'Tis the Slow Season for the Austin Press Corps (APC) in their perpetual Get Perry Campaign (that would be Texas Governor Rick Perry, their Public Servant Enemy #1).

Their Most Hopeful to unseat said collective foe in the 2006 Gubernatorial race, Texas Comptroller of Public Tax Discounts (In Exchange for Campaign Cash) Carole Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn, has postponed the inevitable (for she will have to face the incumbent eventually) by abandoning the Republican primary ship and wading off into general election waters as an Independent.

Thus the APC is left adrift, with no one and everyone at once to utilize to try to undermine the Governor's reelective efforts.

The Media views the Masses as a teeming sea of boobery; their wishes and expectations are to be impugned and ignored, not respected and met. They have fallen into lockstep with the Donkey Party because in them they have found fellow travelers in the anti-Citizenry approach to public policy.

Or they can turn to assaulting Gubernatorial policy initiatives to try to remove the man from the Mansion. As they indeed have, for over the last week we have suffered through a slate of stories and editorials decrying the Governor's executive mandate that schools actually spend (just under) two-thirds of the copious funds they wring from Lone Star properties and the citizens who own them in the classrooms where (ostensibly) the educating takes place.

How this is at all controversial escapes the reasoned and reasonable mind. That it is decidedly so amongst the APC speaks to their wholesale immersion in the teachers' union waters that also deluges the Donkey Party for which they also stand.

The 65% Rule specifics are currently being sussed, and the Media does not miss an opportunity at every step along that way to decry one or another particular and often transitory piece of minutiae culled from the delineation process. There have been several occasions where the Press has loudly and roundly loathed the proposed choice of A over B in what fits the 65,

Any scheme that considers football coaches essential to education but not librarians — or teacher training — is silly.

only to see B and not A actually make the cut.

Look No Further

Which the APC then, of course, duly fails to report, fomenting anger and resentment amongst their ever diminishing readership at a 65% Rule that exists only in their pages and minds.

This egregiously premature henpecking from the cheap seats serves but one other purpose, the endeavor to undermine the reelect effort of the Governor who made this bit of journalistic disingenuousness possible.

Rick Casey of the Houston Chronicle, who proffered the excerpted piece of piffle cited above, also proclaims in today's bit of blather that he once thought, but now knows, that Governor Perry signed this into law for purely political reasons.

Political play is an oft-made Media claim against the Governor, and Elephants generally, and it is at once decidedly simple minded and revealing in a manner that those who levy the charge do not intend.

It is facile witted in that they view it as some sort of revelation that a politician would (GASP) engage in politics.

Yards, And Miles, To Be Won

It is accidentally telling in that if it were true that the Governor were doing it for purely political gain (and he is not, for it is a natural facet of his overall conservative approach to education), it would mean that there is majorative ground to be won by so doing; in other words, the people actually want the law in place.

As is the case far more often than the Press will deign to acknowledge, good politics can be rooted in good policy. The people of Texas are generally quite well aware of their own familial situations, and therefore know which governmental policies would assist them in their daily existences. Hence their overwhelming desire to see the 65% rule put into practice.

They know that schools and school systems are awash in cash (they need only look at their property tax bill to reinforce this bit of Reality), and yet they see dismally poor results emanating therefrom. So they think that perhaps a renewed fiscal focus on the classroom, where the learning actually occurs, will better the underperforming product for which they so copiously pay.

Behold the following graph, which charts the precipitous increase in scholastic spending as compared to the normal, sane level that it would have grown had it been held solely to inflation plus enrollment growth.

(Courtesy of The Texas Public Policy Foundation)

This is a tremendous increase in spending, over and above the reasonable augmentations to cover inflationary monetary and populative conditions. In fact, since 1970, the state of Texas has increased per pupil outlays by the ridiculously large factor of 2.5 to 1.

While maybe unaware of the minuative specifics, the Masses know that their schools are clipping them for inexorably more coin, yet they are seeing conversely diminishing results therefrom.

This then begs the question (for everyone save the Press), where have all these additional dollars been going?

The answer is, to every portion of the education Leviathan save education. The teacher to non-teacher staff ratio is the only thing to have ebbed faster than the Monolith's performance.

Teacher to Others Ratio (and Public Education)

Just two decades ago, there were three teachers to every one "Other" on the educative payroll. This would stand to reason, as the ones doing the teaching should be far and away the predominate focus of the schools in which they ply their wares.

But as federal involvement in local schools began its implacable rise, and the conversion from education facilities to social services centers took over the Leviathan's operational philosophy, this ratio rapidly flattened.

Foisted upon the localities were federal mandates for counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the stealth required hires of myriad staffers to administer the free school lunches, free school breakfasts, Head Starts, after-school programs and midnight basketballs with which the Good Intentions Coalition in Washington, D.C. paved the roads to every educative facility in the nation.

By 1990, the comparative numbers had dropped to nearly 1:1, and have shaved closer to flatline ever since. So now for every one teacher doing, you know, actual teaching, we have one non-teacher consuming a salary (often and in many cases one considerably additionally exorbitant than those given said instructors), benefits and space that could be utilized far more effectively in, you know, actually teaching.

The other facet of this transformation from effective schools to not, besides the exceedingly underreported ratio just discussed, is the inordinately over recounted educators union canard of the importance of the teacher-student per classroom percentage.

Padding the Rolls

Said solidarities have successfully created the false impression that less students per room means better results per student. What they have actually done is ensconced in law a mandate to allow for the increase of their union membership rolls by forcing schools to hire more under-qualified teachers to meet this artificial and artificially low standard.

The empirical and anecdotal evidence, of course, bears out no resemblance to the promises made when castigating for the new classroom criterion.

In 1969, the average Texas classroom contained twenty-four students. Today, it is down to fifteen. (It is interesting to note that if we were today at the 24:1 ratio, the average annual teacher imbursement would be $70,000. Once again we ask, these solidarities are in the business of helping whom?)

This sheer drop in per room presence has coincided directly with the fall in school performance, union assurances to the contrary notwithstanding.

The reasons for this are quite obvious. There are only so many people who are good at any field of endeavor. The best football players on the planet are wielding their excellence in the League who's biggest game is this Sunday. The best baseball players to be found are gearing up for their League's Spring Training to begin in a month or so.

The Few, The Proud, The Excellent

And, likewise, there are only so many truly good teachers. To mandate that school districts throughout the nation, who are already employing the very best available classroom talent, wade back into the now depleted hiring pool to bring on additional staff they have already, by their lack of retaining them in the first place, deemed to be superfluous is a supreme dilution of the educational experience for every student everywhere.

How this is anything but detrimental to the students they ostensibly wish only to help is a question quite answerable, but one that goes unanswered because the unions would avoid proffering it like the Plague, were the APC even asking, which they are not.

But it is most certainly a boon to these solidarities, who get to pad their organizational rolls with all the additional sub par talent that schools are forced to add, and by extension the Donkeys in Washington, D.C., and the fifty state legislatures who the unions unilaterally support in exchange for thier passing these ersatz legislative mandates.

And should one wish to harken back to the schooling of the likes of Abraham Lincoln, one would clearly see that class size bears not a whit on performance therein. Our future 16th President, no intellectual slouch he, attended a one room schoolhouse in Springfield, Illinois, in which four separate grades were simultaneously taught. And not one thin dime from the federal coffers contributed to his educative process.

To paraphrase Carly Simon, these were the good old days.

So the Masses see themselves paying prodigiously higher taxes for ever diminishing results, and when they place that in conjunction with the myriad new school staffers having nothing to do with teaching meandering about campus, they rightly turn to their elected officials to demand a return of impetus to the concept of actual classroom education. Hardly an unreasonable request.

The Press' Great UnWashed

Why the APC misses this in totality is why they are to be ignored on this and in all things. The Media views the Masses as a teeming sea of boobery; their wishes and expectations are to be impugned and ignored, not respected and met. They have fallen into lockstep with the Donkey Party because in them they have found fellow travelers in the anti-Citizenry approach to public policy.

So when the Governor gives the people what they want in the ongoing effort to rebuild a school system that the Democrats (who prior to 2003 were the dominant majorative Lone Star Party for over 130 years) systemically dismantled, he MUST be pandering, because why else would a politician listen to the voters who sent him to Austin (in large part to rebuild a school system that the Democrats systemically dismantled)?

The Citizenry in question, of course, know what is best for them and their children far better than the APC who contemns them, which is why the Governor will be overwhelmingly reensconced come November.