Given all those diverse objectives, and all the corresponding clamor for legislative favor, you might suppose the time had come for an educational strategy based on autonomy: Everybody getting roughly what he wants -- athletes, better coaches and playing fields; academic seekers, tougher English classes; the academically distressed, more attention and less bureaucracy.
An oft-bruited remedy is vouchers that recipient students could take to the schools of their choice, plunk down and use for the satisfaction of specific aims. The irony is that opponents of vouchers construe school choice as an attack on an education system that isn't, it turns out, educating very well. Why not attack such a system? Ah, because public education in the 21st century is the playground of political interest groups that see education more as a way of life than as anything else: a source of jobs and union dues; a source of votes from those who get the jobs; a source of public entertainment -- bread and football games.
The will doesn't exist, insofar as anyone can tell, to make the schools uniformly encourage intellectual achievement. Which means, really, the schools aren't schools at all.
And that's where Texas legislators, poor folks, came in this year; uncertain how to reform school finance due to uncertainty over what schools, as they are today, should be made to do.
The repeated spectacle of failure in Austin has produced some belly laughs, nationally. Some assurance surely would be nice that, 50 years hence, Texas public school students will know a horse from, say, a union card.