Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

The Dallas Morning News. Dec. 15, 2016.

Investing in pre-K now pays off big later

If we told you that every dollar you invested would see a $6.30 return, you’d probably jump at the chance to pour in cash.

And what if by doing so, you produced a better-educated and higher-paid workforce while also reducing the cost of crime and health care?

Game-changing.

That’s the case a Nobel Prize-winning economist made this month in a study about the benefits of to society of investing in quality early-childhood education. Education experts have been saying for years that getting kids into these full-day programs not only sets them up for success throughout their school years, but saves communities big in the long run - with fewer dropouts, reduced crime and generally healthier lives.

Economist James Heckman has put a dollar figure on it. Calculating costs and benefits, he estimated a 13 percent annual return on investment.

He and his team tracked a group of North Carolina kids over 35 years. Those in an intense, high-quality preschool program from infancy to age 5 had lasting benefits, including higher IQ levels, reduced health risks, and better education and earning power.

Local studies show that children in quality pre-K scored higher on the third-grade STAAR reading test than those who were not, plus they had higher odds for reading at a college-ready pace.

With the potential for those results, Texas can’t afford not to make a bigger investment. It’s hard to understand why some lawmakers still aren’t convinced.

While they’ve added $118 million in onetime grants to improve pre-K programs, there’s likely to be a fight when lawmakers reconvene in January to make a longer-term investment to really move the needle on achievement.

We know that these programs are costly; good teachers providing one-on-one instruction come with a higher price tag, for example. And we understand the funding challenges for districts hamstrung by the state’s complex education funding mechanisms, which have cut money for maintenance and operations, leaving more burden on local taxpayers.

But there’s something wrong when we’re so reluctant to put needed dollars into pre-K, while at the same time taxpayers seem willing to take on piles of long-term debt for big-ticket items like indoor football practice facilities.

The Dallas Morning News’ Corbett Smith reported on the construction boom: Bond money will pay for nine new indoor facilities around North Texas to be finished in the next two years, including two $16 million projects in Grapevine/Colleyville ISD and four $15 million projects in Richardson ISD.

We’re all for fielding competitive football teams, but producing successful citizens needs to be an even higher priority.

This newspaper has repeatedly called for Texas to show a sustained commitment to funding programs that work. The evidence continues to mount that quality pre-K should be at the top of the list.

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Austin American-Statesman. Dec. 17, 2016.

Interim police chief must curb crime, repair public trust in 2017

Brian Manley took over as interim chief of the Austin Police Department this month to fill the vacancy left by former Chief Art Acevedo, who stepped down to take the police chief job in Houston. And it will be about a year before a permanent chief is hired to fill Acevedo’s shoes - a job Manley says he wants.

During that time, Manley’s leadership will be tested by several big challenges confronting the 2,000-officer department, including the crisis regarding the police department’s DNA lab; waning public trust of police, particularly among people of color; low morale of rank-and-file officers; and free-speech issues as an increasing number of people use smartphones to record officers on duty.

Along with those, of course, is the issue of public safety. Although Austin still is the fourth-safest big city in the nation - which are defined as cities with populations over 500,000 - it saw a 10 percent spike in violent crime in 2016 over 2015, Manley told us, with aggravated assaults and robberies leading the way.

Manley, 49, who has spent more than 25 years on the force, says that curbing the increase in crime is his top priority, and we agree it’s a challenge that only will get bigger given Austin’s rapid growth. But he rightly acknowledged the importance of dealing with other looming issues mentioned above that can and do impact crime in the Austin area. Finding solutions to the department’s discredited DNA lab certainly is in that category.

Manley is part of a team that includes city and county elected officials engaged in dealing with the lab crisis, including hiring an expert to help determine the path forward for the shuttered lab. The task is complicated and solutions are expensive in repairing the damage.

As the American-Statesman reported, the lab’s problems erupted about five months ago, when city officials closed it days before receiving an alarming audit from the Texas Forensic Science Commission, citing staff workers who were using faulty testing procedures when they examined DNA samples.

Add to that recent revelations regarding the lab’s slipshod tactics, which have thrown into question an unknown number of convictions obtained potentially on tainted forensic evidence. Consider the decision by a supervisor to keep mum about a freezer housing hundreds of vials of DNA evidence that sat broken for eight days, potentially damaging the samples. DNA long has been used as key evidence in violent crimes, such as homicides and sexual assault.

Solutions, including reviewing and reopening thousands of DNA samples and establishing a credible DNA lab, either by a private or public entity, are quickly adding up, with estimates topping $14 million.

As Manley helps restore confidence to that part of the law enforcement system, he also will be dealing with some issues that flared up during the end of Acevedo’s nearly 10-year tenure as chief, including an erosion of public trust in police - particularly among minorities and some millennials - and morale problems with rank-and-file officers.

Trust in reforms Acevedo put in place to change a police culture with a reputation of overpolicing minority residents has faded among many in the community after witnessing a video this summer of the violent arrest of Breaion King, an African-American elementary school teacher. The video shows officer Bryan Richter twice throwing her to the ground during a routine traffic stop in June 2015. A separate video showing King being driven to jail includes comments from APD officer Patrick Spradlin, who told King whites fear blacks because of their “violent tendencies.”

That videos’ release was preceded by the Feb. 8 fatal shooting of 17-year-old David Joseph by officer Geoffrey Freeman after Joseph charged the officer. The African-American teenager was unarmed and naked at the time.

Acevedo fired Freeman, raising the ire of the police union, which supported Freeman and accused Acevedo of siding with community activists against officers. A Travis County grand jury declined to indict Freeman, who ultimately received $35,000 from the city to part ways permanently instead of appealing through arbitration to get his job back.

Manley faces a thorny task in balancing community expectations with officers’ morale.

Also on the radar is free speech, specifically clearly articulating to officers the constitutional rights of the public to record officers on duty.

APD policies do affirm such rights of the public, as well as police officers, and stipulate where that legal line is drawn. But a recent case regarding Austin Community College student Phillip Turner, known to police for his frequent-but-lawful recording of their activities, indicates there might well be confusion over APD’s policy - if not practice - in that matter.

The policy makes clear that officers should not interfere with lawful recordings by residents, as police officer James Maufrais is accused of doing last month by shining his flashlight directly into the lens of Turner’s camera as Turner was filming a traffic stop by a different APD officer. The actions of Maufrais area being investigated by the police department.

For his part, Manley has said he wants the police chief job permanently - a decision that will be up to the next city manager, who the Austin City Council is expected to hire by summer. Whether that decision leads to Manley or someone else, in our view, the next chief should not be Acevedo 2.0 - someone who minds the shop Acevedo built. There is more work to do.

As we previously noted, the city would benefit from a reformer who brings different skills to the table to move APD beyond a plateau on which it has become stuck.

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Houston Chronicle. Dec. 20, 2016.

Save Mission Control: The former nerve center for NASA put Houston on the map and should be restored.

One Sunday night in July a generation ago, the whole world was watching Houston.

On July 20, 1969, just before 10 p.m. local time, an awestruck television audience around the globe saw ghostly black-and-white images beamed back to a building at what was then called the Manned Spacecraft Center. Live from the lunar surface came the pictures and sounds of the first men setting foot on the moon. And families gathered around their television sets occasionally caught a wide-shot glimpse of Mission Control, the big room in Houston where hard-working people from the planet Earth made an impossible dream an improbable reality.

Today, just about anybody of a certain age can tell you where he was or what she was doing that night. Mission Control is arguably the most historically significant place in Houston, a designated National Historic Landmark. Yet this irreplaceable piece of our heritage has fallen into a sad state of disrepair.

As the Chronicle’s Andrew Dansby reported (“Money, access complicate effort to restore Mission Control,” Page A1, Dec. 4), the room that served as the nerve center for America’s space triumphs during the Gemini, Apollo and early shuttle eras now sits badly neglected. Visitors have cut up the upholstery for souvenirs, ash tray covers in the viewing room have been pried loose and the carpeting is a mess. It’s a dispiriting sight for former flight controllers, who decry the deterioration of this monument to our nation’s space legacy.

Hordes of tourists taking daily Space Center Houston tours routinely visit the viewing area overlooking the room itself, ravaging the place where astronauts’ families and other dignitaries watched through a window. Preservationists also complain way too many VIPs are allowed to walk amid the consoles inside Mission Control. The National Park Service reports that about 40,000 people a year are allowed to wander around this area. That number, the park service says, needs to drop to 2,000.

NASA and park service authorities have talked about restoring the room for decades, and space center officials have diligently preserved Apollo-era artifacts. A proposal released last year would cost an estimated $3 million and take about 18 months, but nobody’s set a date for work to begin. A consultation meeting required by the National Historic Preservation Act has yet to happen.

And yes, somebody has to raise the money. Government employees aren’t legally allowed to tackle this task, so private citizens need to step up to the plate. Space Center Houston, the nonprofit visitor center entity, recently hired a CEO with a fundraising background, but he’ll need all the help he can get. Surely the city that landed a man on the moon can raise the money and get this restoration project off the ground. When the Saturn V rocket sitting on the periphery of Johnson Space Center fell into disrepair, a “Save the Saturn” drive raised $2.5 million by passing the hat around various government and private sources, preserving the moon rocket for future generations. Now Houston needs to save Mission Control.

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is now a little more than two years away. Less than a year later, NASA will mark the half-century anniversary of Apollo 13, the aborted moon mission depicted in the movie that made big-screen heroes out of the men working behind the scenes at the space center. So there’s a sense of urgency about launching this restoration project as quickly as possible.

Our city has earned an unfortunate reputation for ignoring its past and allowing historic buildings to either fall into disrepair or fall to the wrecking ball. Mission Control, which did as much as anything to put Houston on the map in the 20th century, deserves better.

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Dec. 21, 2016

Planned Parenthood fight not worth battle

Fighting Planned Parenthood isn’t worth the battle, but that doesn’t seem to stop officials from taking up arms.

In December 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott pledged to defund Planned Parenthood. Now, after a year, the state has issued a final notice to the healthcare organization. Planned Parenthood could lose its $3.1 million Medicaid funding.

The whole battle between the state and Planned Parenthood has been a frustrating, arduous ordeal - all over something that taxpayers don’t even pay for.

It’s all brought on by the abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood. That’s done by a separate entity from the Medicaid-eligible health programs, and no public dollars fund it.

The governor’s office says Planned Parenthood is “no longer capable of performing medical services in a professionally competent, safe, legal and ethical manner” after allegations last year that the organization sold fetal tissue for research.

Planned Parenthood has already filed a lawsuit. Federal officials warned the state that booting the healthcare provider from Medicaid could be illegal. Other states have failed in attempts to do the same thing.

So all this trouble could be for nothing.

We get that some state officials really don’t like Planned Parenthood, but couldn’t all the energy and taxpayer money in this fight be used somewhere else? Maybe to fix the broken Child Protective Services?

It would be a better use of state’s time and money.

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San Antonio Express-News. Dec. 22, 2016.

Carson wrong on segregation

There is little in retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s record to suggest he knows much about housing or urban development. He is nonetheless the president-elect’s choice to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, succeeding former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro.

In this, Carson is not unlike Donald Trump’s other Cabinet nominations. This similarity includes having expressed views that might seem antithetical to the agency he will be heading.

Part of HUD’s mission is providing adequate housing to Americans, including public housing. Among Castro’s achievements in his short tenure was action to bring housing policy in sync with preventing segregation.

Under this new rule, done by executive authority, cities evaluate fair housing in their communities, submit reports on the degree of segregation and blight, and tell the federal government what they will do about it. The aim is to make neighborhoods more integrated and to end practices that confine the poor to poor neighborhoods that have all the attendant problems, such as bad schools, food deserts and high crime.

Carson, a former presidential candidate, complained that Castro’s new rule smacked of a “failed social experiment” that threatened to move public housing and the poor into wealthier neighborhoods.

Oh, the horrors - mixed neighborhoods in which low-income residents have access to the educational, transportation, job and retail opportunities that more affluent residents have. This is, in fact, very much not a “failed social experiment.”

This from a report earlier this year, the Distressed Communities Index from the Economic Innovation group based in Washington, D.C.: “Place matters. . The American Dream is predicated on the idea that anyone from any place or background can climb to the highest rungs of the economic ladder. But there is a growing body of evidence that the more time an individual spends living in a distressed community - especially at childhood - the worse that individual’s lifetime chances of achieving economic stability or success. And not all poor neighborhoods are alike; some offer vastly better chances of economic mobility than others. The United States is still a land of opportunity for many. But when it comes to life outcomes, geography is too often destiny.”

That report, by the way, said San Antonio leads the nation when it comes to the extreme differences between our more prosperous neighborhoods and our more distressed - measured by such things as the number of high school degrees, housing vacancy rates as a percentage of habitable housing, the number of working adults, the poverty rate, and the number of available jobs and businesses.

We are, in other words, among the most economically segregated cities in the nation. And ZIP code is too often destiny - chances are high that if you grew up in a poor one, you become poor; if you grew up in a more affluent one, you do not.

But here’s what else the experts say: If you grow up poor but in a more prosperous part of the community, this destiny changes. You get a shot at getting out of poverty if you live among highly educated people - if you grow up in a place where there are good schools, jobs and businesses.

So, in fact, moving public and affordable housing to more affluent parts of the community does have broad societal impact for the good. Cities, San Antonio included, can essentially move people out of cycles of poverty. Carson is flat-out wrong. Castro and President Barack Obama are right.

This view gets resistance because people fear people they don’t know. This is demonstrably true in San Antonio, with a long history of white flight from the urban core. And there is also a fear of decline in property values, which need not happen in mixed neighborhoods. What we have going on, in any case, is white flight to good schools and other opportunities, but gentrification of poorer neighborhoods resulting in displacement of poor people.

Of course, cities cannot move all their poor out of poverty. The other part of the equation is bringing prosperity to poor communities - including high-functioning and well-resourced schools - and enacting policies that mitigate the displacement potential of gentrification. San Antonio has taken steps on this latter issue. And yet it is a national leader in economic segregation. More broadly it - and the nation’s other cities - haven’t done enough.

Trump has promised vast infrastructure improvements in the nation’s urban cores. If Carson navigates this well, this will serve cities such as San Antonio well. If, however, he limits his vision about where the poor should live, they will not be served well enough.