Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:

Longview News-Journal. April 7, 2018.

Here’s a sweet dream: One day, Texas will have a Legislature that actually works on making public education better, rather than relentlessly attacking its foundations.

Just a dream, we know, but it is also fun to imagine that not just the legislative branch of our government but those in the executive branch - governor, lieutenant governor, comptroller and the rest - would do whatever they could to see that each of our state’s children can receive a good public education.

After all, that requirement is right there in the state constitution.

Of course, every election season we hear a great deal of flatulent speechifying about the importance of education. Come the legislative session, though, it turns into nothing but a bad smell.

One of the state’s latest assaults on school systems involves pre-K programs and, as is often the case, school superintendents had no idea it was coming.

Serious cuts have been made to funds given districts in 2015 to implement high-quality pre-K programs. That has hundreds of districts, including many in the Longview area, scrambling to continue meeting the programs’ requirements while funding is stripped.

The pre-K plan was a good one devised by Gov. Greg Abbott to provide Texas children with a running start on their classroom education. It worked well in the beginning, so we don’t understand why the Legislature saw fit to cut the funding or why Abbott did not stomp his feet when he saw what was happening.

Mind you, the cuts do not eliminate funding for all the district programs, they just reduce it, leaving local school officials wondering how they can possibly continue a high-quality program with less money to support the efforts.

That has put them in a no-win situation.

On one hand, if a district cuts the program, parents will - properly - complain about the decline in quality. If the district keeps the program, the money will probably have to come from cuts made in other areas that might also be worthy endeavors.

Don’t even think about raising taxes to make up the difference. The Legislature also has put all sorts of limitations on schools and the taxes they can assess.

It is enough to make the average Texan scratch his head and wonder if, by golly, his state government isn’t trying to kill public education completely. If so, it would be not with a fatal stab to the heart but death by a thousand cuts. Slow and painful.

Given what we have witnessed over the past several decades, it seems the only possible way to get more state support for public education is regime change, and that’s only going to happen when voters make legislators and other officials stand responsible for improving education.

That isn’t done by making schools or teachers jump through more hoops but by giving them the support they need to get their jobs done.

That should be the goal, of course, but it seems that idea has long ago gone by the wayside.

At the very least, the state should stop setting up districts for trouble by handing out money for good programs that state leaders have no intention of continuing to adequately support once they are operating.

Our state’s schools certainly have problems, but they are not nearly as fouled up as Texas government. Of course we would like better schools, but we need a better government first.

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The Monitor. April 8, 2018.

Here we go again.

Hundreds of National Guard troops on Friday began deploying to the Rio Grande Valley to guard the Southwest border, after President Donald Trump last week urged their activation, saying our border is lawless and allows anyone to come through.

“Our country has no effective border laws,” Trump tweeted.

We’ve played this song before, in 2014 when then Gov. Rick Perry activated 1,000 National Guard troops to our region as an uptick in illegal immigrants swelled through South Texas. At the time, we noted the restrictions that National Guard troops faced - not able to make actual apprehensions or arrests; not able to give chase. And so we ask how this time it will be better?

We also worry about the implications and perceptions to the rest of the world that militarizing the Southwest border will have on our communities.

Trump asked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and governors from the other Southwest border states of California, New Mexico and Arizona to activate National Guard troops last week as a caravan of 1,000 migrants was making its way north from Central America. Although the caravan was halted in southern Mexico (and several hundred were deported by the Mexican government) President Trump used this incident to make a convincing case to Abbott, and the American public at large, that more troops are needed on the border to stop an onslaught of illegal immigrants who appear poised to invade our country.

Coincidentally, as Trump was asking for these troops, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials began issuing a barrage of news releases and statistics that seemed designed to bolster Trump’s case.

Department of Homeland Security Press Secretary Tyler Q. Houlton issued a statement Friday saying “the crisis at our Southwest border is real. The number of illegal border crossings during the month of March shows an urgent need to address the ongoing situation at the border.”

A CBP news release issued Friday afternoon from the Edinburg office carried the headline “Chaotic Border Environment in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.” It quoted RGV Sector Chief Patrol Agent Manuel Padilla Jr., saying: “the border region remains a dangerous place for law enforcement who face an array of dynamics in protecting our communities, from humanitarian efforts in regard to saving lives to being assaulted with rocks along the riverbanks.”

We acknowledge that statistics released last week by CBP show an uptick in immigrants - an overall increase of 37 percent in apprehensions for the Southwest border in March from February. However we note that annual arrest figures in our RGV sector, which runs from Rio Grande City to Brownsville, actually showed a drop in apprehensions of family units and unaccompanied minors this year from last. In fact, there was a 45 percent decrease in arrests of unaccompanied minors in fiscal 2018 from fiscal 2017.

So, other than the creeping caravan - which has since been stopped - is there really a justification for militarization of the RGV border at this time?

And what reparations, if any, are being made to help our region recover from being painted as lawless and full of criminals and gangs that facilitate the flow of drugs and human trafficking across the Rio Grande?

We are the same community that we were a week ago. We are the same people who awoke on Easter morning and cracked cascarones on our loved ones heads. We are the same farmers who work our fields, entrepreneurs who run our shops and students who attend our schools.

We are the same volunteers who help immigrants at the Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen after federal agents process and release them.

We have not changed, but unfortunately the perception of who we are has.

An apology is due to us all. And lawmakers need to take responsibility for their inactions, which have led to this point.

Rather than paint our region with a wide and disparaging brush, the burden of responsibility needs to fall squarely on the shoulders of those in Congress who have for decades failed to pass meaningful immigration reform. New laws are needed that would allow the best and the brightest from other nations to legally seek the American dream by quickly becoming taxpaying American citizens who could contribute to our economy and our society. Laws are needed that will better thwart those with nefarious intentions, like those pushing drugs and human trafficking, from entering our borders.

The federal government also must take responsibility for failing to hire more U.S. immigration judges to clear out the backlog of over 600,000 immigration cases, and for failing to hire thousands of Border Patrol and CBP agents. Congress has for the past few years repeatedly approved funds to hire immigration judges and these federal agents, but for whatever reasons, these positions remain vacant, indeed contributing to the immigration “crisis” that Houlton referred.

Filling these positions would have an impact on curbing illegal immigration. Dispatching the National Guard here will likely not.

We commend the guardsmen for fulfilling their call to duty, but given their legal limits, we doubt their effectiveness.

We recall how restricted these troops were when they first arrived in 2014. They were assigned to posts and not allowed to leave their areas. They also may not make arrests. If they saw a group of immigrants crossing illegally, for instance, they would call Border Patrol agents, but they could not themselves give chase. In their heavy, camouflage fatigues, we saw them sit for hours at a location, acting like pointers and eyes on the ground, but unable to do much more. Often it took Border Patrol agents some time to get to their areas, and by then, the immigrants many times had moved on and were well hidden.

Activating the National Guard just seems like a way to stir up Trump’s base.

As state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, said: “This administration makes decisions based on impulse and distorts reality to fit their political agenda. We cannot and should not make decisions based on misinformation and politics. Yes, we must define and protect our borders. However, we should be smart and strategic about how we do it. This plan is neither.”

Working on a smart solution, by filling key positions of those who can have a real impact in stopping illegal immigration and reducing the number of immigration cases, is what is needed right now. Sending the National Guard here is more of an incendiary tactic that will rile the American masses, but do little to stem the tide of illegal entries.

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Houston Chronicle. April 9, 2018.

The mechanic finishes repairing your car.

“I fixed that power steering lines,” he says. “But I noticed the clutch is about to fail. Maybe next week or next month, but you’re living on borrowed time.”

So what do you do? You have him install a new clutch, of course. It’s too dangerous not to.

Alarmingly, Texas policy makers have not applied this logic to our state’s voting systems.

Cyber experts have warned that many electronic voting machines used in Texas and 13 other states are vulnerable to hacking because they do not produce paper records as a backup. But in recent months, counties have spent millions of dollars on new voting machines that, yet again, do not keep paper records.

The American intelligence community asserts that Russia has tried to breach our voting systems for more than two years. The midterm elections are just seven months away, yet in many cases Texas systems remain as vulnerable as during the 2016 elections.

What makes this issue more maddening is that state and federal officials have focused on election security problems that simply fail to exist.

President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that millions of illegal votes caused his loss in California. He dispatched Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, to investigate allegations of widespread voter fraud around the country, but Kobach found none. Meanwhile, in these parts, a Tarrant County judge sentenced a woman who voted though she was ineligible to five years in prison.

In one case, a Texas county that tried to do the right thing was hamstrung by poor state leadership. San Jacinto County recently spent a cool $383,000 on a new paperless voting system because no one in Austin or Washington warned against it. Now the county’s election administrator is frantically searching for a quick fix.

Texas must end the use of paperless voting systems. We acknowledge this may be an expensive mandate for many counties, but the Legislature must appropriate funds when necessary to ensure this happens. Attorney General Ken Paxton has vowed to stamp out voter fraud in the state. By supporting a shift away from paperless voting machines, he would be making great strides toward this goal.

We applaud the Legislature’s decision this past fall to create a committee on election security. But to live up to its billing, the seven-member panel must draft statewide requirements for voting systems and retire all paperless machines.

Texans already vote in dismally low numbers. The last thing we need is a reason for voters to have less faith in our elections.

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The Dallas Morning News. April 9, 2018.

Any Texan who has spent time in a hospital for a medical procedure knows the bills can skyrocket. Those who suffer the misfortune of a chronic ailment may owe hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No wonder that health problems can send families to the brink of financial ruin. Experts say medical debt contributes to 60 percent of all bankruptcies in this country.

That’s why we were so inspired by news that Covenant Church in Carrollton recently made a $100,000 donation to the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt, which resulted in wiping out $10 million in medical debt for more than 4,000 Dallas-area families, including some veterans.

Here’s how the math works: For every dollar donated by Covenant, the nonprofit knocked off $100. The RIP group, whose mission is to erase America’s medical debt, is funded through donations nationwide.

Good on pastor Stephen Hayes for discovering this partnership opportunity. A handful of others in North Texas, including KXAS-TV (NBC5), have donated to the RIP Medical Debt effort.

Maybe these good folks are onto something transformative that should be replicated throughout the state.

Here’s how it works:

When hospitals and doctors can’t collect payment on medical bills, they sell the debt to collection agencies for a fraction of what is owed - generally pennies on the dollar. The consumer, meanwhile, falls further into the financial hole as big bills keep getting bigger.

RIP steps in to give the providers another option, buying the debt in bundles and making good on what’s owed. At that point, struggling families are sent word that they’re free and clear.

What a relief.

Of course, there’s no substitute for bringing health care costs down in this country. We’ve urged Washington to put politics aside and come up with fixes that will allow Americans to afford the care they need.

The sobering reality, according to national studies, is that more than 60 million people struggle to pay their medical bills. Advocates say that a quarter of all Americans - and that includes those with insurance - report that health care expenses have taken a serious toll on their family finances.

A debt relief nonprofit like RIP isn’t a global solution to all that ails this system, but no doubt the assistance it does provide chips away at the overall problem.

We encourage other local organizations looking for a place to put their charitable dollars to take a look at what RIP Medical Debt is doing to help their neighbors.

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Beaumont Enterprise. April 10, 2018.

A generation ago schools didn’t have to deal with cellphones or social media, and problems with clothing or hair standards seemed tame by today’s standards. But those issues and others are modern realities for teachers and administrators, who have to adapt to these rapid changes without losing focus on their primary mission. The key seems to be dealing with them in ways that can enhance education - and get away from daily skirmishes that frustrate teachers and students.

Many schools are still deciding whether to fight cellphones or find ways to manage them. The trend is toward grudging acceptance, with the number of schools banning them declining from 91 percent to 66 percent, according to one study.

Some teachers, like Susan Letourneau at Lumberton High School, allow students to use cellphones in class to solve math problems in competition with one another.

Most schools realize that by now cellphones have become routine possessions for virtually all students over a certain age - an age that seems to keep dropping. That can’t be changed, and unauthorized cellphone use during class time is never OK. But by allowing options such as phone use during lunch or between classes, some principals are finding ways to tolerate new technology without letting it interfere.

The same questions apply to dress-code battles. Hairstyles like dreadlocks were once considered extreme but are now mainstream. Years ago no teenager would come to school with torn clothes but today “distressed” jeans are fashionable. Dyed hair was once unacceptable, but some schools allow it now.

Schools that minimize conflicts over these issues seem to have clear-cut rules - and a degree of flexibility. Granted, some students will keep pushing the boundaries of any guidelines, and at some point a principal must say no.

But the goal should be making sure that clothing or hair don’t distract others without, say, sending a student home because a shirt is a half-inch too short.

In 10 years, schools will have other challenges to deal with that no one can conceive of now. Then, as now, they need to find the right balance to keep these issues in perspective instead of letting them drive policy.