Walking Small in Texas

Governor Rick Perry announced recently that Texas would not be applying for Race to the Top money. Why? Because, he alleged:

Texas is on the right path toward improved education, and we would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington, virtually eliminating parents’ participation in their children’s education. If Washington were truly concerned about funding education with solutions that match local challenges, they would make the money available to states with no strings attached.

It’s striking how poorly this holds up to any kind of empirical or principled scrutiny. Texas is by no means a national leader in K-12 education achievement. It’s better than some states but worse than many others. The Texas academic standards that supposedly have to be shielded from the taint of “unelected bureaucrats” (as opposed to what–elected bureaucrats? who thinks that’s a good idea?) who are “thousands of miles away in Washington” (even the westernmost parts of Texas like El Paso are not “thousands” of miles from Washington) are neither particularly rigorous nor national leaders in depth and quality. The “eliminating parent’s participation” sentence is a straight-up fabrication. This is just Rick Perry running for re-election against a legitimate primary opponent in Kay Bailey Hutchinson by pandering to the strain of bizarre and archaic separatism that is apparently still alive and well in the Texas body politic. Note to Texans: when your governor makes crazy empty threats about secession and is subsequently re-elected, everyone in the rest of the country laughs.  Moreover, they’re not even principled crazy empty threats. Perry still wants federal funding for education! If he was serious about the outlandish notion that Texas could operate as an independent nation, he’d start by proving it and turning down federal money. Instead he’s just another governor who wants what every governor wants but no governor should get: a steady stream of federal funding with no accountability over how it’s spent. So teachers will lose their jobs and many thousands of disadvantaged students will get a worse education than they would have otherwise received.