Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:

San Antonio Express-News. April 13, 2018.

The tragic case of Mark Anthony Conditt, the 23-year-old serial bomber who terrorized the Austin area for weeks before committing suicide, has brought close scrutiny of his short life and his education as a home-schooled student.

While it has prompted some unwarranted finger pointing, the incident has brought about a much needed public conversation about home-schooling education and its lack of regulation in Texas.

The notion that Conditt’s education had anything to do with motives that resulted in two deaths and four injuries is unmerited. There are well over 325,000 home-schooled students in the state and an estimated 1.7 million home-schooled students across the country. An entire population cannot be painted with one broad stroke.

Some argue that if there were more regulation and oversight for home-schooled students, maybe a teacher or a medical professional would have spotted warnings signs of his anti-social behavior, but there are no such guarantees.

We’ve done no tally, but we’re betting that a substantial number of killers - mass, or not - emerged from traditional public schools. Shall we blame their schools for their misdeeds? No.

Home schooling, as with all education, has its pluses and minuses. Any derision Conditt has brought on home schooling is undeserved, yet we nonetheless welcome the attention this incident has drawn to this type of private education. It is far too unregulated.

The Texas Home School Coalition takes pride in Texas being one of the least-regulated state in the country, the Express-News reports. Regrettably the fact parents are responsible for curriculum does not mean it is all good.

The state imposes only three requirements for parent seeking to provide their children with home schooling. The law mandates that instruction cannot be a sham, it has to be visual with the support of books or video monitors, and the course of study must cover reading, spelling, grammar, math and good citizenship.

That provides much discretion and flexibility on instruction time and rigor. There are no minimum educational requirements for those providing the instruction and there is no state testing to ensure students are learning.

In choosing home schooling, many parents cite student safety and a desire to keep their children away from drugs and negative peer pressure. Other factors include a dissatisfaction with the quality of public school instruction and wanting to provide a curriculum that includes moral and religious instruction. And sometimes the reasons for home schooling include a desire to provide a nontraditional education for a child with special needs or mental health problems.

Certainly, there can be quality home schooling. This generally includes membership in a network made up of those who provide home-school instruction. Members of these networks provide support for one another and opportunities for enrichment activities through sports, clubs and other activities. Some home-school education may also include online classes.

The exact number of Texas children being home-schooled is unknown. The lack of state oversight means there is no official tracking of students being home-schooled - or their completion rates.

We hear many of the success stories regarding home-schooled students who excel in national student competitions and go on to earn professional degrees. But who is holding accountable the parents who fail to provide their children with the education to prepare them for a post-high school education or to enter the workforce?

The appeal an almost totally unregulated private school education option has for some parents is understandable, but playing fields are not always level.

Some minimum checks and balances are necessary to ensure all Texas children receive the education they deserve - even in home schooling.

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The Eagle. April 15, 2018.

Anne Frank would turn 89 on June 12, had she lived. We wonder what she might have made of her life, whether she would have married and become a mother, a grandmother and, perhaps, a great-grandmother.

Alas, of course, those questions never can be answered. Frank was just 15 when she and her family were discovered by the Nazis hiding in a garret in Amsterdam and sent to concentration camps. It was at the notorious Bergen-Belsen camp that Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus - only weeks before the camp was freed by British troops.

We know of Anne and her family from the diary she kept during the two years the Franks remained hidden from the Germans.

Anne and her sister were among more than 1 million Jewish children who died at the hands of the Nazis in more than 1,000 concentration camps. They also were among more than 6 million Jews — two of every three living in Europe at the time - who died simply because they were Jewish. They weren’t the only ones to die. Some 5 million people with mental of physical challenges, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles and Russians, among others, died for not being up to the German ideal of a “master race.”

Many Jews tried to flee the Shoah - the term for the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis - but America, Great Britain, Canada among other nations, refused to take them in. The Australian government - founded in a former British penal colony - said, “We don’t have a racial problem and we don’t want to import one.”

For some of the Jews, death almost must have been welcome after being used for the most horrifying medical “experiments.” Hair from many of the Jews was turned into thread or made into socks for German sailors or made into rope for other military needs. Skin from some of the Holocaust victims was used for lamp shades. It is hard for most good people to comprehend how such horrors could be carried out by any human being.

But just this month, a study shows that the Holocaust is fading from memory. Perhaps that is natural. Only a few survivors of the death camps or the men who freed them still are alive - and many of them are unwilling to talk about the horrors they experienced or had witnessed. Three in 10 Americans seriously underestimate the extent of the Holocaust, believing fewer than 2 million Jews died. For millennials - those between 18 and 31 - the number who guessed wrong as four in 10. No doubt many Americans don’t realize that 5 million others died in the Holocaust.

Auschwitz, just west of Kraków, Poland, included three concentration camps which housed some 1.3 million people - mostly Jews - between 1940 and 1945, when the Soviet army arrived. Of those sent to the camps, fewer than 200,000 survived, and thousands of them died within weeks of being freed due to illness and malnutrition. In the study released last week, 41 percent of Americans and an incredible two-thirds of millennials could not say where Auschwitz is located.

Why is it important for the world to remember the Holocaust? As Spanish philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The world certainly has had genocides before the Holocaust and we continue to have them today, in Syria, in Sudan and elsewhere. We don’t know what to do, so most often we shake our head and then look away.

Over the 70 and more years since World War II ended, there have been numerous efforts to deny the Holocaust, to insist that it never happened, that it was, in effect, fake news. It is easy to reject those preposterous claims.

Of course the Holocaust happened and of course 11 million people - including 6 million Jews - were murdered simply for being who they were.

Harder to combat is the fading memory of those who lived through it, and the growing ignorance many of us have on just what happened and to whom so many years ago.

Wednesday night, just as Holocaust Remembrance Day began, dozens of Aggies walked from the Academic Building on campus to the A.I. and Manet Schepps Hillel Building on George Bush Drive, urging all of us to remember the dark days when so many people died simply for being.

Remember we should.

And say, “Never again.”

___

Houston Chronicle. April 16, 2018.

Tax Day, on Tuesday, offered a reminder that President Donald Trump continues to refuse to release his tax returns. In doing so, he is ignoring a tradition in transparency followed by every president since Richard Nixon.

For the past several decades, most presidential candidates have released their tax returns, including Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. But not Trump.

This should concern all Americans.

Tax returns show how much a person earned, where the money came from and how much they paid in taxes. For Trump, it could help reveal whether he’s had financial ties to foreign interests. Without a doubt, politicians give up some of their privacy by releasing details about their income - but voters have a right to expect their leaders to show where they derive their income, and what potential financial conflicts of interests they may have.

Trump’s claim during the campaign that he could not release his tax returns because he was being audited by the IRS was bogus. The tax agency itself said Trump was free to release them.

Throughout our history, the conduct of presidents has often been guided by norms rather than formal rules and laws. Trump’s refusal to follow many of these norms may mean such rules are needed.

The Maryland Legislature took the unprecedented step this year of passing a bill that would require presidential and vice presidential candidates to release their tax returns in order to get on the state’s ballot. It is unclear if such a law would be constitutional, as judges have never tackled the issue.

As president, Trump wields great influence over policy and can even induce swings in the stock market. We deserve to know where his financial interests lie, and, for example, how he was personally affected by the tax reform bill he signed into law in December. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said her boss would “likely take a big hit” by the tax changes. On that count, we ask the president to prove it.

Trump has gambled that Americans would stop caring about his tax returns. He may be right - with repeated firings and resignations in his White House, the Mueller probe, salacious allegations about extramarital affairs and tensions with Russia, Americans can be forgiven for focusing on more pressing issues.

Trump has long boasted about being a savvy dealmaker and businessman, a real estate scion and television star who has earned billions. If there is any argument that may appeal to him, it’s this one: Release your tax returns, Mr. President, and think how impressed we’ll be to count all of those zeros.

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The Dallas Morning News. April 16, 2017.

Here’s a headline worth repeating: Texas does not have the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world.

Eighteen months after the state made national news for its skyrocketing numbers, careful fact-checking has determined that inaccurate reporting on death certificates inflated the number of Texas women who died from pregnancy-related complications in 2012.

With reliable data now in hand, the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force can dig in on lasting solutions aimed at the too many deaths that do occur.

The state’s seemingly massive spike in maternal deaths was first reported in late 2016. The original statistics put the Texas 2012 rate at 38.4 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births, compared to the national rate of 15.9.

This category includes any pregnancy-related deaths while a woman is pregnant or within 42 days of giving birth, excluding accidental or incidental causes such as car crashes or homicide.

Last year, the shockwaves of concern and criticism over the state’s soaring numbers turned into confusion over the data gathering process itself. The state task force promised to get to the bottom of things, and Gov. Greg Abbott made the issue one of his priorities in the 2017 special legislative session.

Cross-checking multiple sources has now revealed that the number of deaths in 2012 was actually 56, not 147. That’s a 14.6 mortality rate, below the U.S. average.

Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, the Brenham Republican who authored last year’s bill to extend the maternal mortality task force to 2023, brings the right perspective to the latest numbers. While previous reports were clearly hugely inaccurate, she noted, “I believe we as a state, can and are doing more to improve maternal health outcomes.”

Here are strategic ways to continue that work:

- The state should consider extending Texas women’s Medicaid eligibility from 60 days to a year after giving birth. The task force also would be wise to examine the paperwork and bureaucracy involved in state options for help.

- The Department of State Health Services must make good on its vow to review maternal death reports from 2013 onward to ensure accuracy.

- The health agency should require evidence-based practices that can help hospitals more successfully deal with problems that can arise for pregnant women. This suggestion, made by task force chair Dr. Lisa Hollier to The Houston Chronicle, involves protocols that teach staff to look for warning signs of a problem, respond to it and report outcomes to measure their progress.

- Improvements in Texas’ vital statistics collection system need to be a priority. The addition of the maternal mortality category to the death forms coincided with a move to electronic reporting, both of which likely caused confusion for those preparing documents. The health department must ensure that people who certify deaths undergo special training to improve reporting.

Now armed with a more accurate picture of the problem, the maternal mortality task force can put all its energies into improving the health of both new and expecting mothers.

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Amarillo Globe-News. April 17, 2018.

Terry Funk for president?

Before anyone thinks we have taken one too many folding chairs to the head, the idea of the legendary professional wrestler and Amarillo-area native running for the highest office in the land is about as likely as Bernie Sanders embracing capitalism. But is still fun to ponder the possibility.

There is no doubt the former West Texas A&M football player could beat Donald Trump and Joe Biden - in the ring anyway.

In classic Funk fashion, the member of the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame and WT Hall of Champions fired off a Funkster-like quip in March to deadspin.com about Trump and Biden, who many are predicting could go at it for the White House in 2020.

Much like adolescents on a playground, Biden and Trump exchanged fighting words last month - in a manner of speaking.

Biden said if he and Trump were in high school, “I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Trump responded with a tweet (his primary form of communication) that “Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!”

Yes, these comments are from the current president of the United States of America and the former vice president of the United States of America.

God bless, America, indeed.

Funk’s idea of how to deal with Trump and Biden is certainly more appealing than the prospect of these two battling it out on the campaign trail, much less in a physical altercation - as absurd as it sounds.

Said Funk of hypothetical Trump/Biden fisticuffs (from deadspin.com): “If those guys went at it, it would be a very, very (expletive which rhymes with pretty) thing to watch … I’d love to get in the ring with those two (expletive which rhymes with manholes). Both of them at once would be fine with me. They don’t even have to tag in. If either one of them is looking for an (expletive) kicking, tell them to call me up. I’m over 70!”

Funk was speaking tongue-in-cheek. (Maybe. With Funk never rule out anything.)

But considering the lack of quality represented in a potential Trump/Biden political brawl for the White House, a handicap match with Funk versus Trump/Biden - in the ring or on the campaign trial - would certainly be more entertaining.