Houston Democrats

I want our state to answer Bill Gates' call for a fundamental redesign of the high school curriculum to adequately prepare children for the 21st century economy.

... Perry continues to back an Enron-style accountability system that holds kids back to keep them out of the test pool. This "ninth-grade bulge," which education researchers say is a result of high-stakes testing, has pushed the state's effective dropout rate to nearly 40 percent, tops in the country.

The sad fact is that most residents of our prison system lack high school degrees. The perverse incentive to encourage kids to drop out of school has created a school-to-prison pipeline that is a silent moral crisis in Texas. Incredibly, Mr. Perry was one of only three governors not to sign a national agreement by the National Governors Association to accurately track dropouts. We can't keep using the prison system to hide our failures like Enron used offshore dummy corporations to hide its debt.

Another unfortunate, if avoidable, byproduct of Enron-style accountability is the silent crisis of teacher dropouts. We have a shortage of qualified, certified teachers because 60 percent of all teachers quit within their first five years.

Texas pays its teachers $6,100 less than the national average, but it costs more than $13,000 to replace each teacher. This is perhaps the best example of Enron-style accounting. Consequently, we have more certified teachers not teaching in Texas than are working in the classrooms. We need to bring their salaries up to the national average and then empower them to teach our kids something more important than how to take yet another standardized test.

Rick Perry can't steal Chris Bell's ideas, call them his, and pretend he's accomplished something for Texas public schools.

That's more than just magic; it's plain old BS.