The following summary includes education-related proposals from the 2005 state of the state addresses. To assure that this information reaches you in a timely manner, minimal attention has been paid to style (capitalization, punctuation) or format. To view the documents, click on the blue triangle next to the state.
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| Governor Rick Perry's State of the State Address
High School
"We must have two goals: ensuring more students graduate and ensuring more students graduate prepared for college."
Teacher Compensation
Supports dedicating new money to rewarding and supporting our best teachers and providing incentives for progress at schools with large numbers of economically disadvantaged students. Need to recruit proven teachers to under-performing schools, teachers who can turn around a campus one child and one classroom at a time.
Pay our best and brightest teachers salary incentives as high as $7,500 a year when they rekindle the love of learning among children too often left in the shadows of success.
Student Incentives
-- Use incentives to encourage more students to take our hardest course of study, the distinguished achievement program, and improve student performance on the TAKS test.
-- Reinstate end-of-course exams in subjects like algebra, biology, English and history, and allow schools to offer these exams on an optional basis, with incentives tied to student results.
-- Focus incentives on schools with the greatest challenges, such as those with high numbers of students who have limited proficiency in English.
Accountability
-- Bad schools that refuse to change and chronically fail our children must not be allowed to do so without consequences. And we must have zero tolerance for those that tamper with test results. It is wrong to blame our testing system for test tampering. Cheaters are not victims, they are perpetrators of a crime, and a terrible example to our children. While test tampering is likely an isolated problem, schools that fail our children remain too prevalent.
-- Need more transparency in school budgeting. That's why we need a "Truth in Spending" initiative that gives every taxpayer detailed information on how local school dollars are spent.
School Improvement, Accountability
Our first response to failing schools should be to send extra help. We must establish school turn-around teams at the Texas Education Agency that specialize in improving management practices and provide additional mentoring to teachers who lack the support they need.
But if schools refuse to change, they must be shut down and begin again with new leadership.
Choice, Charter Schools
-- Equity should be about more than fair funding. The fact is, a poorly run school will produce poor results regardless of funding. We won't have equity in education until we have equity in educational opportunities. Parents that can't afford private tuition and can't afford to quit their jobs to home school their children have fewer choices, and their children have fewer opportunities. They deserve better than to leave their fate in the hands of a local monopoly that is slow to change without the benefit of competition.
-- Every child is entitled to a public education, but public education is not entitled to every child. Let's give children who need a second chance new choices that can forever change their future. Let's give them school choice.
-- Emulate successful charter schools across Texas. But those that fail our children, and worse yet, those that exist to enrich fly-by-night operators, should be shut down without delay. I'm tired of bad charter schools obscuring the work done by the good ones.
Early Childhood Education
Reforming education must begin long before our five-year olds enter the kindergarten classroom. The Early Start Initiative focuses on the building blocks of reading and language development. It is time to take the next step and increase funding for the Early Start program to give more children a true head start.
Teacher Mentoring
Expand teacher mentoring.
Mentoring, Community Involvelent
Let's do more to help children in broken families, including children of prisoners, make right choices and break the cycle of incarceration. Let's do more to promote responsible fatherhood for dads that have lost their way. Let's invest $25 million more in mentoring programs that can build stronger communities, one changed life at a time.
Finance
It is time to cut property taxes and give Texans appraisal relief too. Cap appraisals at three percent.
Budget substantially increases investments in jobs, public education, higher education, health care and protective services and reduces spending at 60 percent of our state agencies. And it provides a $2.3 billion cushion to close out the books on this biennium and invest even more money in key priorities.
Economic Development
Wants emerging technologies, which will generate $3 trillion in revenue worldwide over the next 10 years, developed in Texas labs by Texas minds to the benefit of the Texas economy.
http://www.governor.state.tx.us/divisions/press/speeches/speech_012605
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