Patrick gets it wrong on schools

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was in town last week, talking school finance and property tax reform. These are favorite topics for Patrick. In his 2015 inaugural address, Patrick bemoaned the failure of “our inner city schools” and invoked Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech to articulate a dream of his own, a “dream of the day every child gets a quality education so they can break the binds of poverty and live the Texas and American dream.”

It was a middle-aged white man having a “conversation” in a room filled with middle-aged white men and women, talking about “people in the inner city.” Mr. Patrick likes to talk about the “inner city.” It’s a phrase he uses often. He talks about “inner city” schools, which are invariably “failing,” and inner city residents, who are “losing their homes” because they can’t afford to pay the gosh-darn property taxes.

What Patrick wants has little to do with bringing hope or light to the shadowy spots in our benighted inner cities. What Patrick wants is the evisceration of the Texas public school system, replaced with a quasi-public collection of “charter schools.”

Property taxes are the primary means of financing public education in the state. Patrick’s solution to a stretched, struggling, woefully underfunded system? Cut the funding. Starve the schools. Starve them to death.

Patrick’s alternative, the charter school system, presents its own set of problems. The conventional wisdom is that charter schools produce better results than public schools. The reality, as reported in Stanford economist Margaret Raymond in her CREDO study of math performance in charter schools, is that just 17 percent of charter students outperform their traditional public school peers. But the most powerful man in state government keeps selling the charter school magic. Patrick told his audience that without immediate school reform, “we are going to have a have and have-not population,” as if he hadn’t noticed that Texas split into haves and have-nots several generations ago.

This state, like the rest of the United States, was built on the notion of universal public education. The school was the center point of the community. We all had a place there. We all had a stake there. And that common stake, that sense of place, enabled a collection of farmers and factory workers to raise children that became scientists and poets and world-changers. The public school gave us hope. It inspired people to look past the troubled places, to believe that there was a reason to believe. It made us America.

Dan Patrick needs to think about that, the next time he comes to town for a conversation.