Naked City

State Rep. Jim Dunnam (Photo By John Anderson)

The Sunset Advisory Commission this week finalized its list of recommendations for tweaks to make the Texas Education Agency run smoother as it oversees the academic and financial quality of Texas public schools. Those recommendations will now be turned into the TEA reauthorization bill, one of those progressively-more-ugly beasts known as "must-pass" legislation. It's "must-pass" because failing to pass it would shut down the TEA, which legislators can't realistically let happen, so the entire debate starts to look like a big game of chicken. That is, legislators gather up all their pet ideas that would otherwise never pass, and they slap 'em onto the bill, hoping other lawmakers will be too scared to shoot the whole thing down just to kill a controversial amendment.

But there was little controversy in the commission's final recommendations, and only a few changes to the draft recommendations proposed in November. One such modification was a requirement that a majority of members of the panels that review proposed textbooks for factual errors actually be experts in the subject area. You'd think this would be a no-brainer, but both liberals and conservatives are guilty of staffing the panels with folks whose main (or only) area of expertise is spotting ideological errors.

In addition, Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, added language requiring the TEA to automatically shut down any charter school that gets the lowest state accountability rating for three years in a row. Eleven percent of charters got the lowest rating last year, and that's not even counting the 45% of charters that weren't rated because they count as "alternative education" facilities. Since the whole point of the charter school experiment is to develop models that do a better job than traditional schools, this is also a no-brainer – doubly so because the State Board of Education made what is widely regarded as a phenomenal flub in 1998 when they granted a charter to literally everyone who wanted one, regardless of their qualifications. (Or, more to the point, lack thereof.) Since the agency can only grant 215 charters statewide, Dunnam believes that forcing the TEA to close the struggling ones will usher in a new era in charter school success.

"There were too many charters granted to nonqualified applicants, and that's what's created a drag on the agency," said Dunnam. "You've got too many folks we're having to watch too closely. I think if we clean out the system and then issue these charters to better and more qualified applicants, that will take care of it."

But first, the reauthorization bill has to make it through the session. Fasten your seat belts.