Making Education a Priority

You can spit from where I live and hit State Rep Ron Reynold’s district. That’s how close I am to being represented in Austin by this very thoughtful and caring person. Ron Reynolds got caught on camera supporting education the other day and Back to Basics loaded a clip of him chastising a villainous Republican-dominated state house about tabling an amendment to HB 1, the budget bill. A bill that slashes $10 billion from education funding over the next two years.

They just aren’t listening though. And they aren’t listening because some of them actually think it’s a bad idea for government to be in the business of educating its people. And some of them want to privatize the whole thing.

But this is not coming from a majority of Texans, this is coming from a rightwing radical fringe that seems to be driving these things, and people are going along with them out of fear of looking like a progressive liberal if they don’t.

But as the reality of what has become the dismantling of public education in Texas becomes apparent, one can hope that more people than teachers and administrators speak out and demand that the state legislature fix the problem by fixing the revenue hole that it created in 2005. The revenue hole that started us down the road to perdition. People are protesting in Katy. And Austin. And in Dallas. And in New Braunfels. And of all places, in Lubbock. Lubbock! And in (God help us) Athens. Yes, that Athens. The one in East Texas.

These are not my fellow bleeding heart liberals. These are the people that sent these anti-education state legislators to Austin last November.

People have to wake up and smell the stuff that the legislature is dealing out to the state’s schoolchildren. Hopefully they’ll do it before public education becomes a memory.