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It'll take months to know which part of the headline is correct, but however it goes, you have to say that Carole Keeton Rylander took over the Texas School Performance Review with a bang. She returned -- uninvited -- to the room where she taught high school history years ago to say that she was going to send her staff and a team of consultants over to find out what ails the Austin school district.
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That school district currently has no superintendent and is under a criminal investigation directed by Travis County Attorney Ken Oden for allegedly manipulating student test scores so that schools would themselves score higher in state rankings.
It is in the middle of a bungled superintendent search that has already seen one candidate turn down the job after being publicly paraded as the number one choice and the savior of the district. The naming of a second group of candidates started what could be described as a "reputation skeet shoot" by various factions and interest groups in the city.
It's hard to tell how this will play out, but Rylander's foray has some interesting turns and twists. In addition to teaching in the Austin schools, Rylander got her political start (at least as an elected official) as a member, and eventually president, of the Austin school board.
Her predecessor, John Sharp, did a performance review of the Austin ISD in the early days of the school audit program, so the new comptroller could spend a fair amount of her time explaining what's different about the new effort. She'll have room to say the district is dramatically different then than now, and that the state's performance reviews have improved immensely since the last outing.
Some questions will come from outside of Austin. On one hand, the state has more than 1,000 school districts, and the comptroller already has a long waiting list of districts that have requested school performance reviews. Some of them are bound to wonder why their requests languish while another district is getting a second crack at the program.
But that part about "uninvited" might be most intriguing and significant change in the way the agency handles school reviews. She said during her campaign she'd be the state's "education watchdog," and she's taking a more aggressive position than her predecessor.
Sharp's tack was to wait for an invitation from a school board member, a superintendent, a legislator or someone before he'd go in (those invitations were engineered as often as not, but they were, until now, a standard feature of performance reviews).
Rylander's approach is to call the school district and tell officials that she's on her way and they should get ready to have their district's performance reviewed. The law says the comptroller "may" go into school districts from time to time and do performance reviews. During the last session, Rylander asked for and got some additional money and a legislative directive to do ten reviews a year.
Her change in policy -- the decision to go into districts like San Antonio and Austin without waiting for a red carpet -- could make this a more visible program than before, if only because of the drama of busting down the doors. It's also designed to keep school districts looking over their shoulders, knowing the comptroller might show up anytime, invited or not.
Houston jurist John Devine, spanked two years ago by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, is the newest addition to the list of folks who would like to succeed Steve Mansfield on the state's Court of Criminal Appeals. Mansfield is dropping out of that race, in part, because of the slings and arrows he thinks he would attract. Part of the reason he feels he would be a target is because of two scrapes with that same conduct commission. Devine, who entered the public spotlight as an anti-abortion activist, is a state district judge who won election in 1994. In 1996, he sought the GOP nomination for Congress in the CD 25 seat held by U.S. Rep. Ken Bentsen, D-Houston. He lost the primary, but that race gave rise to his admonishment by the judicial reviewers: Devine announced his bid for the seat in his courtroom. He did that after hours, but the agency still frowned on it.
Devine is the second Houston judge to join that contest. State District Judge Jim Wallace, who's at mid-term on his current job, will make a bid. Corpus Christi attorney Tom Greenwell is also in the hunt, and several others from around the state are considering it. Everyone who's announced so far is after the Republican nomination.
Elsewhere, a couple of Democratic judges are about to bump heads over an open seat on the 13th Court of Appeals, which is based in Corpus Christi, but covers 20 counties. Robert Seerden, chief justice of that court, isn't seeking reelection to that post. Two state district judges with free shots (they're not up for reelection this time, and losing won't remove them from office) are jumping into the race. One is Judge Rogelio "Roy" Valdez of Brownsville, who has signed Austin consultant Jeff Montgomery to run his campaign. The other is Judge J. Manuel Baales of Corpus Christi. Montgomery will also be busy in another judicial race, that of the so-far unopposed J. Woodfin "Woody" Jones, who wants to keep his seat on the 3rd Court of Appeals, based in Austin.
While we're knocking around on the judicial beat, consider the case of state District Judge Alex Gonzalez, whose territory covers three counties in West Texas. Gonzalez sent a letter to the governor in February, announcing that his resignation would be effective at the end of April. When the time came, however, Gonzalez told the governor's office he was rescinding his resignation and had decided to stay. He's still serving, but aides to Gov. Bush say they consider him to be serving in what's called a "holdover capacity." That means that, in their opinion, the governor can appoint someone and the judge has to leave the bench. Gonzalez doesn't agree. So far, there's no appointment, and no confrontation. If no appointment is made, Gonzalez could remain on the bench until his term is over at the end of December 2002. The governor's office, an aide says, is looking at options.
Lt. Gov. Rick Perry, as previously noted, hasn't named interim committees yet (and won't for a month or so, aides say). His folks also say he hasn't made final decision on who will go where. For instance, they squelched speculation last week about who will chair the redistricting committee (that rumor of the week, denied in Perry's shop, had Sens. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, and Mario Gallegos, D-Houston, co-chairing the panel).
Rumors or not, watch some of the staff movement over the next few weeks. Attorney Steve Foster, who was on the staff of Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, during the legislative session, has moved to Perry's staff and will soon be working out of Fraser's offices.
That's not described to us as permanent placement, but wherever he finally ends up, Foster is likely to be hip-deep in redistricting for the next couple of years. This week's rumor in the Senate is that Fraser is in line to chair the committee and that that's the reason Foster is being moved to his shop.
How much television news can one state support? Time Warner Cable is gearing up an all-news channel that will concentrate on Central Texas, saying that will be on the air at an unspecified date in August. They've built a building and hired a sizable news staff. Once it's on the air, Time Warner says the channel will be available in about 240,000 homes, most of them in and around Austin.
There's another twist here, which might or might not be a view of the future: Instead of sending a crew -- a reporter and a photographer -- to a story as most outlets do, the "News 8" outfit will send one reporter who'll also do his or her own camera work.
The San Antonio-based News of Texas has won broadcast time in most of the state's television markets for one or more half-hour newscasts each day. Dallas-based Belo Corp. started an all-news cable network that rolls for 24 hours a day, but is only available in some parts of the state, mostly North Texas. Behind some of this is a fight over whether a cable company like Time Warner should have to carry programming from Belo or anyone else, or whether they can start their own deals and shut newcomers out. So far, the cable operators are winning that argument.
But what does it all mean to news junkies and to people in business, politics and government? Folks who advise politicos and corporate types on media say the growth of new outlets means two big changes, one of them good and one of them bad. It will be relatively easy to get on the air because of the phenomenon newsies call "feeding the beast" -- the demand for content on the new programs is incredible. On the flip side, it will be relatively difficult to get bad news off the air. Bad news will tend to be repeated again and again until something fresher comes along.
Either effect could be watered down if more than one of the Texas news outlets manage to survive. If there's only one, it's reasonable to assume that that's where most people will go for news. If there are several outlets (in addition to what's already provided by local stations around the state), then the relative importance of a story in any one place is diminished.
School districts that use lease-purchase schemes to finance new construction have escaped unharmed from a provision in the latest school finance bill that was unearthed after lawmakers left town. Some districts were already using so-called "Tier 2" funds to pay for their lease-purchase financing arrangements, and a handful of others were planning to use the same financial approach for new construction. Lawmakers changed the definitions of what could be funded under Tier 2, and for whatever reason didn't move what was excised to another part of the school finance formula.
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