Neal McCluskey, Fox News:
There is more. Scott Brister was a trial judge in Harris County before being elected to the court. I thought he was a smart and fair judge.Anyone who has tracked the outbreak of lawsuits challenging states’ education funding over the last several years knows about the Texas miracle: A few weeks ago, the Texas Supreme Court declared that educational “adequacy” is not synonymous with “more money.”
Need proof of divine intervention? First, states across the country have been losing adequacy suits like the one in Texas for years; just last February, New York’s Supreme Court ordered the state to increase education funding by a whopping $23.3 billion over four years.
Next, while people who realize that better schools don’t simply rise out of ever-bigger mountains of cash are accustomed to having their views relegated to dissenting opinions, they are never in the majority’s opinions—until now. Indeed, educational sanity could be found in both the Texas court’s minority and majority opinions.
According to the majority, “While the end-product of public education is related to the resources available for its use ... more money does not guarantee better schools or more educated students.” The Court also accurately says that, “structural changes, and not merely increased funding, are needed in the public education system.”
Yet despite the wisdom of the majority, it was still the minority—lone dissenting justice Scott A. Brister—who cut to the chase. Brister noted that all the plaintiffs in the case were school districts, not parents, thus disqualifying the suit because the state constitution’s “education guarantee is a right that belongs to school children rather than school districts.”
The point was especially important because special interest groups entrenched in districts—administrators, teacher unions, etc.—are too often concerned with their desires, and block what Brister believes is essential to make education work: competition. “Even formerly communist countries recognize how efficiency is produced,” he observed, “not by higher taxes, and not be state control, but by freedom for competition.”
Having dodged a bullet, and with the Court’s opinion in hand, political leaders in Texas have begun formulating ways to fix the schools. Their suggestions include both good and bad ideas that are worth pondering by lawmakers of other states.
First the good. Rep. Kent Grusendorf, an Arlington Republican who chairs the House education committee, said his committee will look at a number of reforms, including school choice, merit pay for teachers, and curbing school district lobbying.
...
Comments
Post a Comment