As Texas Goes... by Gail Collins

districts dropped their pre-K programs back to the minimum the state required—part-time, for only the poorest of students.
    A little north of Presidio, there’s Marfa, an absolutely fascinating little place that you might call the Texas version of Taos, except for the definite lack of ski slopes. Marfa has attracted an influx of artists, but its school population is mainly children of local agricultural workers and the Perry cuts left its budget in crisis. It, too, was looking at bus service. “We will no longer bring in the children from town,” said Teloa Swinnea, the school superintendent. “It’s not the law. The parents think it is, but it’s not.” Next stop, Swinnea said grimly, was football. But nobody else in the home of the beloved Marfa Shorthorns seemed able to imagine that could happen.
    Things seemed likely to get much worse as the schools’ rainy day funds dried up. Texas was already forty-seventh in the nation when it comes to state aid per pupil, forty-third in high school graduation rate, and forty-fifth in SAT scores. It’s hard to call that leading the way.
    “Failure to provide equal and quality education—it’s really tragic,” said Cisneros. He recalled a conversation with a businessman who runs a major consumer goods firm with outlets all around the state. “He told me they were consciously moving downscale in their marketing, in their product mix, because every analysis they have tells them incomes are going to be declining because of the gap in education.”
    BUT TO GET back to where we started, I asked Cisneros about the Alamo. “I came to terms with it a long time ago,” he shrugged. “It’s not about wars or Mexicans versus Americans or victory or death. It’s just something that happened.”
    In a way, it’s what’s still happening now. The modern battle for the soul of Texas began with Ross Perot and his commission, and it was fought over the question of whether all the state’s children would be seriously, rigorously, and perhaps even expensively, educated, or whether those privileges would be reserved for a wealthier, mostly Anglo minority while the masses of Texas young people just learned to be literate enough for manual labor and the low-end side of the service economy. Right now, Texas seems to need a leader who’s ready to draw the line and dare the people to step over. Victory or death.

Epilogue
    I t seems only fair to leave Texas with the Alamo. But where does Texas leave the rest of us?
    If you’re a diehard states’-righter, as most of Texas’s leading politicians are, the answer would probably be that this is the wrong question. What Texas does is its own business, they say, since the states are individual boats, each bobbing along on its own—although certainly prepared to join together in times of national crisis when the country needs the whole fleet. But not some made-up crisis, like the collapse of the auto industry. Serious, manly crises, like wars, hurricanes, and forest fires.
    Personally, I prefer to think that all Americans are in the same boat. And Texas has a lot to do with where we’re heading. We’ve seen how Texas politicians played central roles in the deregulation of financial markets and the near elimination of energy conservation as a national policy, and how the state served as the model for federal savings and loan deregulation and federal education reform. (Neither one quite worked out the way their architects imagined, but as we have noted a number of times in this journey, nobody’s perfect.) Texans also led the way in the destruction of all major legislation aimed at dealing with global warming, even as their home state was alternately being drowned by hurricanes and dried to a crisp with droughts. But of course that has nothing to do with the ozone layer. Only God can change the planet’s temperature. Like with a volcano or something. Just ask Tom DeLay.
    It’s lucky that Texas has such a hard time growing presidential