How Things Really Work

For very understandable reasons, Texas’ public schools have been getting most of the attention in Austin for the past few months.

But the crisis in our public schools is not the only educational crisis Texas faces. In the last few years we have neglected the state’s higher education system to such a degree that we must now stop the decline of the system or pay a steep price in loss of jobs in Texas.

An excellent system of higher education has enabled Texas to attract such projects as the superconducting supercollider, a large transistor research group in Austin, computer research groups in Houston and Austin, biotech research in San Antonio, and others.

To keep up that kind of success and the prosperity it means to Texas, we need to shore up universities, community colleges, and technical institutes. Recent neglect of these institutions shows up in low salaries, large classes, and leaky roofs.

LOW SALARIES. All Texas’ real competitors for high tech jobs–the 10 largest states–pay higher faculty salaries. These states also have better health benefits–an increasingly important factor in the competition for good teachers.

LARGE CLASSES. There are 10% more students than there were seven years ago, but only 1.4% more faculty. That means 20% increases in class sizes at some institutions.

LEAKY ROOFS. Buildings have been neglected to the tune of about half a billion dollars in the past few years. The Higher Education

Coordinating Board estimates that is now the cost of this neglect, or “deferred maintenance”. Over $40,000,000 is now needed for roof and other repairs to keep some college buildings from being condemned as unsafe.

These problems can be solved by raising tuition in such a way that no student is denied an education because of the increase.

First, where does Texas stand among the states in higher education costs? Dead last. Tuition at Texas public colleges is the cheapest in the country. In fact, Texas charges out-of-state students less than two state universities (Pennsylvania and Vermont) charge their in-state students.

It costs Texans $1,021 a year in tuition and fees to go to a public college full-time (30 credit hours).

For as long as Texas can afford to charge the lowest tuition in the country, it’s a great thing to do. But with Texas in the middle of its most severe financial crunch in years, it is time to take another look at our state’s policy.

The tuition is set by Legislature at $20 a semester hour, about one-sixth of the cost of a college education. Or, to put it the other way, taxpayers pick up five-sixths and the student (or student’s family) picks up the rest.

By setting tuition in Texas so low we lose a lot federal aid that other states get. That is because of the way the Pell grant program works. Pell grants are federally funded scholarships. They are calculated on the basis of family income and size and on the cost of a college education.

The higher the tuition, the higher the Pell grant. Nation-wide, Pell grants of about $4.2 billion account for more than half of all federal aid to higher education.

So cheap is public higher education Texas that private universities (such as Rice, Baylor, SMU, TCU) actually get more federal funds than do state universities (University of Texas, A&M, University of Houston, Texas Tech). There are many more Pell grant students at the big public universities than at the small private ones. But tuition is higher at the private colleges, so their students get larger Pell grants.

A sensible solution would for the legislature to set tuition for Texas residents at 25% of the cost of a college education, instead of putting a dollar amount into law. now Then tuition costs would be calculated annually, taking the matter out of the hands of the Legislature. Tuition for out-of-state students is already calculated automatically, at 100% of the cost.

Pell grants would pick up more of the costs for qualifying families. Adequate scholarship money would be provided from the tuition income to ensure that no student would be turned away.

Texas taxpayers would foot less of the bill. The universities would be in better financial, and therefore competitive, shape.

Texans win all the way around.

Last Sunday my friend and fellow columnist, Tom Luce, made several suggestions about changes he thinks ought to be made in state government before any tax bills are considered.

Some of them are very good ideas–so good in fact that they are already state law. “Nothing is more important to the future of Texas” than public education, says Mr. Luce. And he is so right. “Before even more money is spent on a school system that does not work, changes must be demanded. The changes should include site-based management and making teachers and administrators responsible for the results.”

Whatever the merits of site-based management, it is now the law, passed by the Legislature last year in Senate Bill 1, the school finance bill. The parts of that bill that prescribe how the state distributes money to the school districts have been set aside by the Supreme Court of Texas, but not site-based management.

“Site-based management” is a new educational buzzword. It reduces, not increases, accountability by spreading it around. The Perot Commission, which made the recommendations contained in HB72, favored the concept of the principal as the educational leader of the campus. Mr. Luce and I both served on that commission.

The two ideas are at least partially in conflict. If the principal is to be responsible for the quality of education provided on the campus, should not the principal able to hire and fire–instead of a committee?

Well, let’s give this system a try. Maybe it won’t do much harm. In any case, Tom, it’s already the law.

“Texas needs a school finance system that replaces formula funding with block grants and provides incentives for academic achievement”, writes Mr. Luce. How else would the amounts of block grants be calculated other than by formulas? “Block grants” generally means “no strings attached”. Perhaps he means that the state should not try to say how the tax dollars are spent once they are sent to the districts.

That is a point over which reasonable people can disagree. But the fact is that the state has precious little influence over how those dollars are spent. For better or worse, Texas has “block grants” right now.

Moreover, the Legislature has provided “incentives for academic achievement”. Ten million dollars has been distributed by the “Governor’s Excellence Committee” to achieving school districts. School districts with excellent records are exempt from some state regulations and are not inspected by the Texas Education Agency as often as are districts with poorer records.

Another $525,000 was provided in SB1 to reward creativity and innovation in schools.

These are excellent new ideas. They are current law. Let’s see how they work.

On another subject, Mr. Luce wants “a meaningful reduction of $300 to $600 million in spending on current programs [that] would be a good first step.” Presumably that means cutting general revenue, the only funds the Legislature controls. The Legislative Budget Board has already recommended cuts of $166 million, $444 million short of Mr. Luce’s goal.

Assuming that no further cuts can be made in those areas where Texas is under various court orders, the $444 million comes out of all other state government: the courts, the legislature, the environmental agencies (Parks and Wildlife, General Land Office, Air Control Board, Water Commission), and the regulatory agencies.

Maybe next week Mr. Luce will tell us just where those cuts should be made.

“In addition to attacking specific line items in the budget, some fundamental issues of budget reform must be placed on the table”, writes Mr. Luce. “For example, current funding formulas which do not encourage efficiency in state government must be revised or eliminated.”

But he doesn’t give us a “for example”. Maybe next week.

The strangest of the Luce recommendations is that any new revenues should be dedicated to schools or prisons. Dedicating funds doesn’t change the amount of money that is spent on education or corrections. It just changes some details about the way it is appropriated.

“Businesses have had to restructure their operations to survive,” writes Mr. Luce, suggesting that the state do the same. Indeed. Which business “dedicates” revenue from customer A to pay the bank, the revenue from customer B to meet the payroll, the revenue from customer C to pay the rent, and so on?

Certainly no law firm I know of.

Almost 30 years ago the federal courts first set foot on the path through the partisan thicket of redistricting, a course against which Justice Felix Frankfurter warned for years.

But the population differences among Congressional and state legislative had grown so great that the courts had to act. One legislative district had almost 1,000 times as many people as another in the same state.

A Congressional district in Dallas had 5 and a half times as many people as one in upstate Michigan. Legislatures had deliberately avoided redrawing districts to reflect the growing urbanization of the country. In fact, after the 1920 and 1930 census, frequently only those states who had gained or lost seats in Congress redistricted.

Texas was once so eager to avoid redistricting that we had a Congressman-at-large, elected statewide.

In those states whose representation had not changed, there was no recognition at all of shifting populations.

Cities were deliberately underrepresented, often by specific provisions of state constitutions. Texas limited counties, regardless of population, to one state senator for many years, effectively limiting the number of urban legislators.

So, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in Baker v. Carr, 1962) that such flagrant discrimination is unconstitutional, it did the nation a great favor by righting a preposterous wrong.

By the end of the l970s, the nation’s tens of thousands of political boundaries had been redrawn to reflect the more urban nation we had become.

But the courts, bless their innumerate souls, didn’t know where to stop. So zealous did they become in rectifying previous injustices that they then started making ludicrous decisions.

The previous indefensible differences in district populations led courts to insist that districts be more equal than in fact they can ever be.

For example, the Census Bureau agrees that its figures may be off by as much as 3%. So when the courts throw out a redistricting plan in which population varies among districts varies by only a half on one percent, they are asking for more precision than the numbers can provide.

Not only must districts be more equal than they can in fact be made, say the courts, but they must be compact as well. Fine. Just which districts are supposed to be compact, your honor? West Texas Congressional and Senatorial districts are already larger than many states and will get even bigger. But suppose that more compact districts were drawn around Midland-Odessa and Temple-Waco-Belton, as they easily could be. The remaining rural West Texas, High Plains, and Panhandle districts would then become even more Alaskan in size. All in the name of compactness, which presumably was meant to ensure that legislators would represent a community. (The El Paso district stays about the same.)

Taken together with devotion to unattainable equality, “compactness” means that suburbanites of both El Paso and San Antonio are represented by a Senator from San Angelo. So much for community representation. Able though that representation is, wouldn’t it make more sense for them to be represented by a Senator from their own county?

Because of the system Thomas Jefferson designed and installed in the federal constitution, congressional district sizes in various states will vary by as much as 59%. Rhode Island will have two congressional seats, each representing about 501,732 souls. Montana will have one representative in Congress, who will have 799,065 constituents.

The nationwide average district size is 574,316. The average Congressional district in Texas, which gains three seats, is 566,217.

Texas senatorial districts will average 547,952; state house districts, 113,243; State Board of Education districts, 1,132,434.

An interesting quirk in this year’s apportionment is that Congress, for only the second time in history, decided to count overseas personnel. That decision gave Washington, the home state of House Speaker Tom Foley, its ninth seat and deprived Massachusetts of what would have been its eleventh seat.

Might things have been different if Tip O’Neill were still Speaker? Overall, 18 seats from 19 states change hands.

Of course, the figures may be revised in July, 1991, to reflect an undercount. If Texas then picks up another 100,000 or so population, it could gain a fourth seat but who knows?

Since the mid-1960’s, the Constitution has said that if the Legislature fails to redistrict itself in the first regular session after a federal census, the job will be done by the Legislative Redistricting Board (LRB). In fact, almost all legislative redistricting has been done by the LRB ever since it was created.

That has happened, not because the Legislature has been unwilling or unable to redistrict itself on time, but because of circumstances beyond the Legislature’s control. Those circumstances have included a veto by the Governor and state and federal court decisions.

Since the LRB will likely play a part in the 1990’s redistricting, it is worth taking a look at how it works. The LRB members are Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, Speaker Gib Lewis, Attorney General Dan Morales, Comptroller John Sharp, and Land Commissioner Garry Mauro.

The two members of that board who have the greatest interest in the result are, obviously, the Lieutenant Governor and the Speaker. They are the ones who have to live with the results on a personal, day-to-day basis.

Typically each house redistricts itself and the other house passes the bill without amendment, or even much discussion.

But there have been times when paranoia has interfered with that logical and orderly process. At least once in the past the mutual suspicion was so great that the doors of the two chambers were opened so that the two presiding officers could see each other across the rotunda. In that way they coordinated final passage of the two bills by seeing to it that the gavels fell at the same moment.

If the task does end up with the LRB, that same comity, or respect for the other presiding officer’s position, will doubtless prevail. That means that each presiding officer redistricts his own house and supports the other’s plan. That leaves each presider with the job of getting one more vote from among the other three.

That doesn’t sound like too hard a job, but in 1981 it was harder than it looked. That year, the LRB redistricted the Senate because Governor Clements had vetoed the Senate bill. It redistricted the House because the state court had thrown out the House Bill because the court though it cut too many county lines.

Speaker Billy Clayton and I had each been advised by our predecessors, on the basis of their experience in the 1970’s, not to vote on the plan for either house until the board was ready to vote on both houses.

So Clayton and I produced plans for the respective houses, published the plans, took testimony, consulted with other board members, made the indicated changes, and still were one vote short.

On the morning of the last day the board could meet, the matter was still unresolved. (The Constitution gives the LRB 90 days to do its work.) The board met in the morning, determined that the votes weren’t there for either plan and recessed for an hour or so. And recessed. And recessed. Finally, early in the evening, the board met for the severalth time in the Senate Chamber. I told Billy that I had just gotten (Attorney General) Mark White’s commitment.

Since both of us thought that commitment was good for about ten minutes, the board went ahead and voted out the Senate plan, even though the votes were not there for the House plan. Billy’s House plan was voted out later in the evening.

Texas’ judicial districts haven’t been redrawn in over a century. They bear no relationship to population or case loads. Several law suits have attacked judicial elections on grounds of discrimination against minorities. Federal Judge Lucius Bunton in Midland even went so far as to order a hasty and ill-advised redistricting based on outdated figures. (He was reversed by the Fifth Circuit.)

Should the legislature not redraw judicial districts in Texas by 1993, the job will be done by the Judicial Districts Board added to the Constitution in 1985. The state’s senior judges and lawyer appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate make up the JDB.

This redistricting should substantially improve the administration of justice in Texas.

(Hobby was Chairman of the Legislative Redistricting Board in 1981. He now teaches a course on redistricting at Rice University.)

Do our laws really mean that somebody who tries, anonymously, to defame another person get a reward of $700,000?

The United States Supreme Court will decide soon.

Late last year, the Court decided to hear an appeal from the Minnesota Supreme Court in a case in which Dan Cohen sued two newspapers for telling their readers that Cohen, while working for the Republican candidate for Governor, had tried some pretty sleazy campaign tactics against Marlene Johnson, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.

The case is a sordid one that reflects no credit on anybody involved. There are no heroes in this story.

In 1982 Johnson was the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor of Minnesota. Cohen worked for an advertising agency representing the Republican candidate for governor.

He told four reporters covering the campaign that, some years before, Johnson had been convicted for shoplifting. Cohen asked the reporters not to identify him as the source of the information and they foolishly agreed. Two of the reporters ignored the story. The other two, without checking the public records where the arrest was duly recorded, reported the matter to their editors.

The editors of the two papers then made a decision even more irresponsible than the one made by their reporters. They decided to use the story without checking the facts and to identify Cohen as the source. As it turned out the story was correct, though incomplete. Had it not been correct, they would have exposed their papers to a libel suit from Johnson.

After the stories ran, Cohen was fired. He sued the papers for damages, saying that the papers had violated a contract with him not to reveal that he was the source.

Cohen won a $700,000 judgment in the trial court. That judgment was reversed by the Minnesota Supreme Court, and Cohen is now appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The jury decided that Cohen had suffered $200,000 in actual

damages, and then went on to order each newspaper to pay him $250,000 in punitive damages. In other words, the jury was saying that not only was Cohen somehow damaged the tune of $200,000 but the papers had committed a crime sufficiently evil that they deserved to be fined a quarter of a million dollars each.

If Cohen’s employer wanted to use a teen-age conviction for shoplifting $8 worth of sewing materials against Johnson that was, of course, his privilege. Such tactics are tasteless and demeaning to those who use them, but they are permissible. We Texans have certainly seen much sorrier tactics used by Jim Mattox and Clayton Williams in last year’s race for governor.

But there is a right way and a wrong way even for candidates to make fools of themselves if they want to. The right way is to produce the arrest record in public and take full responsibility for doing so. That way the voters can make their judgments both about the candidate who put out the information and the candidate who was arrested for a teenage indiscretion.

There is a right way and a wrong way for news media to handle such a story. The wrong way is to promise confidentiality to someone who is passing out information that is a matter of public record. The right way is to check the record itself and report what the record says.

What was the result of these tactics in Minnesota? The same as in Texas–the voters elected Marlene Johnson. Cohen’s candidate, Wheelock Whitney, was buried in a landslide of votes.

In fact the whole episode turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Johnson. She had anticipated that the conviction would come up in the campaign had not yet decided how to deal with it. Cohen, of course, had not bothered to mention, even anonymously, that the conviction was later vacated.

In fact the incident generated sympathy for Johnson that was an asset in her campaign. Now she is a fine public servant of the people of Minnesota, who used the judgment that their journalists lacked.

Let us hope that the Supreme Court uses equally good judgment and does not reward sleaze because two newspapers used poor judgment.

Texas’ new legislature has its plate more than full of the usual problems: schools, prisons, human services, and how to pay for them. In addition to the usual menu, this year there is the once-a-decade biggie: redistricting.

Quality of education, efficiency in criminal justice, and medical care for people who can’t afford it make a lot of difference to the quality of our life.

Redistricting does not affect our lives much, but will consume thousands of hours of legislative time. It may not make much difference to most people, but it makes a lot of difference to those who will seek to represent the 211 congressional and legislative districts that will be drawn.

There is a slight chance that the regular Session of the 72nd Legislature not be able to redistrict because of legal challenges to the numbers.

A suit, to which Texas is a party, is underway in federal courts in New York that seeks to order the Census Bureau to adjust its numbers for a presumed undercount of minorities.

A board of population experts is now considering whether or not there has been a substantial undercount. The Secretary of Commerce, Robert Mosbacher, has until July 15, after the regular session is over.

Probably Mosbacher will decide that an undercount has not occurred and the courts, unwilling to delay redistricting, will agree. But who knows?

Redistricting will probably proceed on schedule, but will inevitably challenged in court later on. The factors that the mapmakers will be looking at most carefully are geography, incumbency, and legality.

GEOGRAPHY: A look at a map of Texas shows that redistricting pretty well has to begin at the five corners of the state. They are: El Paso, the Panhandle, Northeast Texas, Southeast Texas, and the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Those Congressional and Senatorial districts are pretty well fixed by the boundaries of the State. Redistricters will add a county or take away one as the numbers dictate, but they do not really have a lot of discretion in those corners.

INCUMBENCY: Legislators have an ingrained sense of turf. With few exceptions the districts will recognize the value of incumbency. There will doubtless be fights about just whose incumbency will be preserved, but that’s what the process is all about. Those fights will mostly be about State Senate seats, particularly those in West Texas. Those districts, sparsely populated as compared to the rest of the state, are already larger than many states.

The district represented by Senator Bill Sims of San Angelo stretches from El Paso to San Antonio and is larger than 30 states. The districts represented by Senator Steve Carriker of Roby and Senator Temple Dickson of Sweetwater are also very large. But Roby and Sweetwater are only about 30 miles apart. That accident of geography will make for an interesting problem.

Congressional redistricting presents less of a problem because three new ones will be created. Texas will henceforth have 30 Congressmen, rather than the current 27.

LEGALITY: A series of court decisions since 1965 have greatly limited the discretion of redistricters. Some of these restrictions are foolish and contradictory. Some do just the opposite of what the judges thought they would do, but the restrictions are there.

Moreover, attempts to draw districts along party lines frequently do not work. Texas voters do just fine at picking the best candidate, regardless of party, thank you.

If the Legislature does not redistrict, or if courts set aside a redistricting bill, the job will be done by the Legislative Redistricting Board (LRB).

But the Legislature probably will do the job, although the three bills (Congress, State Senate, State House of Representatives) will obviously be passed late in the session. And the Legislature had better be careful not to pass them too late. A particularly nutty Federal court in Indiana actually threw out a redistricting bill partly because it was passed on the last day of the session.

The court apparently thought that bills are more constitutional the earlier they are passed. The Supreme Court of the United States, although itself likely to make strange decisions in this area of the law, at least reversed that foolish decision.

What if the Governor of Texas proposed to close the public schools next month because she disapproved of the way we paid for them?

What if your legislator said that your children could not go to school next month because of the way state funds are divided among the 1100 school districts in the state?

Would you not think that those public officials had taken leave of their senses? You would, and you would be right. But that is exactly what nine members of the Supreme Court of Texas said last month.

The Supremes once again held the state’s school finance system unconstitutional. They had previously said the earlier system was unconstitutional and needed to be changed. The Legislature changed the system and made it fairer.

The Supremes said that the changes still did not satisfy the Constitution. Fair enough. They are elected to make those decisions, and I do not quarrel with their judgment.

But what is deeply offensive is their threat to close the public schools if the Legislature does not in the next few weeks take some unspecified action that might or might not be acceptable to the Supremes.

Public education was paramount in the minds of the drafters of the Texas Constitution. The word “education” is not in the federal Constitution, but it is established as a right in many state constitutions.

The Texas Constitution makes the state the equalizer of educational opportunity. Given the notorious complexity of school finance and the fierce emotions that naturally surround the subject, the task of equalizing is not easy. Four acrimonious legislative sessions were required last year to pass the current law.

Our system of paying for public schools combines state dollars with local property tax dollars and, by its very nature, gets out of balance from time to time. That is why the Legislature has had to change the system about every four years during the last two decades.

Argument about the “fairest” way to pay for public schools is just about the oldest political issue in Texas. There are fashions in school finance and governance as surely as there are in clothes.

For example, much talk is heard these days about a “voucher system”, whereby the state would give each family a voucher for the cost of education and the parents would decide where their child would go to school. In this way, say the voucher proponents, competition and accountability would be introduced into our public schools.

It is an idea that should be tried on a pilot basis so we can see if it works. But it is not a new idea. Texas had just such a system a century ago, and it must not have been all that successful or it would not have been changed.

Twenty years ago there was less state regulation of education in Texas than in most states, and our school system was unsatisfactory. So, beginning in the 1970s, the role of the State in supervising public education was greatly expanded–in an effort to “reform” our schools.

Today, the “reformers” want less regulation, not more. Fashions change.

From time to time, fashion dictates that the size of the State Board of Education be increased or decreased, or that it be elected rather than appointed, or the other way around.

In 1984, when House Bill 72 was passed, it was fashionable to urge that the principal should be the academic leader of each campus. That idea was largely a reaction against football coaches who often became principals or superintendents after a few losing seasons on the field.

By 1990, fashion had changed again, and “site-based management” had become the buzzword. In other words, committees were in, and individual leadership was out.

(None of this matters very much. Laws and regulations have very little to do with what actually goes on in the classroom.)

Fashions in finance change, too. For the nine Supremes to threaten to close the schools if the Legislature does not conform to whatever they think the newest fashion is must set some sort of record for judicial arrogance.

That is the sort of behavior we associate with federal, not state, judges.

Clearly, these nine judges need to be replaced by new ones who have not yet mistaken themselves for God.

When I first became Lieutenant Governor in January, 1973, one of the major issues facing the Legislature was how to equalize funding for public education. This past spring, during my final year in office, the Legislature spent four special sessions debating the same issue.

Last week’s Supreme Court decision merely shows that, while the faces in the legislature change (and only two of the current 31 members of the Senate were elected before I was in 1972) the issues do not.

The 72nd Legislature, along with four new State officials–Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller–faces the same problems State government has faced for the past 10 years. To add spice to this new mix of personalities, they all will have to deal with an issue that arises only once every 10 years: Legislative and Congressional redistricting.

The problems may be the same, but their size grows every year. Take the budget, for example.

State government is mainly about four things: Education, Health and Human Services, Public Safety, and Highways. These four areas account for more than 80 percent of State spending and more than two-thirds of all State employees. And spending for these four functions is largely beyond the Legislature’s control.

The Legislature has no control over the number of children who register for public school, the number of vehicles on our highways, the number of elderly or disabled people, the number of abused children or the number of criminals sentenced to prison. These are the kinds the factors that drive the demand for government services and, consequently, State spending.

Moreover, three of these four primary activities of State government are now largely governed by State and Federal courts.

The State will spend more than $1 billion this fiscal year, and had planned to spend an additional $1.6 billion during the next two years, just to pay for the school finance reforms ordered by Texas courts. But since last week’s decision we no longer can predict what the reforms will cost.

Other law suits will add about $400,000,000.

For reasons like these, the cost of State government for the next two years will be $3.5 billion more than the current cost, just to run schools, prisons and human services at the current level.

The Legislature can, of course, cut college enrollments, cut back on highway construction and maintenance. It can turn a deaf ear to chronically ill and disabled children. It can simply leave vacant the new prisons now being built.

No such drastic suggestions were made in the campaigns last year, so we probably will not hear them this Spring. But without doing those kinds of things, there is no way to significantly affect the State’s budget needs for the next two years.

What about economic growth? There is no question that the State is recovering from the economic downturn of the mid-1980s. The recent increase in oil prices resulting from the Middle East crisis has caused some people to predict a windfall for the State treasury. That won’t happen–for two reasons.

First, a big increase in energy prices will probably cause a national recession, from which Texas is no longer immune. Texas’ economy looks more like the national economy today than it did 20 years ago. Second, oil production taxes do not bring in as much as they used to. They now rank sixth, behind such things as motor fuel and motor vehicle taxes, in part because Texas oil production has declined every year since 1973.

A related problem is that our tax base no longer reflects the real wealth of our economy. So even with a continued improvement in the economy State revenue will lag behind economic growth. This will not change until the Legislature significantly changes the State tax structure.

Our tax system penalizes investment and deters expansion of capital-intensive industries. It allows substantial wealth-producing sectors of the economy to remain untaxed. Its burdens fall unfairly on real property and business inventory which may not be income-producing. It is a hardship on many taxpayers, a boon to others.

But what it mainly does is discourage of the kinds of industry that provides good jobs at good wages. Texas attracts the jobs that it does despite our tax structure, not because of it.

One of the more cynical ideas to be floated around the country is the now much-talked about idea of limiting the number of terms state and federal legislators can serve.

The idea is largely a Republican one, born of the fact that, while the GOP has recently been very successful in electing Presidents, it has not done particularly well at electing legislators. Except for the post-Watergate Carter term, Republicans have been in the White House for a generation now, but have recently lost ground in Congress and in state capitols.

In the 1930’s and ’40’s, when the GOP could not elect a President, but could occasionally muster a majority in one house or the other of Congress, Republicans supported and enacted our two-term limit on Presidential terms. In today’s climate, Republicans have talked about trying to repeal the Presidential limitation and imposing a Congressional one.

Fortunately, the trend seems to be going the other way. Texas and a number of other states have recently moved from two- to four-year terms for their governors. At least two states, Georgia and North Carolina, have repealed or modified one-term limitations on their governors.

The idea of legislative term limitation is cynical because it assumes voters are not smart enough to know what is good for them, their state and nation.

It also would have an effect that its advocates presumably would not like. People who like to call themselves “conservatives” however radical they are in fact) generally seem to dislike and distrust what they call “the bureaucracy” even more than they do the elected officials they are trying to get rid of.

But an inevitable result of constant turnover among elected officials would be an increased reliance on staff members (bureaucrats).

The fact is that public officials, like intelligent people in responsible positions in any walk of life, learn from experience. All legislatures work, to one degree or another, on the basis of seniority. Seniority has good points and bad ones. One of the good points is that committee chairs and others in policy-making positions tend to have the judgment that is at least partly conferred by experience.

Occasionally people get elected to office determined to save the world. A (modified) system of seniority at least attempts to ensure such folks can’t do any real damage until they have had time observe that the world has stubbornly resisted saving for several thousand years now.

The fact is that a legislator has to have served a few terms before he or she masters the legislative process and the subject matter of whatever area of public policy the legislator has specialized in. It is only after an pprenticeship that congressional leaders like Lloyd Bentsen, Phil Gramm, Jake Pickle, and Jack Brooks can make their contributions

That is not to say that every long-time legislator is an effective, contributing member of the body in which he or she serves. But a legislator can hardly be effective without the experience. In any case, that’s up to the voters to decide.

And they decide by re-electing many legislators, stubbornly ignoring best efforts of elitists to tell them what is best for them.

Last November’s Congressional elections were our most recent example. Only one United States Senator was defeated.

One writer called term limitation the political equivalent of cold fusion.

Still, the polls and the election returns are sending mixed messages. Seventy-seven percent of the November voters interviewed in a national exit poll said they disapproved of the job Congress is doing. Almost as many (70%) favored limits on the number of years a member can serve.

Limits on state legislative terms passed in Colorado, California, and (earlier) in Oklahoma.

But two thirds of those who favored a term limitation voted for the incumbent. And the most revealing fact of all is that or the fourth election in a row, more than 95 percent of the congressmen who ran for re-election were re-elected. Indeed, 404 of the 405 congressmen who ran for re-election won their primaries.

One of this country’s ablest political observers, David Broder of the Washington Post, is usually sympathetic with anti-incumbent sorts of ideas. But Broder, writing on the management of the Persian Gulf crisis, reflected on the long governmental service of President Bush, Defense Secretary Cheney, Joint Chiefs Chairman Powell, House Speaker Foley, Senate Majority Leader Mitchell, and concluded that he is “grateful that it is the grown-ups who are making the tough calls in this situation.”

Amen.

This country would doubtless not have had the services of Sam Rayburn as Speaker, or those of Lyndon Johnson as Senate Majority Leader, Vice-President, or President under a term limitation scheme.

President Bush, a veteran of 24 years of Federal service, has endorsed term limitation. Where does he think we should get our future Presidents? Not, apparently from a group of men and women seasoned, like himself, by years of public service. Or, for that matter, like his father Prescott Bush, who ably represented Connecticut for many years in the United States Senate.

We approach a historic moment. This week I am confident the legislature will pass a school finance bill that will move public education a giant step forward.

Senate Bill 1 will bring equity, accountability and adequacy to our system of public education. It will once and for all guarantee equal funding to students regardless of the value of real estate in their school districts. No longer will education in Texas be dependent on the property tax revenue each school district can raise.

Senate Bill 1 is necessary to meet the mandate of the State Supreme Court in the lawsuit brought by the Edgewood School District, one of the poorest in the state. But even if the court had not acted it would still be necessary.

In 15 years, the state has tripled its budget for public education, from $1.2 billion in 1975 to more than $5 billion this year. Most of that money goes to poor school districts. But the sad fact is that our school system disequalizes itself. The wealthy districts, with their generous tax bases, can easily hike their taxes to provide more services for children. Even with a big boost from the state, the poor districts cannot keep up.

Equity doesn’t have to cost money. We could do it without spending another dime, simply by redistributing the money already there. Such a plan would cost the Dallas Independent School District up to $59 million a year, which could cause a 12 cent local tax increase. Houston would lose $38 million – an 8 cent property tax hike – and Austin would lose $25 million – a 13 cent tax hike.

That is called the Robin Hood plan – take from the rich and give to the poor. It is not popular because no one seriously wants to downgrade the quality of public education in the name of equal opportunity.

A Robin Hood plan would cause property taxes to skyrocket in many districts, and property taxes are already too high. Texas has a relatively low state tax burden – 46th in the nation in dollars per person. But our property taxes are relatively high – 21st among the states – $50 per person per year more than the national average.

Some have suggested that we cut a budget that is already too austere. The House has passed a bill cutting $74 million and reduced the rainy day fund by $40 million. To make further cuts would require cutting services to nursing home patients and the disabled, delaying prison construction or defying state court orders and federal mandates. Our budget in critical areas of corrections, health, human services and mental health and mental retardation is already strained.

We could reduce the number of state employees, but that would mean laying off prison guards, attendants in mental hospitals and schools for the retarded, highway patrolmen and parole officers.

In the best of all possible worlds, the Legislature would have enacted an income tax and greatly reduced school property taxes which are inequitable and not based on ability to pay.

But in these brief special sessions that cannot happen, so the best solution is the one-half cent sales tax increase already passed by the House of Representatives.

With the $555 million in revenue from the sales tax and budget cuts, we can make some changes now contained in Senate Bill 1. That bill will help upgrade technology in our schools so we will no longer rank behind Mississippi in our use of computer-assisted learning. It will create pre-kindergarten programs for disadvantaged 3-year-olds and effective dropout prevention programs.

It will pay for a facilities study so Texas can start helping school districts with construction and renovation, hopefully reducing the burden on local property taxes. It will allow all districts access to enrichment funds rather than just the wealthy districts.

I wish we could prepare our children for the competition they will face in the 21st century without more money. The fact is we cannot. We must give schools, particularly the poorest ones, the dollars for basic improvements. Then we must demand excellence from our schools.

The bill takes great steps toward excellence and accountability. It will reward schools that are successfully preparing our children for the future.

It will reduce paperwork and the rules and regulations that make our system of public education a bureaucratic nightmare. It will encourage innovation through grants to promising programs.

The Edgewood decision has given us a rare opportunity to build one of the nation’s finest public education systems. If Senate Bill 1 becomes law we will have a school finance system that will be equitable and equal to the challenge of the next century. This is our opportunity to give our children a top-quality education. They deserve no less.