Official slammed over references to special ed and ‘slow learners’
Special education advocates are denouncing the chair of the state’s public school finance commission for calling special education students slow learners and questioning whether it’s worth spending public money educating such students.
Scott Brister, chairman of the Texas Commission on Public School Finance, said his comments were taken out of context and said “of course” he believes state funding should be spent on special education students.
Brister was appointed to chair the panel by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2017. The commission is tasked with recommending to the Legislature by the end of the year how to improve the state’s beleaguered school finance system, which is riddled with outdated formulas and is heavily reliant on local property taxes. During a work group meeting Tuesday, commissioners were discussing whether school districts should have discretion in how they spend special education dollars.
Brister asked, “What’s the best use of our education dollars?
Should we spend that on the
Brister, who is a partner in the Andrews Kurth Kenyon law firm in Austin, is a former justice of the Texas Supreme Court who was the only member who disagreed with the court’s 2005 ruling that the state’s public school finance system was unconstitutional.
brightest kids or the slow learners?”
Later in the meeting, Bris- ter said, “I think I said in a speech years ago, you know, as a pure economist with no heart would say, ‘Why are we spending all this money on special ed? These kids are the ones who are going to get the least return from the dollars on.’ And part of the answer is ... because the law says to, and part of the answer is because it’s not just about GDP. It’s about what kind of society we’re going to be.”
Calling Brister’s statements uninformed and offensive, Cheryl Fries, co-founder of Texans for Special Education Reform, said the group would be willing introduce Brister to children with disabilities and show him research on how students with disabilities can succeed.
“Parents brought it to our attention and were very, very upset,” Fries said. “His choice of language is the language of a far too prevalent soft bigotry of low expectations about kids who have disabil- ities. Since when do we measure children as a commod- ity? Since when do we view a child based on their poten- tial return on investment?”
Brister said Fries’ group was intentionally making him look bad and said he didn’t use “slow learners” in a disparaging way and is
happy to use a more accept- able term.
Fries suggests “students in special education.”
Brister said he made the statements about special education funding as he was questioning a policy expert about whether school districts should be forced to use certain dollars on special education or give districts flexibility to use some of those dollars on other things, as is done with fund-
ing for other education programs, such as talented and gifted.
“My hypothetical was about what a heartless econ- omist would say,” he said. “That’s a Nazi point of view. They took people who were disabled and put them to death. We don’t do that in this country, and we don’t want this country to be a place that treats people like that.”
Brister, who is a partner in the Andrews Kurth Kenyon law firm in Austin, is a former justice of the Texas Supreme Court who was the only member who disagreed with the court’s 2005 ruling that the state’s public school finance system was unconstitutional. He said in his opinion that the court was not demanding schools to be an efficient system as the constitution requires.
He defines an efficient school system as one that “would produce results with little waste,” a goal that Bris- ter continues to promote.
Some public education advocates fear that Brister would force districts to do more with less — which they say isn’t sustainable — as the commission’s the main recom- mendation to the Legislature.
“It’s definitely problem- atic when you consider how much we’ve cut from our school system and the fact that we don’t even keep pace with inflation with our fund- ing,” said Chandra Villanueva, senior policy analyst with the left-leaning think tank Center for Public Policy Priorities. “So every day, we’re already asking our schools to do more with less.”
If districts are given more money, they could decrease
class sizes, increase professional development for teachers and provide more remediation for at-risk stu- dents, among other things, said Amy Beneski, director of governmental relations with the Texas Association of School Administrators. “Money matters,” she said. Conservative policy analysts tend to agree with Brister, and they see ways to force districts to do more with what they’ve got through increasing competition for state funding with high-quality charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded, and curb
ing the growth of nonclassroom staff.
ve never said that we want to spend less on education, but we would like to see what we can do with what we’ve got, because money doesn’t grow on trees,” said Emily Sass, a K-12 education policy analyst with the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Public school advocates took issue with Brister again when he asked how raising Texas teacher salaries to the national average would change anything: “Won’t people work just the same, just as hard as they are? It’s not to say they don’t deserve it.”
Brister told the American-Statesman he believes raises and bonuses should be given to teachers who raise student achievement.
“That’s what they’re doing in Dallas,” Brister said. “If you can raise the reading
scores and math scores for inner-city students that are
doing the poorest on the test, we’re going to pay you substantially more.” Monty Exter, lobbyist with
the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said paying teachers adequately will result in better performance.
“His comment misses the point,” Exter said. “Teachers in the state of Texas are clearly underpaid for the complexity and amount of work they do. If your goal is to get highest quality, you have to ultimately have a greater supply of quality workers ... and you do that with more competitive wages
and better working environments.”