Snake Oil

King Street Patriots attorney Brock Akers joined the group's founder Catherine Engelbrecht Monday night.

Indiana lawyer James Bopp, the legal mastermind behind Citizens United, has made it his quest to inject corporate money into state-level politics too, after his success at the federal level.

Last week, his efforts in Texas suffered a setback when Travis County District Judge John Dietz upheld the Texas election law against corporate contributions to candidates, ruling that the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots behaved more like a PAC than a nonprofit group. In 2010, the group worked with Republicans to train poll watchers, and hosted forums for Republican candidates without inviting Democrats.

(Texas elections may not always look like grassroots affairs, but our longstanding law against direct corporate contributions to candidates and officeholders is still on the books.)

The Campaign Legal Center—a New York-based group tracking efforts to open elections to corporate influence—called Dietz’s ruling “the latest in a string of victories against an aggressive nationwide litigation blitz aimed at overturning a host of state campaign finance laws” after Citizens United. The Houston Chronicle ran it under the headline, “Judge rules tea party group a PAC, not a nonprofit.”

But inside the King Street Patriots bubble, needless to say, that’s not how the story got told. Days after issuing a statement pledging to appeal, the group’s Liberty Institute-provided counsel was in Houston Monday night, to tell the gathered Patriots just what the ruling meant.

For starters, said their lawyer Brock Akers, it didn’t mean much. Joined by KSP’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht, he told the crowd this sort of claptrap is just the sort of thing you’d expect from a liberal judge in Austin—but that everyone knew all along that this case would be decided in appeals.

This may have been one silly little battle, but make no mistake about it, Akers said, the stakes in this war remain mighty high.

“This is God’s work here, and God, I believe, ultimately honors the notion that freedom loving people need the opportunity to speak freely and to live in a free society that does not clamp down on their opportunity to say, ‘Hey, that’s not right,’” Akers told Engelbrecht. “So that’s ultimately our risk. that’s where we’re going.”

“What we’re trying to establish in a more clear way than the Citizens United decision was able to establish is an atmosphere for groups like yours,” Akers said, “to participate effectively and proactively under the guise of making sure that everything is up and up in the election process.”

If Dietz’s ruling holds, he said, the Patriots would indeed have to create a PAC to handle their political activity. “That isn’t an entirely negative thing but there are different limits on a PAC that we would prefer not to impose on ourselves, because that’s not what we are.” Chief among those: disclosing where their money’s coming from, which they’ve managed to avoid so far.

By losing, Engelbrecht said, “We could have made vulnerable one of the greatest rebirths of patriotism in the history of our country.”

Engelbrecht said she’d been hearing from all kinds of confused supporters who’d seen the Chronicle headline and took it to mean that the group had suddenly lost its nonprofit status. Folks were wondering about the damages Dietz ruled the group owes the Democrats—twice the value of the group’s illegal political expenditures.

She didn’t sound surprised. Once again, she said, the “mainstream” media was showing its hand. “We saw it in the Trayvon case with MSNBC,” she said, and in recent coverage of President Obama. More than anything, she said, “It’s been a study in the way the narrative is told.”

Patrick Michels

It's tough to get pumped about school finance in Texas these days.

If last year’s Save Texas Schools rally was a show of force—10,000 activists uniting to fight for education—its follow-up at the Capitol last weekend was, well, something else.

There were far fewer people at the group’s second annual rally at the Capitol on Saturday than in March 2011. The ones who did turn up were treated to a program that ran long, veering wildly at times away from school funding. Front-loaded with Democratic lawmakers warning of a partisan onslaught—or warnings that Republicans are turning school funding into a partisan issue—the rally petered out slowly after more than two hours, ending with a long tail of parents and students on the bill to share war stories with a few dozen stragglers.

Since the Legislature cut $5.4 billion from public education last year, Save Texas Schools volunteers have fanned out across the state, holding workshops on school finance, and preparing parents and teachers to hold legislators accountable for their record on education. That’s where they’ve been most active in the past year, and of course, it’s harder to draw teachers and parents back to an empty Capitol, especially just days before STAAR testing in high school.

Saturday’s program began with lawmakers recalling how the Legislature stymied their attempts to put more money into schools. San Antonio Rep. Mike Villarreal and Sen. Leticia Van de Putte both decried the way Republican lawmakers bent to pressure from fiscal conservative groups and then tried to suggest they put more money into the school system, not less.

Van de Putte said there’s no excuse for lawmakers who hide behind tricky math instead of fixing the broken system. “They’re worried about the report card from these little groups when they should be really concerned about the report cards that our kids bring home,” she said. “You see, they don’t like teachers ‘cause they don’t really believe in the job that teachers do, ‘cause they don’t value children.”

State Sen. Wendy Davis recalled her filibuster of a school spending bill that sent the Legislature into a special session last year.

Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, recalled how quickly Gov. Rick Perry dismissed the idea of calling a special session on spending some of the state’s Rainy Day Fund on schools. “Governor Perry recently said, and I quote, I would be stunned if there is an outcry from the people of this state,” Davis said, drawing some of the day’s loudest cheers. “We are crying out, Governor Perry. We believe in opportunity and we are demanding that it come.”

Organizers said they counted more than 4,500 in the crowd over the course of the rally (they counted by handing out one colored dot sticker to each person who came), but Capitol police pegged the attendance at around 1,000 people. (That’s about what I figured for the crowd, at its peak.) Americans for Prosperity Texas’ Peggy Venable was live-trolling the rally on Twitter, and put the attendance at around 500.

After the rally, its organizer Allen Weeks told me he’d figured the crowd would be smaller this time around, now that the enthusiastic multitudes have run headlong into the harsh, unfeeling reality of life at the Lege.
“Last year, it was the shock,” Weeks said, that drew so many demonstrators. “I think also, people thought, ‘Oh if I just come out, it will cause them to change.’ … I think anyone who’s been out here knows, once the machine starts, it’s in motion till the next election.”

“These people are exhausted, and we’ve got people coming in from Alpine and Corpus. So I think you saw 5,000 really hardcore, motivated parents, students, teachers,” he said—the battle-scarred few who still haven’t had enough.

Save Texas Schools leader Allen Weeks

The crowd also included campaign workers drumming up interest in candidates like Congressman Lloyd Doggett, Austin mayor Lee Leffingwell and challenger Brigid Shea, and folks circulating petitions for emergency medical workers’ causes. The rally included a designated time slot for Occupy Austin to lead a callback “mic check” chant, including a call for “justice for Trayvon” and a few minutes on the plight of state-funded higher education.

The popular backlash against state testing was in full effect as well; one of the most quoted lines was Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott’s remark last month that testing has become a “perversion.” State Board of Education member Thomas Ratliff was among the speakers who said the stakes of school testing are simply too high. Some signs in the crowd urged parents to boycott state testing altogether. Texas Parents Opt Out of State Tests director Edy Chamness was in the crowd interest in her cause. “Even if we’re broke, why does everything get cut except for the testing budget?” Chamness asked. “That’s my tax money, in a tube straight to Pearson,” she said, referring to the company with the $500 million contract to handle Texas school exams.

Weeks said he was encouraged by all the satellite causes drawn to his group’s rally.

“Whether they be budget cuts or testing, I think they all have kind of a common sense that there’s been somebody in charge of the agenda, and it hasn’t been us,” Weeks said. “Who decided cuts were best for Texas, that somehow a very wealthy state doesn’t have the money to fund education?”

“Teachers are tired right now because this has been a really stressful year—I mean they’re feeling the cuts,” Weeks said. “But we know, we just have to get to May 29th, and if 30 percent of teachers normally vote, if we can just have 60 percent of teachers vote, everything changes.”

Weeks greets SBOE member Thomas Ratliff at the podium, at the height of the rally.

A failing report card for Gov. Rick Perry in the crowd.

By the time the last speaker took the podium, most of the crowd had already hit the road.

Patrick Michels

Jeb Bush speaks at Trinity University Thursday night.

At a Thursday night talk in San Antonio, Jeb Bush wanted to talk about Mitt Romney and his brother’s book sales—but an African American father, a Trinity University professor, spoke for many when he told the former Florida governor that the self-defense measure he signed, which has since spread across the country, has had tragic consequences.

Bush’s endorsement of Mitt Romney this week came, as Dave Weigel at Slate pointed out, at a “sub-optimal” time politically, because suddenly Bush’s taste in candidates is hardly the most interesting thing about the former Florida governor. Not when his signature sits at the bottom of Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law, at the heart of the controversy around Trayvon Martin, the unarmed high school student shot by a neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Fla.

Bush signed the law in 2005 joined by, among others, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association—the group that helped get similar laws passed in 16 other states, including Texas in 2007. Florida’s current Gov. Rick Scott has launched a task force to reevaluate the Florida law.

While Scott has suggested taking another look at the law, Florida state Sen. Arthenia Joyner has said the Martin killing is exactly the sort of tragedy she warned about when the bill was up for debate. “When we passed the law, we said it portends horrific events when people’s lives were put into these situations, and my worst fears came to fruition,” Politifact recalled Wednesday. In 2005, they pointed out, state Rep. Ken Gottlieb warned that, “In a few years, you will be back trying to fix this bill.”

Between backing Romney for the nomination and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for VP, Bush hasn’t had much to say this week about “Stand Your Ground.” So at a speaking event Thursday night at San Antonio’s Trinity University—a broad-strokes chat about his fondness for Mexico, his tennis game and America’s place in the world—I asked him whether Martin’s killing had shaken his trust in the self-defense law he signed, given that the warnings that preceded the bill’s passage seem to have been proven right.

Bush said, first, that there weren’t any warnings like that before he signed the bill, and second, that—though it’s impossible to know what the grand jury might decide about George Zimmerman—he doubted the self-defense law would apply here, since Zimmerman seems to have pursued Martin, and wasn’t simply “standing his ground.”

Legal experts have argued that, by eliminating a duty to retreat before shooting, the law has broadened “self-defense” to the point where it could apply here. Five years after the law was passed, the Tampa Bay Times reported that the number of justifiable homicides in Florida had tripled.

“Over the last generation of time we’ve had dramatic declines in crime,” Bush said, “violent crime particularly, just as many places in the country, and part of it is that we have laws that are pretty tough.”

After fielding questions from the audience about his speech, a black man in a tan sport coat rose to an audience microphone, and asked Bush to elaborate on his thoughts about Trayvon Martin’s death, and the role of the law he signed. The man told Bush that when he hears Martin screaming in the 911 call, it’s his own sons’ voices that he hears. “It may not be the exact application of the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law,” he said, “but that is a real context that has to be dealt with, and I just want to know how you feel about that,” the man said.

“You’re absolutely right, and so the surprise to me is that this has taken three weeks before it garnered any attention that got the Justice Department or a grand jury to do what, normally, is done in a far quicker period of time,” Bush said, beginning a lengthy answer with a delicate pivot to an unlikely direction:

So by saying that the law is not going to be applied, does not mean that I don’t feel tremendous sadness when these things happen. I think we’ve made significant progress, but we’re not a colorblind society, and there still is racism. There’s no denying of that. And I would add for example that if you have brown skin, in some places these days where state laws have changed, you’ve got a feeling that, you know, this is a little different. So we have to work these things out, and it’s tragic, it’s completely tragic. This is not an isolated case, this happens on the streets of the United States way too much, there’s no question about it.

Now, as it relates to national identity, I think we do have something that other countries don’t, and that’s that we have ideals. And if those ideals are not met, then we need to have a conversation about that. But the idea of having a race-based national identity, like Japan does, or most of the Asian countries do, is a serious problem for them today. Japan is going to be in complete decline because its population is not going to be able to grow. They have a fertility rate that’s closer to one, and immigrants aren’t really allowed because race is their means by which they identify. It’s a beautiful culture, incredible history, but if they can’t open up and create a different standard of measuring nationhood, they’re going to be in serious trouble. I think we have that advantage, and when we go wrong, we should immediately say, ‘That is not an American value that just took place.’ And if we do that, I think we’re in a far better position.

While the crowd applauded, the man walked back to his seat and the next questioner began: “Governor, thanks for being here tonight, you’ve been a big hero of mine for quite some time….”

After the auditorium emptied out, I found the man who’d asked Bush what he thought about the Martin killing, Trinity business law and ethics professor William Burke.

“I felt it was my obligation to be here,” Burke said, “that he needs to know that there is no place where this question should not be addressed. And I think that fortunately he did recognize that it’s more than the application of the law.”

And so, it has to be addressed and it’s a serious problem and it’s just, even today, coming back from church after dropping my son off, I can’t help but look at the black kids walking to school, males, and they have their hoodies on. And this experience makes me look at them and worry about them. So that’s why I just wanted him to feel, it’s more than just an interpretation of a law. I mean, these barriers to survival have an impact on our culture, and the overall culture. You are dismissing contributions of people that can make a difference.

It’s the presumption that I could be just jogging and then if I bump into somebody, I don’t even have to have deadly force, they could use deadly force against me in Texas, and it would be upheld—and if you’re dead, it’s only one person’s word because the one that’s dead, even if they’re unarmed, there’s not a presumption anymore that they weren’t using deadly force or intimidating, even though they don’t have a gun or knife or anything like that.

As the crowd filed past us to the parking lots, Burke said that Bush wasn’t the only one he was trying to reach by bringing up Martin’s killing, or the law that could make it defensible.

“I really hope this is looked at again because I see it as just as vicious at the Emmett Till lynching for whistling at a white woman years ago,” Burke said. “I just think it’s important not only with the governor, but for the audience to know the depth of how this is significant to them.”

It’s exactly the kind of story, Burke said, that makes him worry about his three sons when they all move out of the house and into new cities.

“The kids always ask me, they say, ‘Dad, why are you still in a shirt and tie? … It is an armor. I mean, I wear it till basically I go to bed at the house—and that’s not the way that it should be. You look at Trayvon Martin and here’s a kid who’s intelligent, and just kind soul, A’s B’s loves math. You speak about the future, there’s a future there that’s lost,” Burke said.

“I was just hurt, I felt I had to be here to bring it up. It’s not just looking at the news nonstop. You think about it, and I hear, I hear his screams when he says, ‘No,’ and he shot him. And I think about my kids.”

This time last year, more than 10,000 people rallied outside the Capitol entreating lawmakers to spare the state’s education system from the harsh budget cuts some had proposed—to Save Texas Schools.

And though the Legislature passed a budget stripping billions from public education, the rally set the tone for months of activism from teachers, students and parents asking for a stronger, fairer system of paying for schools, and for politicians to dip into the state’s Rainy Day Fund to soften the blow to school budgets.

It was also, as Abby Rapoport mentioned at the time, an opportunity to enjoy apple slices, peanut butter crackers and a “positive hip-hop” performance with school leaders from across the state.

Saturday at noon, they’ll do it again. After a long bus ride into Austin, and a short march to the Capitol, school advocates from across the state will gather once again to urge lawmakers not to cut school spending any further—good timing, too, just days after a coalition of conservative groups made their case to keep on cuttin’ in 2013.

The lineup of speakers includes a handful of Democratic legislators, Northside ISD super John Folks, the Texas Association of School Boards’ 2011 Superintendent of the Year (and an Observer Tyrant’s Foe in November), plus Perrin-Whitt CISD superintendent John Kuhn—the man who fired up the crowd last year with this pledge to those who would use poor test scores to justify cutting public education: “I will march headlong into the teeth of your horrific blame machine and I will teach these kids.”

Allen Weeks, the “bookish former track coach” who leads Save Texas Schools (and got the Tyrant’s Foe treatment in May), took a few minutes this morning to chat about what’s changed for the group in a year, and what’s in store Saturday.

This year’s definitely about getting people to vote. Unless we’ve got legislators that strongly support public education, it’s going to be difficult to get anything changed. If anything, the 2013 budget climate if going to be, perhaps, even worse. We really have to get people in there that will fight strongly for public education if we’re going to see funding come back.

We’re nonpartisan, and we kinda keep more general—get out there and be involved in voting—but we’re definitely pointing people to whatever resources are out there to make sure people are informed about lawmakers’ records, more than “I support public schools.”

There’s been a strong backlash against high-stakes testing in STAAR’s first year—how much does all that figure into your message?

That’s gonna be a big part of Saturday—it really does go hand in hand with funding. We’ve seen lots of parents and students really, really upset.

This year they’ll spend an average of 28 to 40 days testing at the average school. Some of our schools are going to see more than 50 days—that’s more than a quarter of the school year that are testing. That’s just unacceptable.

Why are some schools spending so many more days on testing?

It really divides up, in some ways, between rich and poor schools. But schools that tend to always pass, there’s a lot less re-testing, where everybody passes the test. The schools that are more at risk have a lot more benchmark testing, various middle-of-the-year testing, and those schools tend to also be the places where the state does field testing.

It’s going to be interesting to have this rally so soon after some conservative groups got together and pushed to cut spending even more.

It’s great timing that they came out with that this week. It really shows that what they’re about is not just efficiency in public schools, what they’re really about is an attack on public education. I’m not sure if there’s a limit to how deep they would like to see these cuts go.

They’re out on the edge. What we’re trying to find is the Republican and Democratic public officials who are in the reasonable middle. Texas has been wrestling with it for a long time, and it’s going to take good reasonable conversations, not people who say, “Cut, cut.”

Michael Quinn Sullivan at Empower Texans has said 50 percent of the education dollar doesn’t go to the classroom. Well, that other 50 cents includes school lunches, keeping the lights on school buses, libraries, all the extra functions. That’s the fat they want to trim. I guess they want to starve the kids, have them walk to school, have no music, no sports. That’s their vision for education. It’s just not serious proposals.

Saturday, we’re going to have thousands of people there who want to have serious conversations on how to have fair and adequate funding for schools. Texas is just not doing it, and we’re a resource-rich state.

 

Allen Weeks photo from 2011 Save Texas Schools rally by Daniel Setiawan.

It can be tough to measure what the Legislature’s $5.4 billion school funding cut will really cost Texas schoolkids.

Since the new budget took effect in September, anecdotes of woe have popped up all around the state—kids sweeping the classrooms, schools charging for bus rides to school.

In a story published Friday, the Texas Tribune’s Morgan Smith offered a look at how teachers are coping with the bigger classes, when there are suddenly 10,000 fewer teachers around this year, and 100,000 more students. In a word, they’re busier. But they’re still teaching, and students might not mind so much. When the 24th student arrived in one class, Smith writes, kids were just “excited to have a new face.”

But what does the research say happens when classrooms get packed? As Smith suggests, it’s complicated:

Research is mixed on the effect of class size on learning, but many educators agree that adding just two students to an already full classroom can intensify the challenge for teachers. Some worry that increasing class sizes hurts the neediest students most.

There are studies that show kids do just as well in bigger classes—notably the work of Stanford researcher Eric Hanushek, a free-market reformer who also opposes putting more funding into early childhood education. On balance, though, the most thorough studies show young students do better in smaller classes. Last year, for example, the Center for Public Education published a roundup of major studies on the question spanning decades, and found that most studies show evidence there are benefits to smaller classes in early grades, particularly for minority and low-income students:

Even in light of findings that suggest no relationship between class size and student achievement, the preponderance of the evidence supports positive effects and academic gains when class size reduction programs in the primary grades are well-designed and properly implemented.

Texas, of course, is engaged in exactly the opposite sort of experiment. The Tribune says 8,479 classrooms from kindergarten to 4th grade have more than 22 students, according to the Texas Education Agency, up from 2,238 last year. Districts must get waivers from the state to bust through that 22-student cap, and they’re doing it in record numbers.

To get a handle on just what these lean budgets are doing to Texas’ schools, the Texas-based advocacy group Children At Risk has begun a six-month study of surveys, visits to schools and TEA data. The group’s president Bob Sanborn told the Observer they’re hoping to cut through the politics of school funding in Texas.

“We wanted to really look at what’s the real impact, what does the current data say about the impact of the budget cuts in public education,” Sanborn says. “At the beginning of the survey we’re seeing efficiencies develop. We’re seeing schools work to cut down their central office staff, staff outside the education area. And that’s what you want to see, you want to see them take out some of the non-core area type of positions.”

That’s the conservative argument for shrinking the budgets—that these cuts are long overdue, and are only eating away at the bloated bureaucracy that’s built up at district offices.

But Sanborn says those sorts of cuts have been nowhere near enough, and some districts have carved off huge slices of their teaching corps too—like an 11 percent cut in Waco ISD. Fewer teachers, fewer classroom aides and bigger classrooms in early grades are widespread trends statewide.

“If we continue to see the very efficient districts that have gone from six classroom class size waivers to 96, or from 20 to 300 … especially in high poverty schools, you can’t have one teacher to 25 kids,” Sanborn says.

“What we’re not going to be able to do is measure impact on learning, because that’s sort of a longer timeline.”

There’s that same challenge again—finding concrete evidence of just how troublesome these cuts will be for kids.

Earlier this month, state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, waded into those waters, at least when it comes to the cuts to pre-K.

The state still funds half-day pre-K for kids in “at-risk” populations: kids from low-income families, kids who are still learning English, kids in foster care or whose parents are active-duty military or were injured or killed on duty. But last session, lawmakers eliminated the $200 million in grants it had long offered schools to expand their pre-K from half- to full-day.

Numbers Villarreal got from TEA show that, among economically disadvantaged students, those who’d attended public pre-K outperformed kids who hadn’t, on their third-grade state math and reading tests. While 17 percent of low-income kids without pre-K failed the reading half of the TAKS, the failure rate for those with pre-K was 12 percent—pulling them closer, at least, to the five percent failure rate for kids from higher-income families.

“We now have timely evidence that pre-K narrows the achievement gap in Texas, and that the legislature was foolish to eliminate pre-K expansion grants,” Villarreal said in a statement.

Children At Risk’s preliminary look at the cuts breaks down just how much pre-K staffing has shrunk. “In total, school districts cut 1,132 pre-kindergarten teaching positions by limiting student enrollment, moving from full to half-day curriculums, and/or increasing class size.” Some districts, like fast-growing Cypress-Fairbanks ISD outside Houston, kept their pre-K staffing pretty much intact. El Paso ISD cut its pre-K teachers by almost 93 percent.

“One thing that we’ll see in terms of education is that the research is very clear on pre-K, so when you see a place like El Paso eliminate all those pre-K positions,” Sanborn says, “they’re gonna see some long-term repercussions there.”