Texas will not compete for coveted education money
Gov. Rick Perry is expected to announce Wednesday that Texas will not compete for a highly coveted piece of the $4 billion federal education grant program known as Race to the Top, state officials say.
A major policy announcement is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at a Houston education center.
Texas could snag as much as $700 million, if it were to win one of the select few awards aimed at fostering education reform.
Many states have been going to great lengths to improve their chance at winning some of the grant money. Not Texas.
Both Perry and Education Commissioner Robert Scott have harshly criticized the program’s rules, and Scott suggested that one provision was a harbinger of a federal takeover of public schools.
Scott, reached Tuesday evening, rebuffed a question about the grant application and quickly ended the call. A Perry spokeswoman did not respond to an e-mail request for comment on the decision Tuesday.
The governor’s justification for not competing is that too little money is on the table to implement significant reform in a state with 4.7 million students, the officials said.
The decision not to apply also fits nicely into the anti-Washington narrative that has dominated Perry’s gubernatorial primary against U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. It provides him another opportunity to tell the Obama administration that Texas doesn’t want its intrusion in state matters.
Only a handful of states are expected to get money in the first round, for which the applications are due Tuesday.
A year ago, Texas was quite bullish on its chances of winning one few awards.
end snips
Did you see the media pushing the meme that Texas is not giving away enough food stamps? lol.
Its like we don’t have enough poor people or something.
A slice of poll in the governor's race |
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| 11:45 AM Tue, Jan 12, 2010 | Christy Hoppe/Reporter Christy Hoppe/Reporter"> A congressional campaign telephoned Republicans in the GOP heartland of Midland-Odessa-Llano area last week. For fun, they asked their 300 likely voters (registered and having voted in the three last GOP primaries) what they thought of the governor's race. The numbers don't bode well for Kay Bailey Hutchison. Of those sampled, 45 percent favored Rick Perry and 26 percent rang in for Hutchison. There's a large margin of error of 5.6 percent in either direction. Of course, compared to Houston or Dallas, this is not an area that produces buckets of voters, but it is a slice, a snapshot and an interesting tidbit. |
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