Headlines: Challenging Keystone Pipeline Challenge; Watching ExxonMobil Campus Grow

Photo of El Real Tex-Mex at Westheimer and Waugh: Bill Barfield via Swamplot Flickr Pool

7 Comment

  • We’ve spent a couple of decades complaining about the quality of public education in Texas, but it hasn’t kept the state from having robust growth and a stronger-than-average economy during the recession. Is there some correlation we should discuss here? If our schools are so bad, how have we been able to achieve this? Could it be that a strong educational system is not entirely necessary for economic prosperity?

  • Before Boston, my attitute on red light cameras was (1)there is no expectation of privacy on the roads, in your cars or otherwise in public, (2) no person is actually monitoring these cameras, you paranoid freaks and (3) only those who were breaking the law had anything to worry about. After Boston my attitude is the same plus (4) WE NEED MORE CAMERAS and for tapes to be saved at least thirty days to aid law enfocement!

  • @mel, people who are willing to give up freedoms for safety, deserve neither. This is the slipperiest slope of them all.

  • As a resident of TW, I find it difficult to believe they didn’t catch enough red light violators to make the cameras profitable. Just last year a red light scofflaw cost my family a vehicle when my son’s car was rear ended when avoiding another driver. Thankfully only his car was totalled and he wasn’t hurt.

  • Anse, maybe a poorly educated workforce leads in a perverse way to more jobs in today’s economy because a company can relocate manufacturing jobs from a union state to a right to work state like Texas, and the employees do not have the education or skills to demand better pay. Low skills=low wages. Think of Mexico.
    The jobs in Texas requiring a higher level of education, like medical and energy in Houston, tech in Austin, or insurance and aviation in Dallas can bring in workers from out of state with the promise of cheaper housing costs, etc., and have to rely less on the poorly educated endemic workforce in Texas. That’s my theory, at least.

  • @ShadyHeightster, it seems to me that much of the concern about our public schools is misplaced. We had (and continue to have) a high dropout rate in Houston. But where are those kids going? They aren’t all going to prison or to the welfare rolls. Most of those dropouts are finding jobs somewhere. This concerns me because I’m just cynical enough to think that groups like the Texas Association of Businesses, which are lobbying hard for standardized testing and “accountability” in Texas schools, are actually setting them up for failure. It’s really just an effort to privatize the whole system, and if that happens, a ton of kids are simply not going to get an equal chance. Your example of Mexico is an apt one.

  • Anse, you think 100% school choice with a public option would make HISD…worse?