"Texas Became a Model"

"There is a national Republican agenda for cutting back taxes. Naturally, that causes a failure to deliver the services. You can see that in education, all over, especially in the deep red states— Kansas, Oklahoma, our neighbors, where teachers are seriously underpaid, and the education of our children is really suffering. That's true in Texas. The nation's report card, which came out a couple weeks ago, has Texas down in the bottom 10 or 15 percent of the nation’s students. It's at the bottom or right next to the bottom in terms of how much money it spends per student in the state, which is similar to what's happening in other states. A lot of it has its origins in Texas."

Isaac Chotiner at Slate interviews Lawrence Wright about Wright's new book, God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State.