February 2008 Archives

Let's make the most of this beautiful day.

    

I was driving home from the television station tonight thinking about just what races are going to be important on March 4th.

I typically insist I am not in this business for the politics. The usual platitudes bore the life out of me. Yet here I am, at almost 2 a.m., writing about politics and political races next week. Who woulda thunk?

First off, I've got to wonder about the Dawnna Dukes race over in House District 46. I never thought that the vote for Craddick was a fatal flaw -- heck, what Dem didn't vote for Craddick at one time or another with the exception of Lon Burnam? -- but with one scandal after another piling up lately, I have to wonder: Are we about to lose the only African-American in the Travis County delegation? I think old timers are frustrated, even irritated, with Dukes for not jumping off the Craddick bandwagon late in the last session.

When Pat Haggerty marched out during that surreal late-night session, why wasn't Dukes with him? When Patrick Rose -- who has sided with Republicans as often as Dems -- finally chose to disengage from Craddick, why wasn't Dukes by his side? For someone with impeccable timing, Dukes made some serious mistakes, one local Dem leader told me at an endorsement session.

The cynics say that Dukes has jobs tied to Craddick allies. Well, heck, if that was true, surely the woman would be in a better financial position than she is right now. Even now, I have to wonder how much she has benefited from her position as a lawmaker. Frankly, many of Austin's high-profile minority inner-circle contractors got a piece of the CTRMA pie. I think one person told me it was the cost of doing business in the city and to gain the goodwill of the various stakeholder groups. It was a lot of goodwill...

I will make this observation: I think Dukes squandered  a key opportunity last session to cement her role in the Travis County delegation. Of all the members of the Travis County delegation, it was Dukes and Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos who stepped up to represent the interests of state employees. With Gonzo's departure, Dukes had every opportunity to step up to the plate. And, to my recollection, nothing much happened. I would have expected her to be front and center on the TIERS issue.... if only to provide a voice for state employees. 

I think the chips will fall where they may. Brian Thompson has stacked up endorsements -- and a rather half-hearted Statesman endorsement -- but it's still not clear to me how many of those people who endorsed Thompson actually live in HD 46. I guess we're going to find out next week, aren't we, just how gentrified East Austin has become. Austin's African-American base already is unraveling to the point where we can't draw a single-member district. (Sigh.)

The second race... of course... is Pat Hardy's primary challenge for her State Board of Education seat. I don't have a clue how this one is going to turn out. Does Barney Maddox have the network of supporters -- either with or without Terri Leo -- to provide a significant challenge to Hardy? I don't know.

Hardy often has said she pulls part of her base from Democrats. If that's the case, then she may have some worries about the primary. What Democratic primary voter is going to crossover in this election cycle?

Going back to look at Hardy's election history... if that's any clue in all this... She was elected in 2002 in a field of 3 candidates and re-elected unopposed in 2004. I see her closest challenger, Warren Norrad, has run for a number of offices. So I don't find him to be of the same ilk as Maddox, who now has a key supporter in Donna Garner, who saw her proposal for English-language arts curriculum go down in flames during the recent SBOE meeting.

I haven't talked to Hardy about her primary strategy, but I would suspect Hardy would call in reinforcements if she expected to be taken down by a serious challenger. And by reinforcements, I mean the teacher groups who recognized her support of Diane Patrick.Looking through the archive, I was reminded that the Patrick-Grusendorf showdown was a high-dollar endeavor. Hard to believe it was only two years ago.

Since I was sitting here, I went ahead and pulled Maddox and Hardy's campaign finance reports.Maddox had to loan himself $55,000, which doesn't suggest to me he has a strong base. Looks like there is some major mailings going on in the Maddox campaign. On Hardy's side, Hardy has raised very little and spent very little. Stay tuned to that race. I'm wondering how it will turn out.

Input or output? Republicans can't seem to decide which end they want to control on the education front.

It seems to me -- and it made a great deal of sense at the time when I heard an eon ago -- that the philosophy of this generation of Republican leadership in Texas was to tell schools what they expected to see in results and leave it to the schools to determine the best way to meet those goals.

A hundred years or so ago in Texas in the Age of Meno ... or so it seems... we were talking about outcome-based education. What should all students know? What standards should they meet? That's the state's job. How do we get there? What expectations and curriculum do we need to meet that goal? That's the district's job. Or so I thought. Maybe I don't have it straight in my mind. 

Because it seems to me that the Legislature and the Texas Education Agency just can't keep their hands off local school districts.You set an expectation for fiscal responsibility for school districts and even a rating system; then you have to go in and muck around with that half-baked 65 percent proposal. You set standards for math and science achievement, but then that's not enough, and you have to require 4 years of math and science on a diploma... and tell kids with a "basic" diploma they can't get into college. Where does it end?

The latest is The Commissioner's proposal for tailored diploma plan. I think the research is truly there for a getting a child on a particular path towards a goal as early as possible in high school. I remember sitting down with my parents and my counselor in ninth grade and mapping out a path... that would eventually be replaced about three more times once I took my first journalism class.  I'm sure it's good that children start to see where they need to go at the age of 14.... so you're not paying for four different majors in college.

Maybe my own high school experience gets in the way. Unlike The Commissioner -- who has spoken openly about his unhappy high school experience being pigeonholed into vocational education -- I had a great time in high school. Okay, I wasn't the prom queen. But I took second-year science and dabbled in the debate team and served as a band officer and ... yeah... even quit my job as editor of my high school newspaper my senior year when my work with Key Club got to be more than I could handle.

Somehow the whole "this way to your diploma" just smacks of tracking to me. Like being pigeonholed into DECA, told your future is best-served stacking boxes or something. But I recognize that's just my personal feelings getting involved.The bigger picture on this -- the policy picture on this -- is whose responsibility should this be?  

Under the outcomes-based education framework, I would assume that this diploma path should be driven at the local level. And maybe it would be the state's job to give districts a strong nudge towards the research, create a diploma label and provide a good marketing campaign for schools to use.

Instead, we have the state in our classrooms again. And if that's going to be the case, let's just say it. The Republicans .... acting just like Democrats... can't keep their hands off education because they don't trust schools to do their job. And instead of setting out expectations and achievement levels for schools and school districts to reach, they're going to reach in and do the counselors' job for them.