Just in case you needed another reason to love Texas, Governor Rick Perry has given us one. Yesterday, Perry signed education reforms into law which will shake up graduation requirements and put less emphasis on testing. By signing House Bills 5, 809, 842, and 3662, as well as Senate Bill 441, Perry achieved a significant overhaul of public education. 

Currently, students in Texas have to pass fifteen tests to graduate. Under the new legislation, that number will be reduced to five. Students such as sixteen year-old Macala Carroll are excited about the upcoming changes. “I feel that the test shouldn’t judge or break our future,” Carroll said Monday. “All the hard work that I’ve put in this school year … shouldn’t be destroyed by a few questions that aren’t even written properly.” Educators felt that such a heavy test load shifted the focus from teaching to test preparation, which was not in the best interests of the students. 

These measures also give students the flexibility to pursue the paths which they find to be the best fit for them, even if that means career or vocational courses rather than a college path. SB441, for example, creates the Texas Fresh Start Program, a workplace readiness initiative. These bills find the “appropriate balance between our need for rigorous academic standards and the students’ need for flexibility.” said Perry. 

One thing that won’t be changing, however, are Texas’ high standards of education. “If there’s one thing to remember today, it’s that Texas refuses to dilute our academic standards in any way, because our standards are working,” Perry said. The fact that education in Texas is working can hardly be argued. Texas has one of the best graduation rates in the country, with 86% of students earning a high school diploma. It also has the highest rates of black and latino high school graduation in the country. As they currently spend very little per student relative to other states, it’s important for those funds to be going where they will do the most good for local kids. 

Implementation of these laws will take time, but Texas is on the right track. Other states should take a cue from Texas. Students are doing well, but lawmakers there are still looking for innovative ways to prepare students for success after graduation and a changing workforce. This kind of real education reform is what America needs, not the one-size-fits-all education standards which are currently being pushed onto American children. We Americans thrive when given the opportunities to do so, and Texas is giving children just those opportunities. Way to go, Texas! Again. 

The state of Texas is becoming the standard for freedom in America. Already attracting thousands of new employers for its pro-business stance and hundreds of thousands of new residents for its pro-individual policies, now the Lone Star State wants to revolutionize online freedom.

The state legislature has sent a bill to Governor Rick Perry that would close a troubling loophole that allows the government to access your personal emails. Provided that Perry doesn’t veto the law, the legislation would only apply to state and local law enforcement. Nevertheless, it sends a powerful message to the federal government not to mess with Texas or its email.

The loophole was inadvertently created by the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Back then, the vast majority of email was downloaded to one’s personal computer. Any messages not downloaded after 180 days were considered abandoned and open to government searches without a warrant.

But today, most of our email sits in “the cloud.” All those messages new and old reside somewhere on an online server — heck, I have email I saved a decade ago. Although the ECPA was created to protect online privacy, it is now being used to destroy it.

Google recently revealed that the federal government made nearly 8,500 requests for user data in the last half of 2012. This is up 136 percent from the last half of 2009 when the company started tracking this data. In the vast majority of these cases, the requests are made using ECPA subpoenas, which do not need a court order.

Ever skeptical of privacy and freedom, the feds also have dug through Twitter accounts. Of the 815 requests for Twitter user info in the past six months, 81 percent of these “unreasonable searches and seizures” were conducted without a warrant.

The Texas bill is similar to reforms that have circulated in the U.S. Senate. By letting it become law, Austin will throw the gauntlet to Washington to clean up the obsolete provisions of the ECPA. Federal reforms have gone through the Senate Judiciary Committee and await a floor vote.

Hanni Fakhoury of the Electronic Frontier Foundation applauds Texas’ move. “It's significant proof that privacy reform is not only needed but also politically feasible with broad bipartisan support," he said. "Hopefully that will impact federal ECPA reform efforts by getting people on both of sides of the political aisle to work together to make meaningful electronic privacy reform a reality.”

Fakhoury also encouraged other states to join in. “The more states that pass similar legislation, the more pressure it will put on Congress to keep up with the changing legal landscape,” he said.

Follow Jon on Twitter at @ExJon.