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The Dumbing Down of Texas

Texas must do more to prepare preschoolers and must boost grants to provide financial help for college.

The data seems to show that if a kid walks into a learning situation for the first time when they are 5 or 6, that’s probably too late.[This was known long ago and was the impetus for HEAD START which the Father of the Tea Party Dick Armey voted against each and every time it came up in Congress, sometimes the only vote against it]

Hammond, head of the Texas business group, noted that much of the state’s leadership looks like him – Anglo – and said they "do not understand that in 20 years time, their children are going to face a bleak future in spite of the fact that they have a college education because there are not going to be enough educated workers to move the economy ahead." Poverty, dropout rates bode grim future for state Forecast shows incomes plunging if nothing is done

Like me, I am sure that when you pick up a newspaper you too find that it is the libraries, schools and teachers that are taking the brunt of the George W Bush Republican Recession. Damn right. Damn Right. But there are a few cultural factors that make it worse for us here in Dumbutt where guns and Jesus trump education. It is well understood in Texas that if you are well armed and shoot well, things will work out for you.

Thanks to Mississippi, Texas is not at the very bottom of most things educational, though close with drop out rates hovering at 50% in working class districts. Here in Texas that translates into $337 million paid out in police, courts, prisons, medicaid etc. While turning it around would increase incomes in Texas by $300 billion.

Only Texas and Alaska refuse to accept national education and testing standards. For good reason, the Texas TAKS is about twice as easy as the national standard testing. Even though our schools districts spend months giving our kids the answers before their grade level is tested. Alaska? I have only two words for that, Chill Billies.

Our Taliban driven Texas State Board of Education is so full of silly clowns that it adds to the statewide acceptance of abject ignorance as a good thing.

We also have Governor Rick Perry boldly and loudly telling Washington to shove their $1 billion in education money up their rosy RED Yankee liberal asses.

Perry even threatens secession because… The Federal government wants to give Texas money to improve the state’s education. Now there’s the stuff of revolution, let me tell you.

Insanely popular Texas Homeboy Dick Armey – the Father of the TeaTards – finds the very successful HEADSTART program for kids at risk and a work of Marxist communists.

Texas has recently increased tuition and made entrance to our universities harder for minorities.

Reminds me of a few years back when I found Phyllis Schlafly behind a big national push to remove geography from public schools. Yes, GEOGRAPHY. At first I thought it was simply a matter of THOSE KIND OF PEOPLE who hate "multiculturalism" so passionately that even talking ABOUT other nations, races, ethnicity’s and RELIGIONS is at odds with those KIND OF PEOPLE’S world view. 

But as I slowly acclimated to life down here in Dumbutt I soon realized that was just part of it. The real nut of it is the realization that if too many Texas children start out in school early, spend time in libraries reading, enjoy smaller classrooms with good teachers in safe and attractive settings they will likely go on to college where they will become too smart for Texas, sell their pickups for hybrids, spit out their Skoal, put down their guns and move to New York and California because they would rather hang out with gays and lesbians rather than their parents.