Free As Texas Goes... by Gail Collins Page B

in the number of children since the 1930s.”
    “Hablamos rocketry”
    If there’s a single thing that will decide which way Texas goes, it’s the schools. But the dropout rate, particularly among minority kids, is huge. “We’re very proud in Texas,” said Sanborn. “We really want to believe Texas is the best. If we’re bad in something, there must be something wrong—the statistics are lying. And part of the reason is we don’t want to spend the money to fix it.”
    What happened to the Texas Miracle? Well, there are some terrific public schools in Texas. Houston has some great magnet schools. Austin has places like the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, where the students, who are almost all economically disadvantaged, are as curious and outgoing as the best-socialized prep school students in the state. Down by the Rio Grande in west Texas, the students and teachers of Presidio School District gear up for a new academic year with the overheated obsession of a Texas football team preparing for state finals. “I don’t buy into the testing system—I’m more concerned with how many kids are ready to go to college,” says Dennis McEntire, the superintendent. He’s a large guy with a bristly head of grey hair who wears a jacket and tie in the stupendous late summer heat.
    In the summer of 2011, the Presidio schools made something of a splash when McEntire was quoted as saying that he might ask the state for a waiver to drop down to a four-day week in order to deal with state budget cuts. He was not, he admits now, seriously considering it. But there was reason to pay attention, since seven years before Presidio had shocked the Texas world when it balanced the school budget by doing away with football.
    Presidio is not at the top of the heap when it comes to the all-powerful state test scores, but it does pretty well for one of the poorest districts in the state. McEntire says the graduation rate is high, and that 77 percent of graduates go on to further education. After classes end there is tutoring until five o’clock, and the cafeteria ceiling has vanished behind all the college banners draped there. Presidio, which has a history of getting, and leveraging, government grants, also has an award-winning rocketry program. “Hablamos rocketry,” says Shella Condino, the science teacher who mentors it. “The kids I work with—they’re in English as a second language. They’re not the brightest in the class. But they can write technical reports for NASA.”
    The city of Presidio has one of the highest hunger rates, and poverty rates, and everything-else-depressing rates in the state, but the school district had socked away a rainy day fund to get it through the first shock of the state education cuts in 2011. Other districts that were less blessed with government largesse or less willing to give up football were reeling from the $4 billion the state legislature cut from education funding. This was after the legislature made its disastrous attempt to reform the business and property taxes and wound up with a huge void in the place where revenues and expenditures were supposed to meet.
    Rather than raise taxes, Rick Perry and Co. cut what amounted to $537 per student in state education aid. Soon, the Ross Perot reforms of 1984 began to teeter. One was the legal limit of twenty-two elementary school students to each teacher, as the state began handing out waivers like popcorn, having added “financial hardship” to the special reasons why classes could be made larger. The uncapped higher grades exploded. Meanwhile, the inequality between rich and poor districts was sparking another wave of legal action.
    While Presidio’s football-cutting option did not seem popular, school districts were laying off faculty and support staff, and imposing new charges on students’ families. A district north of Fort Worth announced it would bill students $185 a semester if they wanted to ride the school bus. Other