The Texas State Teachers Association, a group of educators and school employees 65,000 strong, is taking the Texas Education Agency to court in what appears to be a slightly altered reincarnation of the controversy surrounding school vouchers, according to a recent article in The Houston Chronicle.
The lawsuit stems from a TEA meeting last March during which Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott approved a plan that will give nearly $6 million in public funds not only to school districts and community colleges, but to private nonprofit organizations for their participation in an "experiment" aimed at helping dropouts earn their high school diplomas - essentially giving them a second chance at the achievement. The TSTA is arguing that giving tax dollars to private education organizations violates the state's constitution, and we fail to see how this case could be interpreted any differently.
In spite of Texas' explicit ban against the practice of giving public funds to private, nonprofit companies, Scott offered the irrelevant argument that the money involved in this mysterious experiment will not affect the funding for public school districts.
While Texas is facing what some would call a "dropout crisis," with approximately one-third of the state's high school students failing to graduate, according to the Chronicle, the state's dropout rate is a serious problem and will not be corrected by quick fixes like a simple reallocation of money from public to private education programs.
More engaging classrooms with better-trained teachers would be a much more effective solution. Public funds should go to improving the classrooms we already have. Why pay for a "second-chance" program when you can simply improve the quality of the first chance?
With several schools closing their doors in Austin and Houston due to their inability to meet state education levels, it is clear that there are issues that need to be addressed in the public school system. The money that the TEA is setting aside for this second-chance fund could be better spent giving students satisfactory educations in the first place. Those who have already left high school or middle school should not be given another chance at their peers' expense.
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