Texas Tidbits
Gail Collins has a wonderful piece in today’s New York Times that rightly slams Texas and its governor, Rick Perry, about education and abstinence.
This month, The Houston Chronicle published an opinion piece by the former first lady titled “We Can’t Afford to Cut Education,” in which Mrs. Bush pointed out that students in Texas currently rank 47th in the nation in literacy, 49th in verbal SAT scores and 46th in math scores.
Seriously, those are Alabama-like numbers.
The next piece would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. Texas has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in the United States and Perry is a fan of abstinence-only education.
“Abstinence works,” said Governor Perry during a televised interview with Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune.
“But we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country,” Smith responded.
“It works,” insisted Perry.
“Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?” asked Smith.
“I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” said Perry, doggedly.
Wow, just wow. The only thing Collins left out in her evisceration of Texas was an attack on the Dallas Cowboys. But we can’t have everything can we?
Tags: Texas
Texas is rapidly becoming a third-world nation. Collins ends her piece with a plea to Perry to resume his session threats. I agree.
I second that. Perry does make one accurate point: abstinence works. If your goal is to increase teen pregnancies. There is nothing better.
Abstinence does work. I think America should abstain from Rick Perry and Texas.
abstinence works. If your goal is to increase teen pregnancies.
Being 47th in literacy also helps.
“I used The Pill, but it kept falling out!”
Texas is first in average seating capacity at high school football games! They just dropped 60 million on a stadium in Allen.
Priorities, people!
The funny thing is New Jersey is actually dead last (behind Texas) in almost every education-related category even though they are No. 1 in the nation when it comes to spending per/pupil!
The funny thing is that the (former) NJ Education Commissioner was having a tough time selling he idea that NJ schools are really horrible when according to the NAEP, NJ kids were at the top of the heap in reading and math.
Here’s a wingnut group that says that NJ is in the top 10 (as is Texas, BTW).
NJ is 11th in average SAT score (with a pretty decent participation rate).
NJ traditionally ranks pretty high on a lot of measures of student performance, but I wouldn’t know that either if I was just listening to the Christie hagiography.
The problem with providing school performance metrics as evidence to prove a point, there are literally 100s of metrics to compare, from umpteen educational organizations, think tanks, agencies, etc.
I’ve tried perusing the data online and there is simply too much information; it’s difficult to compare apples to apples. In one study, NJ is in the top ten; on another similar study they are at the bottom fifth percentile.
For Collins to deride Texas, or compare the Texas education system to that of any other state, she needs to standardize for other variables, like demographics, that correlate with education level. Where are the citations to studies that employ econometric techniques?