RE: Our government needs to learn some things so school kids can, too

In Jennifer Klinger’s editorial, “Our government needs to learn some things so school kids can, too,” brought up very good points on how the education program in Texas has some serious problems. With all the cuts going on across Texas, it is not surprising you saw the effects happening this past school year and not just the next.

It is a shame that teachers, librarians, and certain classes are getting cut out of the budget. The worst is for the teachers, I think, because they are letting go the experienced ones who have taught for many years and replacing them with brand new ones, so they don’t have to pay as high a salary since it is their first year. Changing the style of teaching on how teachers have been taught in college to teach is very hard on them when they only have a summer to make whole new teaching plans and techniques. If you think about changing to block scheduling, yes it might not be good for the teachers but maybe for the students. Block scheduling is more like how college classes would be and will maybe help the students transition a little better into college. I say this because going from high school to college the big change for me was going from having the same 8 classes a day to going to only like 2 to 3 classes every other day.

Klinger also talked about the conservatives having big influence in the Texas budget cuts for education. I do agree because Republicans do have control over the Legislature and they are mostly all conservatives but the only way we can change this is to elect more Democratic officials into the Legislature to balance it. Raising taxes is against what conservatives believe in but they won’t raise them because that is what they believe. That is what their party platform is and they aren’t going to go against it because it may jeopardize if they get re-elected or not.

 There does need to be big changes very soon in Texas government because we are going more into debt, making huge budget cuts where they really shouldn’t be but this isn’t going to change over night. The Legislature isn’t going to change their ways until the people of Texas change the Legislature by electing different people who stand for the right thing, which is the Texas citizen.