Opinion

Hart: GOP's collective pants on fire about education cuts

Say you had a good job, and you regularly provided your kids with three meals a day. But in 2009, you got laid off, and regrettably, meals had to be cut to 1½ times a day. That is, until your generous Uncle Sam stepped in and wrote you a check. Regular meals resumed.

Fast forward to 2011. You've got your job back. You've built up a healthy savings account, and Uncle Sam closes his wallet. But now, you want to spend your own money to cover only two meals a day. After all, you convince yourself, that's more food than the little buggers were getting before Uncle Sam stepped in!

Your kids, of course, are hungrier than they were before you lost your job. Your decision to cut their caloric intake has nothing to do with Uncle Sam's support in hard times. Meanwhile, you've got about $8 billion stashed away that you'd rather hoard than use to provide your kids with adequate nutrition.

That scenario is the best explanation for the continued claims by Texas Republicans that they didn't really cut public education funding by $5.4 billion in 2011, according to Scott McCown, executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities.

"What happened is in the economic downtown, Uncle Sam sent federal relief, and we used it to fund the kids," McCown pointed out. Then, when the state of Texas no longer needed federal stimulus support - after all, there was $8 billion in the Rainy Day Fund - our state leaders "made the decision not to replace it."

Spreading fiction?

I called McCown to get his reaction after seeing Republican Houston Rep. Sarah Davis' latest campaign mailer, which claims that her Democratic challenger, attorney Ann Johnson, is spreading fiction in her assertion that Texas Republicans cut $5.4 billion from public education last year. On the cover, Davis invokes the dictionary, sharing this definition of fiction: "A belief or statement that is false, but that is often held to be true because it is expedient to do so."

To back up her allegation that school budget cuts are a figment of Johnson's imagination, Davis then asserts that Texas lawmakers actually added $1 billion to our schools. Johnson's math, she tells us, includes "President Obama's one-time stimulus money, that simply wasn't available the following year."

The mailer goes on to assert, with great umbrage: "So Johnson is blaming Republicans in Austin for what a Democratic President did in Washington. This happens all the time: liberals in Washington throw a bunch of money at programs, and then in later years leave the state to find the money to keep them going."

In a campaign season full of tall tales, this may be the whopper that tops them all. State lawmakers in 2009 used $3.6 billion in federal stimulus money instead of state dollars to fund public education - essentially supplanting federal support for state support. In 2011, the Legislature added back only $1.6 billion in state money to replace the federal dollars.

To claim that the Legislature "increased" funding to public ed is, as I wrote when Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst made this claim, to have giant amnesia about the stimulus.

Now, Davis is using the state's 2009 contribution to education as a baseline for comparison to state funding in 2011, and blaming Obama that the dollars fall short. It's as if Davis is saying, two meals a day is more than what those kids were getting before Uncle Sam stepped in!

'Not that big a cut'

This outrageous claim - that Republicans didn't cut public education funding - has been rated "Pants on Fire" by the newspaper fact-checking service, Politifact, on several occasions this year.

And Politifact's researchers didn't rely on the opinions of Democrats, noting that during the legislative session, Senate Education Chairman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said: "Nobody wants cuts. But we have to have them." And House Education Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, predicted the cuts would amount to 4 percent to 5 percent, which he characterized as "not that big a cut."

The writers' conclusion: "So, lawmakers ultimately cut public school aid, with key leaders even acknowledging so as those decisions were sealed. To tell constituents otherwise is not only inaccurate, it's misleading and ridiculous. Pants on Fire!"

By the way, I looked up "fiction" in dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.com. Neither definition came close to the version quoted on Davis' mailer. While I was at it, I looked up chutzpah, which I think applies here: "supreme self-confidence; nerve, gall."

patti.hart@chron.com