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(SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS) MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund)

welcomed the court order released this afternoon by Travis County Judge John K. Dietz following his

declaration that the Texas school finance system is inadequate and inefficient.

Judge Dietz

granted final judgment in favor of MALDEF’s clients and found specifically that the current school

finance system violates the Texas Constitution because property-poor districts do not have

substantially equal access to facilities funding and do not receive sufficient funding to educate their

students, particularly when taking into account the larger proportion of limited English proficient and

low-income students in districts like the Edgewood Intervenors.

Because Texas continues

to rely primarily on local property taxes to fund public schools, and the property wealth of school

districts varies widely around the State, Judge Dietz concluded that the State must equalize school

funding with provisions similar to those in place today.

MALDEF celebrated this victory

for fair school funding with its clients, known as the Edgewood Intervenors in this case. The Edgewood

Intervenors are twenty-two property-poor and predominantly Latino school districts that joined this

latest round of litigation to remedy the continued inequality in school funding and ensure that they

would have the funds necessary to educate their students. Many of these districts were plaintiffs in

the original Edgewood school finance cases that led to the current funding system.

The

latest lawsuit, West Orange-Cove CISD v. Neeley, (“Edgewood V”) was brought by both property-rich

districts and property-poor districts, with neither party calling for the end of the equalization

measures known as “Robin Hood.” Dietz, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Travis County, issued

655 findings of fact and 24 conclusions of law based upon the evidence in a five week trial held in

August and September of this year.

“Today’s ruling supports the basic notion that every

schoolchild in Texas deserves a fighting chance and that educational opportunity depends on the fair

funding of schools,” said MALDEF President and General Counsel Ann Marie Tallman.

MALDEF Regional Counsel Nina Perales added: “Property-poor school districts have continued

to suffer from underfunding, even after our victories in the Edgewood cases. Judge Dietz’s ruling

recognizes the persistent inequality in school finance and sends a strong message to the Texas

Legislature that Latino students deserve better resources and a meaningful opportunity to learn.”

David Hinojosa, MALDEF Staff Attorney and co-lead Counsel for the Edgewood Intervenors

commented further: “Judge Dietz recognizes that our superintendents are doing all they can with the

resources they have, but that in the end, money does matter. The State of Texas erred by raising

academic standards for all Texas children yet only providing funding for a less-than-adequate

education.”

I read your fine article with interest. As an older Texan I want to add my two cents. A lot

of Bush’s Texan support is from the “Willful Ignerts”. They are the middle and lower class whites

who consistently vote against their economic interests and take personally any perceived mistreating of

the well-to-do.

Their world-view is concretist, and while it could be shattered by

trauma, it will never be changed by argument. It would be a fool’s errand to even attempt it. There

is, however, one political possibility with these people-neutralize them by delegitimizing their Prince

in their eyes. Keep them out of the polling booths by showing Bush to be a Trickster and a Fraud. The

UnChristian Bush. The UnTexan Bush.

Sorry…just thinking out loud. Will keep working

on it.

Malcolm Evans
Longview **********

Greetings!

ONE good question which no one seems to be seriously asking (those sterile sub-

divisions you mention – based on MY limited exposure, they are EVERYWHERE in America …)

Where ARE the people who will get INSIDE of this new “robotized” culture and will see

it from the insider’s POV (the roots of this can be seen in the 1950s … the recent PBS documentary

on the foundations of “Tupperware” are a real eye-opener … makes one wonder how many Americans

literally cannot even remember their own childhoods ???)

This culture [suburbs, two-car

garage, etc.] was celebrated by Hollywood and TV as early as the 1950s … the new manifestations HAVE

to be mostly updates of the originals … when I was a kind in Southern California [1959-1965] … the

extreme right-wing was a foundational component of the region …

… the Los Angeles

Times, George Putnam, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade (covered “gavel to gavel” on local TV ….

Ch11… for an ENTIRE week) in the sports arena [now old and gone?]which was the original home for the

Lakers (Chick Hearn and the Lakers vs. Celtics playoffs – or was it the finals? with Bill Russell,

Elgin Baylor, Jerry West et. al. James Ellroy captures a believable “flavor” of the LA-region BEFORE

I arrived as a 7th-grader-to-be in 1959) …

to an impressionable kid from the near-

midwest, LA looked and smelled “different” in nearly every way … my 7th grade teacher used to

lecture her junior-high class on the unworthy-ness of our generation and how we were typical of the

post-war generation of young Americans who were insufficiently hardy enough to stand up to the

Communist challenge … and of how WE would probably surrender to Communist agression without even a

fight …

[sound familiar to you ??? probably only if you’re old enough?]

WHO is currently situated to actually STUDY the current manifestations of American

residential sprawl (it may be be worse than ever ??? … culture, economics, politics, education) so

that understanding is ACTUAL rather than hit and miss …? Who will even try ???

My

experience is that the sprawling suburban “middle-class” …
(see the new April issue of Harper’s

for a useful picture of Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri … to a stranger like me, it rings quite true as

far as it goes)
… has always been as stomping grounds of crackpot American politics … as an old

college prof (San Jose State, 1970) used to suggest, American suburbia is founded on a transparent,

ill-defined sense of “community” … large cohorts of people are thrown together by economics and

real-estate developments (and most of the people IN these developments have NO idea of just who made

all the deals and decisions which created their inherently alienated communities, hence, there NO

genuine community.

… in America, economic development is the ONLY mechanism which

allows people to escape from the corruptions of well-established “communities” [increasingly insane

real-estate values since Ronald Reagan] … maybe what is wrong with America is an astounding LACK of

renewal in already-established communities – destruction (aided by corruption?) of selected parts those

communites has been our primary method since the 1950s ….???

And now, under GWB,

several millions MORE Americans are getting screwed ??? With many more millions having little idea of

how to fight-back [and not even imagining it to be possible] … and yet, GWB has many tens of millions

of “supporters” who subscribe to the prevailing very foolish fantasies …?

I’ve

probably said enough for now ….???

Sincerely,

R. K. LeBeck,

Jr.
SEQUIM, WA 98382

[Editor’s Note: In reply, I reminded the writer about

Carter’s “malaise” speech and how it turned out to be political poison. Here’s the response:]

PS: Absolutely yes.

…. there must be many thousands of other Americans

who have also lived through the last 40+ years who have seen and heard their own versions of
what I

saw and heard – artifacts of everyday life familiar to many – all over our country

…

Yes, I do remember Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” as well as the one year (?)

experiment with extending daylight savings time, the challenge to turn
down the nation’s

thermostats, the late 1970s gas shortage (riding my bike to work was good for me!), and the surprising

hatred (my naiveté?) of
Carter as expressed by certain executives in the silicon valley company I

then worked at – it was a very common feeling among business “types” back then … it was as if THEY

had “never” [!!] before experienced disappointment in a sitting President (pretty damn silly of them,

I remember thinking back
then …. 1978/79?)

**********

In Michigan

the issue is jobs not terror. Forget Texas. Bible thumpers will never switch and vote for the Dems

even though the Republicans are shafting them economically behind their backs.

As for

states like Texas: The people must not have suffered hard enough under Bush and the Repubs. If they

are in their 50s and 60s, they will find out soon enough. Another Bush term will see the end of the

safety nets that were there for my parents when they retired.

Baby Boomers are either

fools or rich to stick with the Repubs. I pray daily (yes, Dems pray) that we can turn out the vote to

get rid of the most dangerous administration in my lifetime. I still say if the US media was not the

lapdogs of Bush and company, the American people would wake up and see them for what they are. LIARS

Catherine Brabant
Lincoln Park,

Michigan

**********

good one on counterpunch on the oscars, white bread

and mayonaisse. Of course, black folk in this country, even those who call themselves African, still

consider themselves American first and foremost, no matter how bad they may be treated. And their

leadership wether it be political or cultural has long lost their base in the black institutions that

integration was meant to destroy.

Once upon a time black folk controlled what how their

children were educated, the stores they shopped in, the very institutions that were critical to their

lives. Today, what do black folk control outside of their churches?

Wouldnt you agree

integration was the most effective tool to destroy black institutions? As for the oscars, what has

really changed?

Thomas C. Mountain

Saddle up the Messenger Hoss:
4 Million Children Might be News

By

GREG MOSES

CounterPunch 9-16-

2004

(7 a.m. Central Daylight Time)–The morning after
Texas district judge John

Dietz ruled that the state’s
school system fails to satisfy criteria set forth in
the Texas

constitution, I’m browsing some of the “top
headline” sources on the internet to see how the

fate
of 4 million Texas schoolchildren rates on the
national news scale.

“More

than 130 years after Alferd Packer ate his five
companions to survive a Colorado winter, a

museum
curator is making a case that the notorious cannibal
was innocent of murder,” reads a

report from the
Associated Press that I find seven stories from the
top at Yahoo’s US National

News. But no news of Texas
education in the total of twenty stories that are
either listed as

“top” or “more.”

“Three men shot to death in a Willowbrook parking lot
apparently were

victims of a planned ‘hit’ that by a
fluke occurred just as a village police officer drove
past,

law enforcement sources said Wednesday,” reads a
story out of Chicago that gets number seven billing

at
Google’s US news page.

“The Times Fills 2 Editing Posts,” reads headline
number

six under New York Times national headlines.
The Education section also finds other things to

talk
about.

With Hurricane Ivan consuming three of the top dozen
stories at USA

Today’s “Nation” page, it’s Southern
weather that rules the day.

Maybe we can find the

headline at CNN US? Nope. But
if you look under local news from the US Southwest you
will find

this number one headline: “Former anchorman
out of prison.” Or this headline, ranked second:

“Henna tattoos cause family pain.” The Education page
leads with a story about college

affordability.

As the school buses pass my window here in Texas,
taking kids to their

unconstitutional destinations,
I’m reading parts of the US Supreme Court decision in
1973 that

set the precedent for not putting Texas
education on the national agenda. The Rodriguez

case,
which was the first of the “Edgewood” cases to be
filed—-way back in the summer of ’68—-set

the Supremes
to fidgeting over the prospects of “wealth
equalization.” They said they could

handle a lawsuit
where folks were completely deprived of some good
because of poverty, but the if

the High Court started
getting involved in cases where relatively poorer
people were only

relatively deprived of such things as
education, well you know, the great black-robed

scions
might have to stop taking summer breaks!

The dissenting judges in 1973 were

Thurgood Marshall
and William O. Douglas, not bad company to keep on a
morning such as

this.

“The Court today decides, in effect, that a State may
constitutionally vary the

quality of education which
it offers its children in accordance with the amount
of taxable wealth

located in the school districts
within which they reside,” wrote Marshall (with
Douglas

concurring). “The majority’s decision
represents an abrupt departure from the mainstream

of
recent state and federal court decisions concerning
the unconstitutionality of state

educational financing
schemes dependent upon taxable local wealth. More
unfortunately, though,

the majority’s holding can only
be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to
equality of

educational opportunity and as
unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives
children in

their earliest years of the chance to
reach their full potential as citizens. The Court does
this

despite the absence of any substantial
justification for a scheme which arbitrarily

channels
educational resources in accordance with the fortuity
of the amount of taxable wealth

within each district.”

“In my judgment,” continued Marshall, “the right of
every

American to an equal start in life, so far as
the provision of a state service as important

as
education is concerned, is far too vital to permit
state discrimination on grounds as tenuous

as those
presented by this record. Nor can I accept the notion
that it is sufficient to remit

these appellees to the
vagaries of the political process which, contrary to
the majority’s

suggestion, has proved singularly
unsuited to the task of providing a remedy for

this
discrimination. I, for one, am unsatisfied with the
hope of an ultimate ‘political’

solution sometime in
the indefinite future while, in the meantime,
countless children

unjustifiably receive inferior
educations that ‘may affect their hearts and minds in
a way

unlikely ever to be undone.’ Brown v. Board of
Education, 347 U.S. 483, 494 (1954). I must

therefore
respectfully dissent.”

But it was the refusal of Marshall’s peers that

sent
the issue of equalized education back to the Texas
courts and a series of state-level

rulings known as
the Edgewood cases of the early 90s. Texas courts
today are doing the work that

national courts refused
to do thirty years ago, and in the process historical
contributions are

being made to the human rights of
children everywhere.

For these reasons and others

that might be given with
more time and space, can we please ask the editors of
the national desks

to dig a little deeper into their
Associated Press dispatches and post the ones about
Texas

education? After all, attention to the human
rights of 4 million children today will bring you

so
many more avid readers tomorrow.