I think Rick Perry has spent far too much time palling around with the likes of Sarah Palin and the teabagger folks. After spending much of last summer hanging out with right wing fundamentalists and extremists who want to form their own armed militias and who are known for making stuff up and pulling facts out of their butts, Rick Perry has apparently forgotten how to add and subtract.
As Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle writes, some whoppers are just too huge to ignore, even during the silly season of campaigning.
After all, similar to drinking while driving, speaking while stumping has been associated with any number of side-effects, from impaired judgment to short-term memory loss to feelings of grandiosity.
Campaign rhetoric is usually judged in this context. But, occasionally, the whopper spewed from the candidate's lips, or those of a spokesman, is so big, it can't be ignored. And it might be dangerous to do so.
Such was the case last week with Gov. Rick Perry and his spokesman, who claimed, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, that Texas' dropout problem isn't that big of a deal.
Rick Perry claims that our school's drop out is a mere 10%. Oh were it so.
ADVERTISEMENT
Last week, Perry and his spokesman were responding to Democratic gubernatorial opponent Bill White's claim that nearly 1 million Texas students have failed to graduate or get a GED on time during the past nine years.
The former Houston mayor may actually have undercounted the number of dropouts. According to Texas' foremost authority on dropouts, the non-profit San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association, more than 1.2 million students have been lost to attrition in Texas since 2000.
The total number lost since 1985, the year the state hired IDRA to study the magnitude of the problem, is more than 2.9 million.
The organization generally calculates that Texas public schools fail to graduate one out of every three students, with the percentage inching up to 40 percent for black and Hispanic students.
These numbers shouldn't surprise anyone who's been paying attention. They're in line with what a diverse array of groups, from Education Week's Research Center to the Manhattan Institute to the Libertarian-leaning Foundation for Educational Choice (formerly, the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation) have found.
Robert Enlow, president and CEO for the foundation noted that TEA has low-balled the problem for years: "That kind of under-reporting would get me in trouble as a non-profit, I'll tell you that," he said.
The Texas dropout rate and the cost to society.
"There's no way to put a happy face on it," said Linda McSpadden McNeil, director of the Rice University Center for Education, which recently released a report suggesting Texas' high-stakes accountability system may be adding to the dropout numbers. "This is very dire. It's a slap in the face to the families of the kids we're losing to say we're actually not losing that many."
If Governor wasn't too drunk or demented to ever have read the Wall St. Journal he would have never had the stupid arrogance to think he could get away with claiming the dropout rate is 10%.
In a global economy, the single most important issue facing our country is an educated work force," says Houston Mayor Bill White. "Somebody who lacks a high school education will have lifetime earnings that are only about 60% of those of somebody with that education. That's just the impact on personal income. There are the social costs as well."
With other studies also showing increases in the number of students who aren't graduating, public officials are concerned those numbers will mean rising costs for social programs and prisons, as well as lost tax revenue because of the reduced earnings potential of dropouts. Dropouts are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, including about 75% of state prison inmates.
"The whole cauldron of social and economic challenges you face are increased, and those problems are laid at the doorstep of city hall, city government, community organizations and churches," says Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans and currently president of the National Urban League.
Bill White gets it. And he has understood the seriousness of the school dropout problem for sometime.
The day began with Bill White issuing a press release accusing Republican Rick Perry of quoting what White says is a bogus drop-out rate for Texas: 10 percent. In an interview, White blasted the governor for failing to address the catastrophic problem over the last decade, insisting that the real drop-out rate is 30 percent. "About 3 in 10 Texas high school students do not graduate from high school or get a GED within 4 years," the release states. "In the graduating classes of 2000, when Perry took office, through 2008, about 3.2 million students were enrolled in high school, but only about 2.1 million graduated or earned a GED on time."
Of course Bill White does not pall around with nut cases and self serving demagogues most of the time, either. Nor does he fill his head with extremist voodoo make believe and fuzzy math.
What's the truth? Both statements are technically correct - yet neither is exactly true, according to the most reliable dropout figures. Both lack context and ignoring other readily available data. Ultimately, however, White's figure may be the closest to reality, as a Texas Tribune analysis of the many and conflicting dropout-counting methods showed last year before the candidates ever started fighting about it.
Note the differences in their style. White presents facts, which you can see here, while Perry points and says "Look! It's a monster under your bed! Run for your life!" Don't expect anything different between now and November.
The fact of the matter is, under Perry's leadership Texas schools have been engaged in a race to the bottom.
If the Governor spent less time reading teabagging leaves maybe he would know the difference between facts and fairy tales.
