So, after 140 grueling days arguing in Austin, the Texas Legislature went home last week, but no one yet knows for sure what happened. A lot of bills ended up on the governor’s desk and he’s still thinking about whether to veto, sign or let someone else pass the buck.
That’s it in a nutshell.
What was worrisome this session was their take on education.
They who are so ill-advised are progressively making awful laws for millions of students at every level.
One rather distressing factoid that hit the newspapers toward the end of May was a scale showing what Texas workers earn based on their college major and degrees.
Lawmakers were focused on the pay levels of the Texas work force. Professors regarded the lawmakers’ focus as attacking the humanities and arts as wrong. Better workers, the profs retorted, aren’t necessarily better thinkers, which is what an education in the humanities produces.
The average for all fields of work was $74,155. A high school diploma was at the bottom of the list, with annual earnings of $37,077. Top of the pile was engineering at $105,000 plus.
At the bottom of employees were those with Education degrees at $57,934 (average annual pay), and was barely topped by the Arts, which earned $58,117 annually.
Now here’s the rub. Legislators wanted to take over this bill in order to grant students “degrees of value”. The educators were at the bottom of the bin!
The Arts community – writers, painters, yes, even journalists – were seriously dissed, and the professors testifying weren’t real happy with the legislature’s focus.
The Texas Workforce Commission weighed in that in the next 10 years, the employment demand will be for nurses, financial advisers, software developers and physician assistants. No one noted that all those future jobs would go begging without teachers to lead high school grads to that point after they graduate.
There is lots more to this subject, but it would have been interesting if someone had taken a survey of legislators in Austin this year. An employment survey from 2017-2021 showed that only 36% of full-time employees in Texas had an actual bachelor’s degree; one might wonder if possibly only a third of the legislators on the House Floor also held only a high school diploma.
This is who is making our laws in Austin, folks. And seeing what they are coming up with, a dose of studying the Humanities might do them a world of good.
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Right up there with getting an education, those severely conservative representatives who advocate for banning and snatching books out of the hands of children goes against the pioneer grain, telling anyone what they cannot read.
I’ve always thought that’s what parents were for. And for smart librarians who wisely shelve any books with a mature nature, like calculus or engineering tomes or illustrated medical books much higher up than 10-year-olds can reach. And then watch the kids like hawks when they stray into another area of the stacks.
Common sense doesn’t always need a law, but making it a requirement for running for office seems reasonable.
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What actually should be banned would include irritating phrases like:
Fake News.
Witch Hunt.
I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.
Beautiful Wall.
I didn’t do it. No, maybe I did. But they did it first.
Deals of any kind.
Lock her up. Or him.
Tweets for official press releases.
Who wouldn’t accept a B-27?
No problem (for “you’re welcome”).
‘Ddddd, that’s all folks!
Shelly has worn more hats in the communications field than Carter had pills but forgot to retire when she closed her promotions business. She earned a BA in Journalism at NTSU (before it became UNT) and has never lost her love of words.