judges who, having led cloistered lives, are completely unfamiliar with the atmosphere which prevails in schools today.

Another factor has been added to the complications school officials have in dealing with discipline: they can be personally sued for damages. For example, the principal involved in the the Morse v. Fredrick case was actually assessed damages for suspending a student for publicly advocating the illegal use of drugs at a school- related event. The principal was actually assessed damages by an Appeals Court which said that “it would be clear to a reasonable [principal] that [her] conduct was unlawful in the situation [she] confronted. (The Supreme Court subsequently reversed the Appeals Court on that issue)

The suit for damages was probably initiated by the leftist ACLU. But it should be noted that school officials have been sued for damages from the right, as in regard to the “Candy Cane” case when the Liberty Institute sued damages against some Texas school officials who had denied certain children (Christians) permission to distribute Christmas candy at school.

These suits are coming in the wake of inconsistent rulings by courts. Asserts Justice Thomas in this regard: “I am afraid our jurisprudence now says that students have a [First Amendment] right to speak except when they don’t – a standard continuously [being] developed . . .”

AN ANALYSIS OF COURT CASES AND FEDERAL LEGISLATION

The Tinker Case. Justice Thomas asserted that the Tinker case brought about a “sea change” in school discipline.

The author of the 1969 Tinker opinion, Abe Fortas, inserted the phrase, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” But another way to phrase Fortas’ thought is to say that “the street has now been extended to the school campus.” (Think of potential “occupy” demonstrations)

There were two dissents to the ruling, one of which was by Justice Hugo Black who was regarded as the foremost advocate of virtually unrestricted First Amendment rights in society. Some of the points made in his dissent seem remarkably prescient. Note this comment made more than 40 years ago:

Uncontrolled and uncontrollable liberty is an enemy to domestic peace . . .School discipline, like parental discipline, is an integral and important part of training our children to be good citizens . . .One does not need to be a prophet . . .to know that after the Court’s holding today some students . . . will be ready, able, and willing to defy their teachers on practically all orders . . .Turned loose with lawsuits for damages and injunctions against teachers as they are here, it is nothing but wishful thinking to imagine that young, immature students will not soon believe it is their right to control the schools rather that the right of the States that collect taxes to hire teachers for the benefit of their pupils.

The Goss v. Lopez Case. Kay S. Hymowitz, author of a report titled “Who Killed School Discipline,” reports what happens when federal standards concerning due process come on the school campus:

In 1975, the Supreme Court hampered school officials’ authority yet further in Goss v. Lopez, a decision that expanded the due-process rights of students. Goss concerned several students suspended for brawling in the school lunchroom. Though the principal who suspended them actually witnessed the fight itself, the court concluded that he failed to give the students an adequate hearing before lowering the boom. Students, pronounce the court, are citizens with a property right to their education. To deny that right requires, at the least, an informal hearing with notice, witnesses, and the like.

The experience of a New Jersey school in attempting to enforce its “anti-bullying” regulation is instructive in regard to this due process standard. An article in National Review reports: “A principal reports dealing with 10 to 15 “bullying” incidents every day, very few of which are serious enough to result in actual disciplinary measures. Another administrator says that an investigation into a bullying incident that happened over the summer, off of school grounds, took nine hours.

The Individual With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Hymowitz comments on the effect of federal legislation:

This law, which mandates that schools provide a “free and appropriate education” for children regardless of disability – and provide it, moreover, within regular classroom whenever humanly possible – effectively strips educators of the authority to transfer or to suspend for long periods any student classified as needing special education. This wouldn’t matter if special education included mainly the wheelchair-bound or deaf students whom we ordinarily think of as disabled. But it doesn’t. Over the past several decades, the number of children classified under the vaguely defined disability categories of “learning disability” and “emotional disturbance” has exploded.

THE LAW AND THE TEACHER-PUPIL RELATIONSHIP

Legal commentator Zechariah Chaffee makes the following straight-forward contention: “The central idea of our law is relation.” He explains that we speak of the law of principal and agent, landlord and tenant, and vendor and purchaser. He also points out that while the written word will describe much of the relation between two parities, the relation is also given definition by unwritten sources such as the tradition and usage – in addition to court decisions.

Authors Beany and Cox contend the student-institutional relationship has successfully defied legal classification. Courts were comfortable with in loco parentis, but with the erosion of that concept, there is considerable uncertainty in the legal community. Courts have not in all cases given students full constitutional rights commensurate with adults.

Hymowitz comments on the resulting reality:

The principal wants to send [a] kid home, but he’s not sure its within his authority to do so, so he calls the superintendent. The superintendent is also unsure, so he calls the district’s lawyer. The lawyer’s concern, though, isn’t that the child has breached the boundaries of respect and tolerance, and needs an adult to tell him so, but whether disciplining the student would violate the First Amendment.

Worse, the influence of lawyers over school discipline means that educators speak to children in an unrecognizable language, far removed from the straight talk about right and wrong that most children crave. Students correctly sense that what lies behind such desiccated language is not a moral worldview and a concern for their well-being and character, but fear of lawsuits.

When educators aren’t talking like lawyers, they’re sounding like therapists, for they’ve called in the psychobabblers and psychologists from the nation’s ed schools and academic departments . . .School bureaucrats have been falling over one another in their rush to implement trendy-sounding “research-based programs” – emotional literacy training, anti-bullying workshops, violence prevention curriculums, and the like . . .

A practice which has severely impacted the teacher-pupil relationship has been the practice of allowing police to issue tickets to middle and high school students for rules violations such as chewing gum, dress-code infractions and sleeping in class. According to press reports, more than 120,000 students received such tickets last year.

A youth-advocacy group, Texas Appleseed, reported that 11 school districts serving a quarter of Texas children spent $227 million on disciplinary programs and security.

Two legislative committees are now investigating the involvement of police in school discipline.

Hymowitz comments on the current status of the teacher-student relationship: “ . . .the mere potential for a lawsuit shrinks the adult in the child’s eyes. It transfers the person who should be the teacher and representative of society’s moral and cultural values into a civil servant who may or may not please the young, rights-armed citizen. The natural relationship between adult and child begins to crumble.”

SCHOOL CHOICE AND THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports” “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion”
George Washington (from his Farewell Address)

As was pointed out earlier, schools which receive public funds come under the Fourteenth Amendment and consequently the authority of the federal courts; however, private schools do not. This means that, should the Texas legislature pass legislation providing for some funding which goes direct to parents – as other state legislatures have done – the resulting schools will have considerably more flexibility with respect to their mission and operations. The remainder of this report will explore that flexibility.

The public school movement evolved during an era when the nation was described by George Washington as follows: “With slight shades of difference, you [fellow citizens] have the same religion, manners, habits and political principles.” Given that commonality, a common purpose for public education was therefore relatively easy to achieve. But now, with diversity having been attained and now worshiped, such commonality may not be possible. Some alternates to public schools may better be able to meet the differing wordviews of parents.

Particularly with respect to the inculcation of moral values does this appear to be true. Reflect in this regard on the following comments of Robert Knight:

If you were the devil, what would be your most important mission? It would be to corrupt innocent children.

I’d start by kicking God out of the public schools and excising from textbooks the truth about America’s deeply Christian heritage. I’d get rid of glaringly obvious ties between Christianity and the Founders’ vision of unalienable rights and limited government.

Children would be indoctrinated to think of themselves as cosmic accidents of random mutation and survival of the fittest, not precious beings with eternal souls created in the image of God. The result would be an effectively atheistic system of moral relativism.

Next, I’d cloak sexual promiscuity in terms of self-fulfillment, mix it up with junk science and lobby teachers union to openly promote the Kinsey sex education model of children as “sexual beings” whose “orientation” has no moral relevance.

An example of the flexibility which might be available to parents is the mission of so-called “classical” schools (such as Grace Academy) as stated by Duke Pesta who points out that a purpose of classical education is “to recognize the value of reason, not as the only way of arriving at truth, but as one part of a complex organism that includes body and soul . . . We reject the contemporary idea that reason alone is sufficient for human progress and fulfillment.”

Given the incivility, crudeness and immorality of much of today’s society – including school-age children – the comments of columnist Walter Williams seem pertinent:

I think that a society’s first line of defense is not the law but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms – transmitted by example, word of mouth, religious teachings, rules of etiquette and manners – represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important legal thou-shalt-nots – such as shalt not murder, steal, lie or cheat – but they also include all those civilities one might call ladylike or gentlemanly behavior. Police officers and courts can never replace these social restraints on personal conduct. At best, laws, police and the criminal justice system are a society’s last desperate line of defense.