By Alan Bean

“This is an engineered crisis—a thing that was done on purpose by people who do not mean well for our community, our city, our state or nation.” Jim Schutze

Texas is facing an estimated $27 billion deficit.  Governor Rick Perry and his fellow ideologues gutted the state’s property taxes two years ago, then sat back and waited for the inevitable.  At the time, according to this terrific article by Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer, Texas Comptroller, Diane Keaton Strayhorn, predicted that this radical decrease in tax money would create a deficit of $23 billion by 2011 unless new sources of revenue could be found. 

Ms. Strayhorn didn’t factor in the worst financial crisis since the great depression, but the accuracy of her numbers suggest that any thinking Texan could have seen the current imbroglio coming.  (Thanks to Gerald Britt at Change the Wind for bringing Mr. Schutze’s article to my attention).

Governor Perry seems delighted by the budget crisis he created.  Asked how he felt about an estimated 100,000 teachers getting pink slips before the beginning of the next school year, Perry shrugged his indifference.  Here’s his response, as recorded by the Austin American-Statesman:

Over the course of the last decade, we have seen a rather extraordinary amount of nonclassroom employees added to school rolls. So are the administrators and the school boards going to make a decision to reduce those, or are they going to make a decision to reduce the number of teachers in the classroom? I certainly know where I would point.

Mr. Perry is unconcerned that Texas has one of the worst educational systems in the country.  Texas ranks 49th among the 50 states in verbal SAT scores in the nation (493) and #46 in average math SAT scores (502).  Texas ranks 50th in percentage of residents with a high school diploma. 

Fortunately, the governor’s children, and the children of his political chums, are guaranteed a good private school education, so why should he be concerned.

According to the American-Statesman article, Mr. Perry’s claim that schools are overburdened with non-teachers can’t be substantiated:

Data from the Texas Education Agency does not reflect a surge in staffing hires other than teachers over the past 10 years.  In 2000, according to the TEA’s website, 48.7 percent of school employees across the state were nonteachers, which includes counselors, librarians and cafeteria workers as well as central office administrators. In 2010, that number was 49.5 percent.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers would more dramatic if only central office administrators were considered.  The American-Statesman article claims that “A recent statewide analysis from school finance consultants Moak, Casey & Associates found that school districts could eliminate half of all nonteaching staff members and would still fall short of the reduction called for in the introduced budget bills.”

Texas is heading for educational Armageddon and the folks responsible are washing their hands in innocence.  Will there be a political price to pay, or are the conservative voters of Texas down with these developments?

These statistics only cover the years 1999-2005, but they help explain the paucity of concern in Austin:

Overall change in Student Enrollment       +11.1%

Change in African American Enrollment   +9.5%

Change in Hispanic Enrollment                    +28.7%

Change in White Enrollment                              -5.1%

Jim Schutze recommends some reading material that might help explain why Governor Goodhair can fiddle while Texas burns:

Two compelling books have been published in the last three years about these terrible trends—the first, The Predator State, by James K. Galbraith, an economist at the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin; the second, Winner-Take-All Politics, by Jacob S. Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, and Paul Pierson, a political scientist at University of California-Berkeley.

Both books paint pictures of a creeping political and economic devastation underway since the 1970s, chewing at the very fabric of post-World War II American democratic prosperity. Both books persuasively debunk the notion that the cause has been in any way natural, accidental or irresistibly market-driven.

The authors chart specific turning points in this process and name names of the people who made it happen. Hacker and Pierson paint them as corporate and financial buccaneers who figured out somewhere between Nixon and Clinton that Democrats in Congress are every bit as feckless and corruptible as Republicans.

Galbraith, the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, describes these new robber barons as predators with “no intrinsic loyalty to any country”—sworn enemies, in fact, of the very concept of community.

“As an ideological matter,” he writes, “it is fair to say that the very concept of public purpose is alien to, and denied by, the leaders and the operatives of this coalition.”

I wish I could argue.