Snake Oil

It took a little longer than promised, but sure enough the California-based private space outfit SpaceX is soaking up good press since its successful robo-mission last month to restock the space station and splash back to Earth.

While the company was gearing up for that mission, the news broke that it’s seriously considering building its own launch site in South Texas, on a 50-acre stretch of private property on the beach at the end of State Highway 4 in Cameron County. It’s one of three possible sites where the company could launch its Falcon rocket, along with Florida and Puerto Rico. Those are all southern U.S. sites where rockets could launch east over water.

The announcement about Cameron County didn’t come from SpaceX—one of the biggest players in the private space movement—but from the Federal Aviation Administration, which announced it would study how a launch site would affect the surrounding environment. They’d begin, they said, by asking for input from locals.

Last Tuesday, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department offered up their thoughts, with a 12-page letter from the agency’s Deputy Executive Director Ross Melinchuk. He lists 34 rare and protected species that could be affected by the SpaceX project, “if suitable habitat is present,” (his italics) including sea turtles, snakes and, appropriately, three falcon species.

While the SpaceX project would be on a strip of privately owned land, it’s surrounded by Boca Chica State Park, at the end of the Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Corridor. According to Melinchuk, the launch site would be 300 feet from park property. Noise, heat and vibration, from the launches could all cause trouble for animals living so close, he writes—but that’s not all. Fences around the SpaceX site could get in the way of ocelot migration. Bright lights around the launchpad could lure sea turtles onto the roads. Or a fuel spill, a launch mishap or a tourist’s stray cigarette butt could burn the whole place down.

Luke Metzger at Environment Texas first heard about the SpaceX plans from Parks and Wildlife last week, and promptly sounded the alarm. On Friday, they began a letter-writing campaign to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “Don’t build spaceport inside a wildlife refuge,” is the suggested subject line.

“There’s so few places we’ve set aside,” Metzger said over the phone today. “It’s just inappropriate to have an industrial development in the middle of a wildlife refuge.”

SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham has argued that Cape Canaveral, for instance, is also right near a wildlife refuge—but Metzger says that doesn’t make it safe. “There’s a billion-dollar environmental cleanup effort going on at the NASA facilities in South Florida, and how that’s impacted the environment is something we still don’t know yet.”

Though they’ve already launched their petition drive, Metzger says he’s still learning just what kind of trouble the launch site could cause, especially relative to other heavy industrial sites. “It’s kinda hard to compare to something else, because it’s pretty unique. We don’t have a lot of rocket launch pads in Texas.”

That’s something the Texas Space Alliance is hoping to change—its leaders say Texas just isn’t doing enough to attract space business, and that SpaceX is a golden opportunity. The Brownsville Economic Development Council has been trying hard to show SpaceX what a welcome neighbor they’d be. In April, their vice president Gilbert Salinas told me the SpaceX project “is what we call a game-changer. It could totally change the face of our community.”

Metzger warns that betting on the space business is going to mean betting against the nature tourism industry that’s already developed in the Rio Grande Valley. He cites a Texas A&M study that said birdwatchers, hikers and campers generate $300 million a year for the entire Valley.

And the resistance to SpaceX isn’t isolated to one Austin-based environmental group. At the blog Save Boca Chica Beach, Bobby Wightman-Cervantes is rallying the local resistance to the space boosters. “We are not a bunch of loud locals and we are not opposing SpaceX for publicity,” he writes in one post. “We care for Boca Chica and do not want it destroyed by SpaceX and those easily impressed with shiny objects.”

A Texas Parks and Wildlife diagram shows the proposed SpaceX locations in Cameron County (in purple), along with 1.5-mile (red) and 5-mile (blue) buffers.

Update (9:13 a.m.): With Election Day behind us, it’s safe to say that tidal wave of pro-school sentiment didn’t quite materialize, either in the state House races or at the State Board of Education.

At the SBOE, the night was nearly a wash in the ongoing tug of war between the hard-line conservatives and the more moderate Republicans. Gail Lowe, a longtime member in the latter camp, lost her seat to retired Lampasas teacher Sue Melton, a former state president of the teachers grow; Association of Texas Professional Educators.

The very conservative David Bradley has fended off a challenge—his first in a quarter of a century on the board—from former Lege staffer Rita Ashley. Thomas Ratliff, a (relatively!) moderate Republican from Mount Pleasant will hold onto his seat, as well.

The far-righters will gain a vote in the Panhandle, where their candidate of choice Marty Rowley eged out former Amarillo ISD board president Anette Carlisle by just over 1,000 votes.

The only moderate Republican who’s been ousted from the board is George Clayton, the Dallas ISD teacher who would have become the state’s first candidate to win office as an openly gay Republican. He nearly got into a runoff for his seat, but instead it’ll go to either Tincy Miller—who held the seat for eons before Clayton beat her in 2010—or tea party favorite Gail Spurlock, who’s found of pointing out that the pilgrims were communists.

Round Rock ISD teacher Rebecca Osborne will face former school board member Tom Maynard in a runoff for the seat now held by moderate Marsha Farney.

In the Texas House, Rob Eissler’s ouster by Texas Home School Coalition-backed Steve Toth is the change with by far the greatest implications for public ed.

But as a new House leadership forms around public school policy, there’ll be a handful of freshmen there to lend their school administration experience—and a few new voices pushing for tight budgets and school choice.

Magnolia ISD board member Cecil Bell Jr. won his bid for an open seat, Lufkin ISD board president Trent Ashby knocked out Rep. Marva Beck, and on the Democratic side, former Eagle Pass ISD trustee Poncho Nevárez nabbed his seat without a runoff.

In all, seven of the 21 House candidates backed by the Texas Parent PAC won seats last night, all but one of them newcomers to the Lege. Five more will head to runoffs in July, and nine of their picks are out.

Many of the group’s biggest recipients of campaign cash lost last night, but Marshall mayor Chris Paddie’s campaign to send Rep. Wayne Christian packing was a major exception. Christian was backed by home-schoolers, and targeted by public ed groups for his role in last year’s budget cuts. Realtors groups spent even more on Paddie to help show Christian the door, but he’d also been one of the House’s biggest anti-choice and anti-LGBT crusaders.

Update (11:02 p.m.): House Public Ed Chair Rob Eissler is out, for real, bumped by Tea Party Insurgent Steve Toth, who  campagined on a promise of cutting the bureaucracy from public ed. In a casual conversation, Eissler would agree with him in principle, but his ties to House speaker Joe Straus and his generally moderate ways made Eissler a big target this primary season.

So the next Legislature will be down a few school finance experts, which is no big deal, really, because it’s not like they’ll have to come up with an entirely new system for funding Texas schools. Well, they might. But still. Jimmie Don Aycock looks to be a quick study, and Arlington Rep. Diane Patrick has won her race tonight handily. All of a sudden, they’ll be two of the Legislature’s top experts on public schools next year.

Update (10:00 p.m.): The night has been good so far to the State Board of Education incumbents in the highest-profile races, with far-righters David Bradley, Barbara Cargill and Ken Mercer all leading in their races. Thomas Ratliff has the edge in his race, too, 52-48 over former SBOE member and Don McLeroy acolyte Randy Stevenson.

The biggest upset of the night on the board, though, has got to be San Antonio Democrat Michael Soto, who has lost his primary race to challenger Marisa Perez. Perez’s was a quiet campaign—she “essentially ran no race,” as Texas Freedom Network’s Dan Quinn put it, not raising or spending a dime. She’s a social worker in San Antonio. Soto had been one of the board’s toughest critics of charter school applications.

Update (9:26 p.m.): The big news so far in the public edusphere is that House Public Education chair Rob Eissler—who was thought to be in a fairly safe race—is trailing his tea party-backed opponent Steve Toth, who runs a pool installation and service business. Without Eissler around next session, the hole in the Legislature’s education know-how would be much, much bigger. They’ve already lost Rep. Scott Hochberg and Senate Public Education chair Florence Shapiro to retirement-slash-the-private-sector.

The below-mentioned Trent Ashby, a school board president with major backing from teachers’ and parents’ groups, is making major headway against incumbent Marva Beck in Lufkin, but most other Parent PAC-backed candidates are struggling early. The memorably named Mineola ISD superintendent Mary Lookadoo hasn’t made much of a dent in her bid to upset Rep. Greenville lawyer George Alexander, backed by Parent PAC in his attempt to bump Dan Flynn out of office, is down 60-40 in his race.

 

Posted earlier: Between the monster school funding cuts dealt by the Legislature last year, a popular uprising against school testing and the biggest school finance suit ever against the state, Texas’ public education leaders have plenty to get riled about.

Texas Parent PAC and other pro-education groups have poured big money into races they care about this year, propping up former school board members and challengers to folks they’d like to bump out of the Lege. The investment looks to be paying off in Lufkin ISD board president Trent Ashby, who’s up 76-24 in early voting, in his big to oust freshman Rep. Marva Beck.

Former Lewisville ISD board member Amber Fulton is down by the same margin against Frisco City Council member Pat Fallon, a guy who made light of her school experience and said he’d be a more reliable tax figher. Fulton’s hoping she convinced voters that fighting for schools doesn’t mean more spending.

On the State Board of Education, all 15 seats are up for grabs this year, with some longtime incumbents facing big primary challenges tonight. Those includes members of both the hard-right Intelligent Design-backers and the moderate Republican Darwinistas.

SBOE inclumbent Thomas Ratliff, one of the latter, sees that with so much talk about friends of public schools putting up a fight fighting this primary seasonm they’d better deliver. “It could be a hugely good or hugely bad,” he says. “After all this hew and cry about the cuts and this overemphasis on testing, if they don’t get their people elected, they’ll be ignored forever.”

Police departments and crime labs in Texas still have a ways to go before clearing out their rape kit backlogs. Like, a really long way. Most of them haven’t told the state yet how many they have, though they were supposed to do so last fall.

The trouble with the law creating a new timeline for rape kit testing is that it required more work from police and labs, but didn’t provide extra funding. That’s also the only way it was going to pass in the Legislature last year: totally unfunded.

Earlier this month, though, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn was in San Antonio trying to drum up support for a measure that would commit more federal money to clearing out the backlog. It sounded like just the sort of answer Texas police departments have been waiting for.

At the Bexar County Courthouse, Cornyn laid out the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry Act he plans to introduce in the Senate, which includes more grants for studying and clearing out rape kit backlogs, and a new nationwide registry of sexual assault evidence. As the San Antonio Express-News described it:

The legislation would build upon the Debbie Smith Act of 2004, which expanded the Combined DNA Index System, otherwise known as CODIS, and created grants for states to reduce testing backlogs. The SAFER Act would shift the already existing money so 75 percent of it is focused on rape kit testing instead of 40 percent, Cornyn said.

That’s how it worked when Cornyn introduced the same language late last month, as an amendment to the Republicans’ version of the Violence Against Women Act. As the Dallas Morning News wrote:

Cornyn’s budget-neutral amendment would increase the proportion of grant money doled out under the Violence Against Women Act that would have to be directed to rape kit testing and research, but it does not specify what other programs would be cut as a result.

So it may not be new money exactly.

It’s worth noting that this idea didn’t just spring fully-formed from Cornyn’s head.

The SAFER Act, as worded in Cornyn’s amendment, is the same language introduced in the U.S. House each of the last two years by New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney. Last year, it was co-sponsored by Texas Republican Ted Poe.

Like that bill, Cornyn’s amendment got support from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or RAINN, as well as the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault.

But the forensics workers who process all that evidence aren’t on board. In a newsletter, the American Society of Crime Lab Directors president Jill Spriggs thanked the group’s Texas members for their help dissuading their representatives. “While the intent was sound- the actual implementation of the Act would have taken funds away from processing of rape kits,” Spriggs wrote.

The crime lab directors I spoke to about the new Texas law—the unfunded one that sets deadlines for testing all of a police department’s rape kits—didn’t like the idea that every scrap of evidence in storage was supposed to be processed and run through a database, whether or not police needed it to make a case. “I think it’s unfortunate that the law has taken any police work out of this,” Austin PD crime lab DNA supervisor Cassie Carradine told me.

Laying out his amendment on the Senate floor late last month, Cornyn suggested that he understood that concern, but he still wanted to see all the kits run through a dedicated national registry, connect serial rapists with their crimes across the country.

“There are two distinct types of rape kit backlogs: the well-known backlog of untested rape kits that have already been submitted for testing, and the hidden backlog of kits in law enforcement storage that have not been submitted for testing,” Cornyn said. “This amendment would help us learn more about this hidden backlog and ultimately help state and local law enforcement officials to end it.”

Conventional wisdom goes that charter schools are models of efficiency, of “doing more with less.” They cost taxpayers less than traditional schools, charge no tuition, and freed from big district bureaucracy the best of them turn out kids better prepared for college.

That’s the reasoning behind one of the school finance suits in Texas right now, filed by folks who say what matters most isn’t how much money schools get, but how they spend it. A more efficient system, they say, is one with far more charter schools.

But public funding is just part of the picture for charter schools, many of which get major money from private donors like the Gates Foundation to support their programs. This private money can account for a huge difference between charters.

According to a trio of education researchers who looked at what charters are actually spending in Texas, all that classroom innovation can cost even more per student than a traditional public school. Sometimes much more.

Their report, released on Saturday, was published by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, a center for education reform research that gets some funding from teachers’ groups, and often takes a critical look at the charter school industry. In a field that’s long on reform boosterism, the center is one of the most prominent alternatives to the charter network PR machines.

Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker and Ken Libby and Kathryn Wiley at the University of Colorado compared schools run by 21 Texas charter school networks—including some of the largest, best established charters in the state, like KIPP, Uplift, IDEA and Harmony—to traditional public schools in the same area, serving roughly the same number of similar students. They looked at spending reports from 2008 to 2010.

The researchers picked Texas, they write, because it’s one of the few states that reports what each of its public schools spends each year. They also considered Ohio and New York, two others that report spending at the school level.

While Ohio’s charters are generally spending less per student than traditional public schools nearby, the researchers found a wide range of spending from one charter to the next in Texas and New York. “Overall, charter spending variation is large as is the spending of traditional public schools,” they write. Especially in Texas.

Some Texas charters spend far less than traditional public schools—50 percent less, in some cases—but most spent more.

Schools in the Houston-based KIPP network top their spending rankings in Texas. KIPP is one of the best regarded networks of charter schools in the country, with its “no excuses” philosophy built on high expectations and extra time in the classroom. It also runs some of the most expensive programs, according to these researchers, propped up by big donors and foundations. In the 2008-2009 school year, KIPP Aspire Academy in San Antonio reported raking in donations of $11,000 per student—nearly twice what the average public school spent in the study.

KIPP schools in Austin, San Antonio and Dallas spent between $750 and $1,700 more per student than traditional schools, according to their reports to the Texas Education Agency—that’s between 11 and 25 percent more. Based on their IRS filings, though—a more comprehensive measure of their costs—KIPP spent almost $6,500 more per student. (Throughout the study, one of the researchers’ greatest frustrations seems to be the huge difference between what Texas charters reported to the state and what they reported to the IRS.)

All that extra money can be great news for the kids who like being at a KIPP school, but it’s bad news if you’re hoping to expand KIPP’s model to public schools—which is what the charter movement is supposed to be about. KIPP middle schools spend around $2,000 more per student than traditional schools, the researchers found, and with 36,000 middle schoolers in the public system, Houston ISD would have to pay an extra $72 million to run the KIPP model just in its middle school.

In fact, Houston ISD has been using KIPP-influenced reforms in a hand-picked set of high schools for its Apollo 20 program. Responding to the study on Twitter, Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier seemed to agree with what it found: “HISD spends about $2,000 more per pupil in our Apollo 20 secondary schools. It cost[s] more to educate some children.”

But KIPP isn’t having it. The day the report came out, they released a statement saying the researchers “manufactured” their results, and that correcting for their errors would “virtually eliminate the KIPP Houston expenditure gap.”

The majority of KIPP schools included in the report were not fully mature schools, which inflates per pupil costs relative to district schools with full enrollment. The researchers also included costs that they did not attribute to districts, such as interest on debt service, depreciation, central administrative expenses, and KIPP Through College – a student support program for KIPP graduates.

On Monday, Bruce Baker replied to KIPP’s skewering of his research. “We have not said anywhere in our report that there’s anything wrong with spending more to do a good job,” Baker writes, and he’s clearly frustrated by the organization’s knee-jerk reaction to his work.

I guess what continues to perplex me most is the stance that KIPP takes whenever anyone writes anything about them, in a report not sponsored by them or by one of their major funders (some of which are quite good).[...]I actually hesitate to write about KIPP and perhaps that’s just what they want. Apparently no one should write about them that hasn’t been paid by them to write about the[m].

The study, and KIPP and Baker’s responses, are full of much more nuanced numbers on what a charter school education really costs. There’s a particularly huge discrepancy between what Texas charters tell the state they’ve spent and the larger totals they report in their taxes—much bigger than in New York. In Ohio there’s a big difference too, but in the opposite direction.

This uncertainty in the data leads the researchers to a larger point: that we can’t simply trust that charters are good models of “doing more with less,” certainly not without a better look at what they really cost. It’s worth knowing if the innovations charter schools are testing out would ever be possible in schools that don’t have the Gates Foundation’s help.

And if it’s this hard for bunch of academics to get these numbers, think of how tough it is for parents to get a good perspective on what’s being spent on their own kids.

It was a 911 call much like the one George Zimmerman dialed in Sanford, Florida, in February—the voice of a defiant man—that announced to the world, back in 2007, that Texas had become a “Stand Your Ground” state, where killing a person is justifiable if you can claim you were afraid.

In November 2007, two months after Texas’ new “castle doctrine” law took effect, a 61-year-old retiree named Joe Horn called to report a pair of burglars in the home next to his.

“I’ve got a shotgun,” Horn told the dispatcher straightaway. “Do you want me to stop them?”

“Nope, don’t do that,” the dispatcher replied. “No property worth shootin’ somebody over, OK?”

Horn stayed on the line for minutes, waiting for the police to arrive, telling the dispatcher how disgusted he was, how scary it was to know burglars were at work in his neighborhood.

It’s not that he wanted to shoot the intruders next door, he said, “but if I go out there to see what the hell’s going on, what choice am I going to have?” The dispatcher told him again to wait for the police, not to go outside with his shotgun, that nobody needed to die for stealing.

Horn was unconvinced. “The laws have been changed…since September the first, and I have a right to protect myself,” Horn said. “I ain’t gonna let them get away with this shit. I’m sorry, this ain’t right, buddy … They got a bag of loot … Here it goes buddy, you hear the shotgun clicking and I’m going.”

“Move, you’re dead,” he told the men, then he fired three times, killing both men, and returned to the phone in his house.

“I had no choice, they came in the front yard with me, man, I had no choice,” he told the dispatcher. Police arrived seconds later. Horn wasn’t arrested, nor was he indicted by a grand jury that later considered the case.

“In Texas, a person has a right to use deadly force in certain circumstances to protect property … and that’s basically what the grand jurors had to deal with,” Harris County District Attorney Ken Magidson said at the time. State Sen. Jeff Wentworth—the San Antonio Republican who beat out House members Joe Driver and Debbie Riddle for the privilege of carrying the castle doctrine bill in the Legislature—suggested the law didn’t apply in the Horn case because, as he told the Houston Chronicle, it “wasn’t his castle” Horn was protecting.

Horn became a right-wing hero and, because the men he shot were Colombians in the U.S. illegally, the story became one about illegal immigration and so-called sanctuary cities like Houston. At a 2009 tea party rally at the Alamo, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck introduced Horn before a cheering crowd. “I’m a Texan,” Horn began. “I love it. I can’t help it. I thought what I thought was the right thing to do, and I did it. It’s unfortunate that it turned out the way that it did, but that’s just the way that it is.”

Now, in the wake of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, some Texas lawmakers are planning to roll back the state’s castle doctrine—either to repeal it altogether, or to discourage armed homeowners from enthusiastically greeting strangers with the barrel of a gun.

In the last few years there have been plenty of questionable castle-defense shootings in Texas indicative of the kind of shoot-first culture:

• In 2010, James Arlie Knight III in Texarkana allegedly shot a 15-year-old African-American boy who’d been hiding from a bully on Knight’s porch. Knight, a 60-year-old white man, later told police he’d heard a bang on his door in the middle of the night, so “his adrenaline and nerves went up,” according to the Texarkana Gazette.

  The boy told police he’d asked Knight to call the police for him, but that Knight stood over him with a laser-sighted pistol pointed at him, said, “I’m about to kill you,” and kicked him in the face. Knight then apparently shot the boy twice in the back. The boy survived, with a lacerated kidney and liver, and two wounds in his back. It took more than two years, but Knight was charged with aggravated assault last month.

• James Green, 29, rang the doorbell at what he thought was a friend’s house in late December 2011. It was 3:30 in the morning, and the doorbell woke up a woman who’d just bought the house and was inside alone. She called her husband, who was out of town, who suggested she get their gun, call 911 and check it out.

  She called 911, but before police arrived Green let himself through a back door and into the house, where the woman shot and killed him. She won’t face any charges for the shooting. “It’s really an unfortunate accident it wasn’t an intruder,” one of the woman’s neighbors told CBS 11.

• Enrique Recio III, a 23-year-old Texas State University student wrecked his car in a northwest Austin neighborhood around 3 a.m. in early February.

  Fred Yazdi, 47, found Recio hiding under his wife’s car in their driveway. “If you flee, I’m going to shoot you,” Yazdi said, according to police, and when Recio tried to run Yazdi shot him three times.

  Now Yazdi is facing murder charges in WIlliamson County, but District Attorney John Bradley has said the grand jury will have to consider the case in light of Texas’ castle doctrine protections.

  One of Yazdi’s neighbors told the Austin TV station KVUE that she wasn’t too surprised by what happened. “He said he wouldn’t hesitate (to shoot) if somebody was on his property,” she told the station. “It was just a matter of time.”

On his blog, state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said he will file a bill to repeal Texas’ Castle Doctrine law, calling it unnecessary and saying it’s only led to more violence. Last month, the American Legislative Exchange Council abandoned its push to spread “stand your ground” legislation across the country, after providing model bill language to Texas andmore than a dozen states, 

Sen. Royce West announced at a South Dallas rally for Trayvon Martin that he’d file a bill named for the slain Florida teen—not to repeal the 2007 law, but to limit its use.

“Repeal is a tough sell,” says West’s spokesman Kelvin Bass, so West’s office asked police how they’d like to see the law change. That’s how they came up with the proposals: send all deadly force cases to a grand jury, collect the murder weapon at the scene, no matter what, and revoke the shooter’s concealed carry permit while the case is investigated. “It’s an approach that’s consistent with law enforcement practices,” he says.

West laid out his hopes for the law in a statement in early April: “When tensions escalate and situations turn fatally tragic, we should have a thoughtful, consistent and thorough procedure in place to examine the incident in question.”

In Texas, even that could be a tough sell.