There is a great deal of misinformation in Mimi Swartz’s short article in The New York Times Magazine on “Texas Brags,” not all of which I can address. But here’s a start. Swartz writes:
Not just Democrats but also a growing number of Republicans are quick to mention that Perry pushed the Legislature to cut $4 billion out of public education. And they talk about how Texas now has the highest rate of the uninsured in the nation — the largest percentage of uninsured children too — and how we’re dead last in the percentage of adults with a high-school diploma. “What will eventually happen is the debate about Perry in the primary or in the general election will shift from being about Perry the candidate to ‘Does the rest of the country want to live in Texas?’ ” says Bob Stein, a political-science professor at Rice University. And strangely, Texans most likely won’t respond with a shrugged-off “of course.” …
Texans who have spent zillions to brag about the state’s opera and ballet companies, and who have paid the likes of Santiago Calatrava for architectural gewgaws, also know that multinational corporations aren’t willing to locate in a place that has awful schools and toxic air and that wears its provincialism proudly.
About those awful schools, Robert Scott, the commissioner of education of Texas since 2007, recently clarified a number of misconceptions in an interview with Rick Hess:
I pointed out that if you look at the [National Governors Association] rate, which is the rate all fifty governors agreed to, out of only twenty-six states that had reported as of 2009, we were ranked seventh. And we have an 84.3 percent on-time graduation rate, which is far better than many other states. And I think this year, when you see other states finally having to report that, you’ll notice a significant increase in Texas’ position nationally. I also pointed out the NAEP scores bear out that our African American students tied Massachusetts for number one on the math NAEP, [and in eighth grade science] our Hispanic students were eighth [and] our Anglo students…were second only behind the Department of Defense schools. And so, I simply pointed out that [Secretary Duncan’s] generalizations were wrong.
The “crisis of confidence” in Texas seems to be rooted in the fact that Texas has experienced rapid demographic change as the native-born Anglo population as aged and as Americans of Mexican origin represent a larger share of the K-12 population and the workforce, at least when it comes to educational attainment.
As for the uninsured number, Anne Dunkelberg of the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, offers valuable context in a comment on a recent article in the Amarillo Globe-News:
Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin has looked at the role of non-US citizens in Texas’ uninsured rates for a number of years (see cppp.org).
Non-citizens, both legal and undocumented immigrants, account for about one-fourth of Texas’ uninsured population. Immigrants in Texas are more likely as a group to be uninsured than U.S. citizens, but uninsured U.S. citizens are the primary cause of Texas’ high uninsured ranking. Even if you remove all non-citizens in Texas in 2009-10 from the newly released data, Texas would still have had the third worst uninsured rate in the country at 21% uninsured—and that is comparing Texas’ uninsured rate among U.S. citizens to all the other states with immigrants still included in their rates. California, despite being home to near half the US immigrant population, still has an uninsured rate of 19.4%, or over 5 percentage points lower than Texas’ 24.6%.
The Census Bureau does not report on the immigration status of the non-U.S. citizen population, so the best estimates of the share of uninsured non-U.S.-citizen Texans who are undocumented (not lawfully present) are based on other expert sources. In 2010, non-citizens accounted for 11 percent (2.8 million) of the Texas population, but made up 1.7 million of the uninsured or 27 percent. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates undocumented residents in Texas in 2010 at between 1.45 and 1.85 million, or 52 percent to 66 percent of all Texas non-U.S.-citizens. Applying those percentages to the Texas non-citizen uninsured population, we would estimate 884K-1.12 million of Texas uninsured are undocumented.
In summary, immigrants are a part of our uninsured probelm, but even if no immigrants–legal or not– were in Texas tomorrow we would still rank near the very bottom among the states.
To underline, Dunkelberg is explicitly stating that Texas would still perform poorly relative to other states in terms of access to insurance even if we factor out the undocumented population.
Yet it is also true that Texas, with a median age of 33, is younger than all but two other states, Utah and Alaska. The age group between 19 and 24 has the highest percentage of uninsured individuals. One assumes that even if we adjusted for age and citizenship status, Texas would have a relatively large number of uninsured citizens. Adjusting for family disruption and income, however, might yield a very different result.
And if you believe that non-Hispanic whites have historically enjoyed certain cultural and economic benefits in U.S. society, the fact that Texas is 45.3 percent non-Hispanic white while the U.S. as a whole is 63.7 percent might be considered salient. It is certainly possible that Swartz doesn’t believe that the historical experience of enslavement and decades of racial subjugation would have any bearing on levels of educational attainment or income or family disruption or that Americans of Mexican origin face unique challenges and barriers, and thus that a state like Texas should be measured by the same yardstick we apply to a state like New Hampshire. That doesn’t strike me as plausible.
It is interesting to note the Swartz article as part and parcel of a broader phenomenon that Marc Dunkelman recently described: as ideological polarization intensifies, liberals in Texas identify more as liberals than as Texans, i.e., they are more likely to find common ground with liberals in Boulder or New York than with moderates or conservatives in Fort Worth or Amarillo. Confirmation bias will incline the ideologically inclined to downplay or to fail to recognize mitigating circumstances that undermine an ideological perspective, while it might lead those with a strong regional identity to take into account local particularities.