Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

One of the best things the 80th Texas Legislature did this year before its regular session ended on Monday was to restore health insurance for an estimated 127,000 children of low-income — but working — parents, who also will face less bureaucratic tape to renew coverage.

More money for the Children's Health Insurance Program was among our priorities for the Legislature.

Other major concerns for us were to avoid backsliding on the new margins tax on business; make government more open; remove the high stakes on a single test for high school graduation; a shift away from over-reliance on just building more prisons to handle offenders; and more flexibility for the University of Texas regarding the 10 percent admission rule.

Here's a closer look at the results:

Children's health insurance

While restoring health insurance coverage to thousands of kids is a welcome step, no one should think "problem solved," because more than 1 million Texas children remain without health coverage.

The Legislature never should have cut CHIP as it did four years ago during a budget crisis. The cuts caused about 200,000 Texas children to lose health coverage, but many of those youngsters ended up in hospital emergency rooms, where local taxpayers paid for their care. House Bill 109 by Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, mostly restores those cuts. It will cost $78 million over two years to cover new children who enroll in CHIP. But that is a bargain because Texas receives about $2.60 in federal dollars for every dollar it spends on CHIP.

County ordinance authority

But lost in the legislative shuffle was an effort to give urban and suburban counties authority to pass ordinances. As we noted on Dec. 31, "Whether they like it or not, and whether they are ready or not, county commissioners in urban and suburban Texas are called upon to manage growth and referee the disputes that growth causes, but with very little authority to do so."

But the Legislature tends to ignore the needs of more populated counties to oversee development and growth to protect resources. Urban counties like Travis and growing suburban ones like Williamson and Hays remain at the mercy of developers, largely unable to manage their own destiny.

No reform for Top 10 percent

Texas universities will not get greater flexibility in admitting students under the state's automatic admissions law. Currently, Texas public colleges and universities must admit students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class. A proposal to permit colleges and universities to limit such admissions to half of an entering class failed in a House vote.

This was especially a setback for the University of Texas, where about 71 percent of freshmen from Texas are top 10 percent graduates. Without a cap, there could be a time when the entire freshmen class is filled with top 10 percent students, leaving no room for the unusually talented students in math, music or art or another subject who nevertheless were not in the top 10 percent of their senior class.

No TAKS

For the first time in two decades, high school graduation won't hang on a single test. Legislation passed this session will replace the state test, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, with end-of-course tests that will count more like final exams, starting in 2011.

Comprehensive exams like the TAKS test are highly useful in determining just how much students know — and don't. That information can guide administrators and teachers on who needs help with which subjects and what kind of instruction is working. Testing also can help identify gaps in learning between minority and white students and between poor students and wealthier ones.

But Texas went too far, using testing to determine whether a student passes to the next grade, graduates or whether a school is shut down or a teacher gets a bonus. By moving to end-of-course exams, teachers will be free to teach the curriculum rather than to pass the TAKS test and no student will be denied a diploma because of a single exam.

Don't tax me . . .

The Legislature properly held the line in defending the margins tax on business, enacted last year as part of a school finance reform that included a significant cut in school property taxes. Collection of the new margin tax doesn't even start until next year. But the need this year to fix honest errors in the new law offered those so inclined an opportunity to try to change the new law to their own benefit, perhaps even by exempting themselves.

But the Legislature made the necessary changes while preserving the tax. One change, for example, actually should result in collecting $200 million more from the tax, but that was offset with about $200 million in reductions to fix other mistakes and to lighten the new tax load on thousands of small businesses, those with gross receipts of less than $900,000 a year.

Property value disclosure

The public's right to know did not fare well. We favored disclosure of the sale price of real esate to government appraisers so that market values could be accurately — and fairly — determined for assessing property taxes.

Although a task force studying the issue proposed making property sales prices public and some Republicans in the Legislature supported the change, it failed. Commercial property owners and real estate agents were blamed for sinking sales price disclosure.

The bill's failure means that public schools in Texas will continue to be shortchanged by billions of dollars. Because appraisers must guess at sales prices, property appraisals lag actual value and that means less tax money for schools and government. One estimate found that Texas schools lose as much as $4 billion annually because of underappraised property.

Dallas lawyer Tom Pauken, a former chairman of the Texas Republican Party, chaired the task force that studied property appraisals. That task force recommended several major changes, including sale price disclosure, but none of them made it into law.

Better prisons, less cost

Lawmakers rightly decided to try a different way to deal with lawbreakers by approving legislation that will add 8,000 more prison beds over the next few years, but mostly for intensive drug and rehabilitation programs.

The legislation is intended to provide more treatment, not just punishment, for those who get into trouble because of drugs or alcohol; doing so should be less expensive in the long run for taxpayers, not just better for the prisoners. And the legislation also is supposed to ensure prisoners who meet parole or probation requirements are released as soon as possible, again at great savings to taxpayers.