Dan Branch:
Texas needs to get behind these school supplies

Opinion/Viewpoints
Here's what it will take for our students to compete globally

09:56 AM CDT on Friday, August 24, 2007

By Dan Branch

As 4.6 million Texas children head back to school next week, it's important to remember what's really at stake if we fail to properly educate tomorrow's workforce. Despite the current credit crunch, Texas is growing rapidly and has a booming economy. Demographers estimate that we gain 1,600 new Texans each day; approximately 500 of those come to the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Texas ranks second to California in population and productivity, but we're the only state with six cities among the nation's 25 largest. Texas is the nation's leading exporter for the fourth year running and, if we were a country, has the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Texas is being rewarded for having managed its budget, controlled its taxes and limited its regulations, but we must not become victims of our own success by failing to properly manage our growth and maintain adequate infrastructure.

With 10 million new Texans estimated by 2020, we will need efficient transportation systems, ample energy and water resources that are respectful to our environment, as well as public and social safety networks to protect our homeland and our most vulnerable.

In a globally competitive, knowledge-based economy, however, we must expand our most important infrastructure: a smart, creative and skilled workforce.

Next week, 85,000 more K-12 students than last year – the equivalent of the Fort Worth ISD – will fill our public school classrooms. They face stiff competition from their peers sitting in classrooms across the oceans.

Innovation, a market once cornered by this country, is now occurring all over the world. Goldman Sachs global economist Jim O'Neill argues that the economic potential of Brazil, Russia, India and China is such that they may become among the most dominant economies by 2050 with 40 percent of the world's population and a combined GDP of $15.5 trillion.

By 2025, China and India alone are projected to have 300 million skilled workers – the growing scale of foreign talent contrasted with falling U.S. rankings on international assessments, brings into focus our critical need for prioritizing quality education.

While our high school graduations and college enrollments are up, Texas is still falling behind other states. Our rank by percent of college graduates slipped from 27th in 2000 to 35th in 2004. We are a leader in the number of high school graduates but rank near the bottom for percentage of population holding high school diplomas. California students can choose from nine flagship universities, but for Texas students, only Rice, the University of Texas-Austin, and Texas A&M rank among America's top 60 universities.

This session, the Legislature worked to reverse some of the negative trends by passing new laws to improve high school graduation rates and college readiness. We overhauled high school testing requirements, favoring end-of-course exams over the TAKS test and promoted college readiness by allowing Advanced Placement or similar tests to substitute for end-of-course exams. In addition, every high school student will soon have the opportunity to take a college entrance exam at state expense.

Public and higher education continues to be the state's largest budget priority. Forty-four percent of the new state budget – a significant increase – goes to education. We poured $3.9 billion in new money into public and higher ed, increasing funding for popular financial aid programs like TEXAS Grants and college work-study by $162 million.

Because our competition is global, I helped pass HB 3259 this session to permit a sample of Texas schools to participate in international assessments to show us where Texas students rank against their international counterparts. Closer to home, I am chairing the House Select Committee on Higher & Public Education Finance. This committee is charged with re-engineering K-12 and higher-education funding in a coordinated fashion. We must do more. For example, we must fund additional "flagship" universities.

Going back to school is a time of new beginnings, new teachers and new classmates. It reminds us that our children and grandchildren are growing up. It should also renew our focus on the very real competition with classrooms around the world. That is the competition Texas must win.

Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, chairs the Texas House Select Committee on Higher & Public Education Finance. His e-mail address is Dan.Branch@house.state.tx.us.