Brandon Darby on Sex Trafficking in Texas

Human sex trafficking is alive and well in the state of Texas.  In other words, eleven and twelve year onld girls are getting raped and the Feds are covering it up.  Last month, we were at this talk with Brandon Darby:

Highlights: 

• A lot of good men and women in law enforcement care about human trafficking, but political leadership stops them.

• This happens all the time in Texas.

• Law enforcement whistleblowers lose their pension.

• The culture of promotion in the FBI is based around pleasing political appointees, not merit.

• "We're in a sad place where no one cares anymore."

• This issue is going to have to fall to the state of Texas!!!
• "In the state of Texas, if you're a person in Law Enforcement and you know of a child being raped and you do nothing, there are still state laws for you to contend with, Mr. FBI."
• AMEN!!!

• Show people the effects of illegal immigration.
• Sex trafficking is a consequence of a porous border.

Bottom Line: Little girls are being raped in the state of Texas and the Feds are covering it up.

(h/t Women on the Wall)

Troubling Transportation Proposals in Texas

Yesterday, Texas Senate Finance Committee chairman Tommy Williams and Texas House Appropriations committee chairman Jim Pitts spoke to the Texas Tribune about the budget.  First things first, Cahnman's Musings can live with what the legislators said about Medicaid and School Finance if we pass the Texas Budget Compact to handcuff future spending.  What the legislators said about transportation and water, however, raises more question than it answers:



Cahnman's Musings Concerns:

• Revolving Fund to Finance Water 
• Controlled by who?!?  Define 'revolving.'
• Obvious Transparency concerns
• Potential for cronyism

• Leveraged Debt to Build Roads
• What form, exactly, will 'leverage' take?!?
• Who will be doing the 'leveraging'?!?

• Road Infrastructure fund
• Same concerns as Water fund
• Fast Eddie Rendell has proposed the same idea nationally; obviously, anything Fast Eddie Rendell proposes leaves Cahnman's Musings nervous.
• Sounds like a boondoggle for unions.

• Raising Car Registration Fees
• Non-starter.

• "Combination of Public and Private."
• Boondoggle, boondoggle, boondoggle.

Bottom Line: This sounds like an attempt to set up several new off-budget quasi-governmental entities.  These ideas have boondoggle and crony capitalism written all over them.  While it's too early to render judgement, early signs make us very nervous.

ACTION ALERT: RARE JOE STRAUS PUBLIC APPEARANCE

Well, well, well, it looks like Texas House Speaker Joe Straus will be making a rare public appearance next week in Austin:

Date

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Time

7:30 a.m. - 9 a.m. The event begins promptly at 8 a.m.

Location

The Austin Club
110 E. Ninth St., Austin, TX 78701 (map)

Questions?

rsvp@texastribune.org or 512-716-8641

RSVP

A reservation is required.

 This could be a great opportunity to pin Straus down on several policy questions.

On CSCOPE and School Choice

Cahnman's Musings spent the day at the Capitol, first at the Senate Education committee CSCOPE hearing, then at the Americans for Prosperity Texas School Choice event; the day highlighted both problems and solutions in Texas education.

The hearing was notable for the degree to which the CSCOPE representatives attempted to blow smoke up the committee's ass.  According to the CSCOPE representatives, every concern the committee raised was old news.  The CSCOPE reps tried to paint themselves as victims of numerous misunderstandings and mistakes,  This led committee chair Dan Patrick to ask how many mistakes they need to make before we questioned their competence to do the job in the first place.  The bottom line, however, is that the CSCOPE bureaucracy has no interest in addressing public concerns.

The reason we are confident we understand the CSCOPE bureaucracy's motive is the testimony of Charlie Garza.  Garza, a former member of the state Board of Education, from CSCOPE back in November.  They haven't delivered, which leaves us skeptical of their promises to the committee today.

At this point, we've been covering CSCOPE for several months.  Today's hearings confirmed what we've suspected for awhile.  The product is substandard, with questionable content, and the financial irregularities haven't been answered.  We need to get to the bottom of this mess, but that's barely a start.  CSCOPE is a symptom of the model of public education.

As long as large sums of money are flowing through unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, messes like CSCOPE are inevitable.  That's where school choice comes in.  School choice shifts how money flows, taking it away form bureaucrats and returning it to parents.  Putting money in the hands of parents makes it easier to fix problems once they've been discovered.  At a minimum, putting parents in charge of the money cuts out a lot of middlemen.

The challenge for school choice is political.  The education establishment views school choice as a threat, and they'll fight it with everything they've got.  That's why the legislature need to hear from five parents for every bureaucrat.

For education in Texas, both the problems and solutions are obvious; the open question is political will.

Americans for Prosperity -- Texas: UT ranked 3rd Richest University in the US

 
A great find from AFP-Texas, money quote:

The University of Texas system, with an endowment of more than $17 billion, is the richest public university in the U.S., and the third richest overall. That’s richer than Princeton and Stanford.

And yet, for all that money, they can't educate students properly.

Agendawise: Gambling and battleground Texas

Casino gambling in Texas is a terrible idea that never seems to die.  Agendawise has a fantastic piece on how casino gambling is also a smokescreen to give organized labor a foothold in Texas.  This is a shrewd plan by Democrats:

Expanded gambling is the Democrats meal ticket to expanded power in Texas. It is an invitation to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Harry Reid’s political base of power in Nevada.

....

For Democrats casinos mean a very powerful lobby (think: trial lawyers but more violent) and unions. Reid relied heavily on casino unions to hold onto his seat in 2010. Gambling expansion in Texas means unions and built-in campaign infrastructure.

....

Gambling expansion is an important plank in the Democratic Party’s plan to take over Texas. Casinos, and the unions that come with them, would be a big victory for them. Conservatives must mobilize in opposition.

Any conservative (or so-called libertarian) who supports casino gambling is a sucker.

Tom Pauken: Texas vs. No Child Left Behind

Texas Workforce Commissioner Tom Pauken has a must-read piece on the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind and the revolt against the education legacy of (Governor) George W. Bush in Texas; money quote:

For the past two decades, excessive emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing and a one-size-fits-all focus on preparing all students for college came to dominate education policy in Texas and later, in Washington, D.C. with the passage of the Bush-Kennedy “No Child Left Behind” legislation. In addition, vocational education came to be neglected—even denigrated—in this massive push to make all students “college-ready.” Meanwhile, the principle of local control over education (which historically had been a deeply-held belief of Goldwater-Reagan Conservatives) was abandoned by Republican politicians in Texas and Washington, D.C., in their rush to be known as “educational reformers.”

....

The principal architect of Texas’s accountability system was a lawyer from Dallas named Sandy Kress. The most thorough analysis of Kress’s role in pushing Texas’s education policy in the direction of a high-stakes testing system was one written by Mark Donald for the October 19, 2000 issue in the Dallas Observer right before George W. Bush’s election to the presidency. Entitled “The Resurrection of Sandy Kress,” Donald’s article described how Democrat Kress and Republican Bush came to be close allies in pushing Kress’s vision of “educational accountability.”

I had gotten to know Sandy Kress when he was the Dallas County Democratic Chairman, and I was an active Republican. Later, I was elected State Chairman of the Texas Republican Party in 1994, the year in which George W. Bush defeated Ann Richards in the race for governor of Texas. What I didn’t know at the time—but soon learned after the November election—was that Sandy Kress already had been a major advisor to George W. Bush on education issues for some period of time. I found that unusual since Sandy Kress was a liberal Democrat whose views on education and other domestic policy issues were very much at odds with the views of conservatives like myself who believed in local control of education and decentralization of governmental power, wherever possible. Moreover, Sandy had not exactly distinguished himself in the early 1990s when he chaired the board of the Dallas Independent School District (DISD), during one of the most tumultuous periods in DISD history.

....

Nonetheless, Sandy Kress remained a key strategic advisor to the governor. He worked closely with Margaret LaMontagne (later Margaret Spellings), who was Gov. Bush’s education advisor, in expanding the statewide accountability system. During Bush’s tenure as Governor, the state consolidated power over education in the office of the Texas Education Agency and the Education Commissioner who was appointed by the Governor. Meaningful local control over education in Texas continued to erode as the accountability ratings system caused local school districts to focus more attention on the performance measurements put in place by the state particularly the testing system. Since that system did not include evaluation of the effectiveness of vocational education instruction, that area of preparation became de-emphasized in many Texas school districts.

...

Just as Texas started this failed approach to educational accountability, the Texas Legislature has the opportunity to replace it with a common-sense system that focuses on real learning and opportunities for all.

Read the whole piece.  Education spending in Texas has been growing faster than inflation plus population for the past decade.  On a related note, this is school choice week....