Maybe it’s time for a legislative gap year

The 85th Legislature just completed a tumultuous special session, tasked by Gov. Greg Abbott to tackle 20 subjects not addressed to his liking during the 2017 regular session. The special session was an engineered opportunity for a legislative bonus round, necessitated after critical sunset legislation affecting medical licensure did not pass in May. Media have reported that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick worked with a handful of legislators at the end of the regular session to stonewall or take hostage those bills in order to advance his pet priorities — like private school vouchers and state regulations on bathroom usage — and demand a special session when the ransom wasn’t paid.

Now we are witnessing a repeat performance, with Patrick and some others pressuring Gov. Abbott to call yet another special session on the taxpayers’ dime so that legislators, needlessly and hopelessly, can debate the same ideological battles. It took only minutes for the majority in the partisan upper chamber to complain about the results of the special session, in which we avoided the enactment of reckless voucher bills, largely refrained from overregulating our local school districts and municipalities, and defeated blatantly anti-educator “union dues” legislation favored by the governor and lieutenant governor. As Abbott and Patrick threaten another special session and blame the Texas House and Speaker Joe Straus for those “failures,” the public education community celebrates the modest wins produced for Texas schoolchildren and educators and thanks those responsible.

Notably, we’re ending the special session with half a billion more dollars (although borrowed) for public education than we had in June, thanks to a vocal education community and lawmakers with courage to admit that public education, despite representing our state’s largest budget commitment, remains insufficiently supported. The Legislature, unfortunately, punted on an opportunity to make structural changes to our beleaguered school finance system, opting to study the issue for two more years. Like a seventhor eighth-year college student still living at home, at some point the Texas Legislature must complete its studies and start working on the real job of fixing what is broken. That includes acknowledging that our Texas pride apparently does not extend to our dismal rankings in per-pupil funding comparisons nationwide; prioritizing long-range funding solutions to help our students with any kind of special needs; and recognizing that the only way to recruit and retain a stellar workforce of educators is by granting them the pay, job and retirement benefits, and professional respect they would reasonably expect to earn in other fields or even in other states.

Property tax relief has been cited as perhaps the most popular rationale among lawmakers advocating a second special session. However, the most obvious strategy for alleviating homeowners’ rising tax bills — overhauling the school finance system — has already been summarily rejected by Patrick’s Senate, insisting on a need to wait until 2019 for those discussions. Against that backdrop, why entertain the idea of a second overtime period for the 85th Legislature?

There is little to nothing that would be gained substantively from another month of Capitol infighting over make-believe crises manufactured by political operatives to generate scorecard votes for upcoming elections. Moreover, if Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick revive the same politically motivated priorities they espoused during the special session that just ended, an extension of those debates would only have the effect of fomenting the surge of discontent among active and retired educators, a million strong, who are ready to make a statement at the polls in 2018.

Canaday is the government relations director for the Association of Texas Professional Educators. With more than 100,000 members, ATPE is the state’s largest educator group and the voice of public education.