Press Release, "Education Leaders: Delaying End-of-Course Exams Fails Students Implementing Existing Education Reforms Will Not Drive Costs," put out by the Texas Institute for Education Reform promoting HB 3's heightened use of high-stakes, end-of-course exams.
Shouldn't be surprising given the individuals endorsing this proposal all have an economic stake in the state's testing consumption.
-Patricia
Showing posts with label HB 500. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HB 500. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
House votes to ease up on new testing and graduation requirements
Hmm... So Berman's argument, “Why spend almost half a billion dollars for tests that won’t count for anything?” should raise some concerns for the simple fact that it highlight just how much money (in direct costs) are being put into the pockets of testing companies.
-Patricia
By TERRENCE STUTZ | Dallas Morning News
April 2011
AUSTIN — The Texas House, responding to pleas from worried school districts, voted Wednesday to ease up on tough new testing and graduation requirements for high school students.
Although critics said the House bill was a major retreat from strengthening academic expectations, most members voted to pass the legislation, which would allow students to fail as many as eight of 12 new end-of-course exams and still earn a diploma. Tentative approval came on a voice vote, with final action scheduled for Thursday.
The measure, which faces a hostile reception in the Senate, also would scrap a requirement that the end-of-course exams count as 15 percent of a student’s final grade in each of the 12 courses. Instead, school districts would be allowed to decide whether to count the test scores in grades.
Incoming high school freshmen this fall will be the first group of students subject to the new tests.
House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, author of the bill, rejected complaints that it represents a step back on school improvement efforts, insisting it “does not lower standards” in Texas schools. He also said there is strong public support for reducing the amount of testing in schools.
“We all hear from parents and teachers that schools are more focused on testing than learning. Time and again we hear complaints about drill and kill [on test preparation] in Texas classrooms,” he said.
Eissler said the measure “creates a clear, easily understandable path to graduation in Texas” unlike the current law. The rules now require students to get passing averages on the three exams in each subject area — English, math, science and social studies.
But Rep. Todd Smith. R-Euless, said the bill is a “huge step back” on getting Texas high school students ready for college, as evidenced by the fact that they could “miserably fail eight of the 12 tests and still meet the state’s graduation requirements.”
Smith said Texas has been recognized nationally for setting such high standards for schools, including the new end-of-course exams for high school students.
“Now we’re raising the white flag before we even see there’s a problem,” he told House members. “This is a major sea change, the first time this body will have passed a bill that dramatically lowers standards in our schools.”
Smith also said while school districts are worried about large numbers of their students failing the new exams, the commissioner of education will have authority, as he has had in the past, to adjust passing scores if the exams prove too difficult for most students.
Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, who also opposed the bill, said end-of-course tests that have cost the state millions of dollars to develop would become almost meaningless under the legislation.
“Why spend almost half a billion dollars for tests that won’t count for anything?” he asked, noting money spent on the high number of tests that could be failed without consequences.
Eissler said students would still have to pass their courses to graduate and that school districts would have authority to include scores on the tests in final grades.
“It’s a matter of letting local school districts make these decisions. We’re trying to get the state out of micromanaging school districts,” he said.
While Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, and other Senate leaders have voiced opposition to backing off on the new testing program — originally approved in 2007 — Eissler said times have changed and many school districts are looking at sizable funding reductions next year.
Under the 2007 testing law, high school students will have to take three exams each in English, math, science and social studies — a total of 12 tests. The law calls on students to achieve a passing average on the three tests in each subject to earn a high school diploma. Field testing of the new exams has found large numbers of students lacking the skills to pass.
Under the House bill approved Wednesday, students would have to pass only the English III and Algebra II exams, and one test each in science and social studies.
In addition, the measure sets up a new two-year transition that would allow students for the next two years to take the outgoing and much easier TAKS exam in lieu of the end-of-course tests.
The House bill has drawn fire from the Governor’s Business Council, Texas Association of Business, Texas Institute for Education Reform and former President George W. Bush’s education adviser, Sandy Kress. All said the House bill would undermine recent academic improvements in the state.
Final House approval is expected Thursday or Friday, before the bill is sent to the Senate, where leaders have said they don’t want to retreat on the new testing and graduation requirements.
-Patricia
By TERRENCE STUTZ | Dallas Morning News
April 2011
AUSTIN — The Texas House, responding to pleas from worried school districts, voted Wednesday to ease up on tough new testing and graduation requirements for high school students.
Although critics said the House bill was a major retreat from strengthening academic expectations, most members voted to pass the legislation, which would allow students to fail as many as eight of 12 new end-of-course exams and still earn a diploma. Tentative approval came on a voice vote, with final action scheduled for Thursday.
The measure, which faces a hostile reception in the Senate, also would scrap a requirement that the end-of-course exams count as 15 percent of a student’s final grade in each of the 12 courses. Instead, school districts would be allowed to decide whether to count the test scores in grades.
Incoming high school freshmen this fall will be the first group of students subject to the new tests.
House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, author of the bill, rejected complaints that it represents a step back on school improvement efforts, insisting it “does not lower standards” in Texas schools. He also said there is strong public support for reducing the amount of testing in schools.
“We all hear from parents and teachers that schools are more focused on testing than learning. Time and again we hear complaints about drill and kill [on test preparation] in Texas classrooms,” he said.
Eissler said the measure “creates a clear, easily understandable path to graduation in Texas” unlike the current law. The rules now require students to get passing averages on the three exams in each subject area — English, math, science and social studies.
But Rep. Todd Smith. R-Euless, said the bill is a “huge step back” on getting Texas high school students ready for college, as evidenced by the fact that they could “miserably fail eight of the 12 tests and still meet the state’s graduation requirements.”
Smith said Texas has been recognized nationally for setting such high standards for schools, including the new end-of-course exams for high school students.
“Now we’re raising the white flag before we even see there’s a problem,” he told House members. “This is a major sea change, the first time this body will have passed a bill that dramatically lowers standards in our schools.”
Smith also said while school districts are worried about large numbers of their students failing the new exams, the commissioner of education will have authority, as he has had in the past, to adjust passing scores if the exams prove too difficult for most students.
Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, who also opposed the bill, said end-of-course tests that have cost the state millions of dollars to develop would become almost meaningless under the legislation.
“Why spend almost half a billion dollars for tests that won’t count for anything?” he asked, noting money spent on the high number of tests that could be failed without consequences.
Eissler said students would still have to pass their courses to graduate and that school districts would have authority to include scores on the tests in final grades.
“It’s a matter of letting local school districts make these decisions. We’re trying to get the state out of micromanaging school districts,” he said.
While Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, and other Senate leaders have voiced opposition to backing off on the new testing program — originally approved in 2007 — Eissler said times have changed and many school districts are looking at sizable funding reductions next year.
Under the 2007 testing law, high school students will have to take three exams each in English, math, science and social studies — a total of 12 tests. The law calls on students to achieve a passing average on the three tests in each subject to earn a high school diploma. Field testing of the new exams has found large numbers of students lacking the skills to pass.
Under the House bill approved Wednesday, students would have to pass only the English III and Algebra II exams, and one test each in science and social studies.
In addition, the measure sets up a new two-year transition that would allow students for the next two years to take the outgoing and much easier TAKS exam in lieu of the end-of-course tests.
The House bill has drawn fire from the Governor’s Business Council, Texas Association of Business, Texas Institute for Education Reform and former President George W. Bush’s education adviser, Sandy Kress. All said the House bill would undermine recent academic improvements in the state.
Final House approval is expected Thursday or Friday, before the bill is sent to the Senate, where leaders have said they don’t want to retreat on the new testing and graduation requirements.
House advances bill easing path to diploma
By Gary Scharrer | My San Antonio
Thursday, April 7, 2011
AUSTIN — The Texas House tentatively approved a bill Wednesday to make it easier for high school students to pass end-of-course exams — a move critics called “a substantial retreat” from school accountability.
“This bill creates a clear, understandable path to graduation,” House Public Education Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said of his legislation, HB 500.
Business and education reform groups complained the bill would weaken efforts to ensure all high school graduates are college- or career-ready.
Some legislators also used the debate to blast the entire testing issue and reliance on standardized tests to measure student achievement.
The House will take a final vote on the bill today before it moves to the Senate, where it is unlikely to get a friendly reception. Senate Public Education Chair Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, has repeatedly expressed opposition to diluting end-of-course testing.
Two years ago, lawmakers approved HB 3, replacing the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills with end-of-course exams for high school students.
Under that bill, starting in the 2011-12 school year, students are to take 12 end-of-course exams in math, science, social studies and English language arts. They must earn a minimum score to be determined by the state commissioner of education.
Under Eissler's bill, students would have to pass only four end-of-course exams — in English, algebra, science and social studies — to earn a diploma.
He called the changes an “appropriate balance between teaching, learning and accountability.”
With more than 120 co-sponsors for the bill, Rep. Todd Smith, R-Bedford, knew it would pass but told colleagues he felt “morally obligated to sound a loud alarm.”
He said the changes would dilute the state's incremental upgrading of accountability standards, designed to produce high school graduates who are college-ready.
“We are raising the white flag without any evidence that there is a problem” with HB 3, Smith said. “This is not about improving our accountability system; it's a significant step toward dismantling it.”
HB 500 also directs the Texas Education Agency not to use projected improvement in school accountability ratings, which cast doubt on last year's ratings.
Projections are appropriate to set expectations but not for measuring actual student improvement, Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, said before getting unanimous support for his amendment.
Hochberg also won easy approval for an amendment creating a pilot program to exempt students from a standardized test if they passed it the previous year.
“If we know they're going to pass that test, why give it to them?” he asked. It would be better for schools to concentrate time and effort on struggling students, Hochberg said.
Lawmakers also unanimously approved HB 6, which would replace the system of funding textbooks and instructional materials with a new “instructional materials allotment,” including books, computer software, magnetic media, DVDs, CD-ROMs and computer courseware.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
AUSTIN — The Texas House tentatively approved a bill Wednesday to make it easier for high school students to pass end-of-course exams — a move critics called “a substantial retreat” from school accountability.
“This bill creates a clear, understandable path to graduation,” House Public Education Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said of his legislation, HB 500.
Business and education reform groups complained the bill would weaken efforts to ensure all high school graduates are college- or career-ready.
Some legislators also used the debate to blast the entire testing issue and reliance on standardized tests to measure student achievement.
The House will take a final vote on the bill today before it moves to the Senate, where it is unlikely to get a friendly reception. Senate Public Education Chair Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, has repeatedly expressed opposition to diluting end-of-course testing.
Two years ago, lawmakers approved HB 3, replacing the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills with end-of-course exams for high school students.
Under that bill, starting in the 2011-12 school year, students are to take 12 end-of-course exams in math, science, social studies and English language arts. They must earn a minimum score to be determined by the state commissioner of education.
Under Eissler's bill, students would have to pass only four end-of-course exams — in English, algebra, science and social studies — to earn a diploma.
He called the changes an “appropriate balance between teaching, learning and accountability.”
With more than 120 co-sponsors for the bill, Rep. Todd Smith, R-Bedford, knew it would pass but told colleagues he felt “morally obligated to sound a loud alarm.”
He said the changes would dilute the state's incremental upgrading of accountability standards, designed to produce high school graduates who are college-ready.
“We are raising the white flag without any evidence that there is a problem” with HB 3, Smith said. “This is not about improving our accountability system; it's a significant step toward dismantling it.”
HB 500 also directs the Texas Education Agency not to use projected improvement in school accountability ratings, which cast doubt on last year's ratings.
Projections are appropriate to set expectations but not for measuring actual student improvement, Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, said before getting unanimous support for his amendment.
Hochberg also won easy approval for an amendment creating a pilot program to exempt students from a standardized test if they passed it the previous year.
“If we know they're going to pass that test, why give it to them?” he asked. It would be better for schools to concentrate time and effort on struggling students, Hochberg said.
Lawmakers also unanimously approved HB 6, which would replace the system of funding textbooks and instructional materials with a new “instructional materials allotment,” including books, computer software, magnetic media, DVDs, CD-ROMs and computer courseware.
House to vote on loosening graduation testing requirements
This piece needs to be clear when it say's "education reform groups," and acknowledge (as was done during the hearing) that members of these "reform groups" are also closely tied to the testing companies that benefit from our testing obsession. Changing the use of high-stakes testing does not mean that students will still be required to complete the curriculum. In fact, there is no research that supports the ways in which Texas place high-stakes testing requirements on students. Rather, experts would argue that it's a misuse of the tests, which are developed for diagnostic purposes only. This is such an old debate that is kept alive by the interests that benefit.
-Patricia
Measure would allow students to pass fewer end-of-course exams to graduate.
By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Texas high school students would have to pass fewer new state exams to graduate under a bill to be considered today by the Texas House.
Pushed by state Rep. Rob Eissler, chairman of the Public Education Committee, the bill aims to ease the transition to tougher end-of-course exams. But business and education reform groups say it is a step backward, and they blame school districts for using the state's budget crisis to justify undoing a law they don't like.
Current law sets as a graduation requirement that students take a total of 12 end-of-course exams — in English, math, science and social studies — and earn an average passing score within each subject.
Incoming freshmen would be the first students to face the more stringent requirement, which was passed in 2009.
House Bill 500 would loosen those requirements and allow a student to graduate by passing four exams: algebra and English III as well as one from each of the other two subject areas.
Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said the bill would give students more time to ease into the tougher new exams and simplifies the requirements.
"We're not letting up. I think we're being more direct and more fair," Eissler said.
Business leaders and education reform groups have said the proposed looser requirements would weaken the expectations for graduation, making a high school diploma little more than a piece of paper.
Drew Scheberle, vice president for education at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, said HB 500 takes the state in the wrong direction.
"It reduces the amount of information you need to demonstrate knowledge on to earn a diploma. This isn't a transition; it's an absolute lowering," Scheberle said.
And the people who will suffer from the lowering of those standards will be the students, he said .
"If HB 500 passes, there are no repercussions until the kid hits college or the real world academically unprepared," Scheberle added.
More than 125 other House members have signed on to the measure, so chances are good that HB 500 will clear the House.
But its fate is murkier in the Senate.
Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano , has said that she does not want to backslide on education reforms that have been years in the making.
Consequently, Shapiro pushed to include almost $400 million in the Senate version of the budget to pay for textbooks and other instructional materials needed to prepare students for the exams.
The House budget, however, does not have money for those materials and reduces school aid by almost $8 billion in the next two years.
School districts have seized on the state's budget crisis to justify this change, said Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business.
But he said the districts' real worry is that student performance on the field tests of the end-of-course exams has been troubling.
"They want to take advantage of the financial situation and delay the onslaught of reality," Hammond said.
Eissler denies that this change is related to the state's budget situation.
But state Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin, said the budget crisis has put in jeopardy money for programs and materials that schools need to prepare their students for the exams.
"Their request for getting the Legislature's foot off their necks in the accountability system has some resonance with me," said Strama, a member of the Public Education Committee.
What has been lost in this debate, Strama said, is that the exams are supposed to be used to identify students who are struggling and get them the help to pass the tests.
"The accountability system shouldn't be a Damoclean sword hanging over the heads of schools," Strama said.
-Patricia
Measure would allow students to pass fewer end-of-course exams to graduate.
By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Texas high school students would have to pass fewer new state exams to graduate under a bill to be considered today by the Texas House.
Pushed by state Rep. Rob Eissler, chairman of the Public Education Committee, the bill aims to ease the transition to tougher end-of-course exams. But business and education reform groups say it is a step backward, and they blame school districts for using the state's budget crisis to justify undoing a law they don't like.
Current law sets as a graduation requirement that students take a total of 12 end-of-course exams — in English, math, science and social studies — and earn an average passing score within each subject.
Incoming freshmen would be the first students to face the more stringent requirement, which was passed in 2009.
House Bill 500 would loosen those requirements and allow a student to graduate by passing four exams: algebra and English III as well as one from each of the other two subject areas.
Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said the bill would give students more time to ease into the tougher new exams and simplifies the requirements.
"We're not letting up. I think we're being more direct and more fair," Eissler said.
Business leaders and education reform groups have said the proposed looser requirements would weaken the expectations for graduation, making a high school diploma little more than a piece of paper.
Drew Scheberle, vice president for education at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, said HB 500 takes the state in the wrong direction.
"It reduces the amount of information you need to demonstrate knowledge on to earn a diploma. This isn't a transition; it's an absolute lowering," Scheberle said.
And the people who will suffer from the lowering of those standards will be the students, he said .
"If HB 500 passes, there are no repercussions until the kid hits college or the real world academically unprepared," Scheberle added.
More than 125 other House members have signed on to the measure, so chances are good that HB 500 will clear the House.
But its fate is murkier in the Senate.
Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano , has said that she does not want to backslide on education reforms that have been years in the making.
Consequently, Shapiro pushed to include almost $400 million in the Senate version of the budget to pay for textbooks and other instructional materials needed to prepare students for the exams.
The House budget, however, does not have money for those materials and reduces school aid by almost $8 billion in the next two years.
School districts have seized on the state's budget crisis to justify this change, said Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business.
But he said the districts' real worry is that student performance on the field tests of the end-of-course exams has been troubling.
"They want to take advantage of the financial situation and delay the onslaught of reality," Hammond said.
Eissler denies that this change is related to the state's budget situation.
But state Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin, said the budget crisis has put in jeopardy money for programs and materials that schools need to prepare their students for the exams.
"Their request for getting the Legislature's foot off their necks in the accountability system has some resonance with me," said Strama, a member of the Public Education Committee.
What has been lost in this debate, Strama said, is that the exams are supposed to be used to identify students who are struggling and get them the help to pass the tests.
"The accountability system shouldn't be a Damoclean sword hanging over the heads of schools," Strama said.
Budget crisis poses threat to educational standards
Of course individuals with strong ties to the very testing company that benefits from schools and districts' over-consumption of high-stakes testing would put this out. They belong to the small number (count them on one hand) of individuals that are opposed to HB 500.
-Patricia
Let's keep commitment to accountability in schools
By JIM WINDHAM, TEXAS INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATION REFORM | Houston Chronicle
April 26, 2011
The current Texas legislative session is largely about the budget crisis, and the media reports have particularly sensationalized the potential cuts in public education funding. But if one looks more closely, there is a larger threat in public education policy, one that would undermine much of the progress we have made in standards and accountability.
Let's retrace why the recent Texas public education reforms were necessary and why the Legislature spent so much time and effort crafting them.
Prior to the adoption of the landmark House Bill 3 in 2009, we needed a more rigorous high school curriculum with serious and focused assessment and accountability. Among other provisions, these reforms called for the end of the dreaded TAKS exit exam in high school, to be replaced with end-of-course exams in the 12 core high school subjects.
This was a big step forward because these exams could be used as finals, total testing time would be reduced and instruction could be devoted entirely to the curriculum instead of teaching to an unrelated test. Educators, parents and students would take these courses and exams seriously because the exams would count as 15 percent of course grades.
This means that for the first time, after HB 3 is fully implemented, postsecondary readiness, defined as college and workplace readiness without the need for remediation, will be the organizing principle of the Texas school accountability system. In addition, it means that we have adopted a postsecondary ramp, with benchmarks for achievement at every grade level and vertically aligned assessments that tell us where every child is on that ramp leading to the postsecondary readiness standard as the exit.
We have been on a journey leading to this standard and these expectations for our students and our educators for more than a decade. With the adoption of HB 3 in 2009, we are there.
These reforms increased focus on quality instruction, eliminated time spent teaching to an unrelated test and the assessments mattered in students' grades, providing great hope to getting students more prepared for college or a meaningful career. This was a very big deal, a stop-the-presses moment in reform. In fact, Achieve Inc., a national consortium of business and education leaders, named Texas as the only state that met all of its criteria for college- and career-readiness graduation standards.
Now a series of proposals in the current session, primarily House Bill 500 recently passed by the House, threaten to roll back much of that progress, to revisit the old HB 3 debates, to refight the last war.
If these proposals become law:
• End-of-course high school exams will not count as part of the student's grade in the course.
• Graduation standards will be lowered so that students will be able to fail as many as eight of the 12 end-of-course exams and still receive a high school diploma. This means a student would have no motivation whatsoever to take seriously English I or II, geometry, two of the science exams and two of the social studies exams.
Many would like to do away with state testing in the interest of local control or delay implementing end-of-course exams on a hollow argument about costs. But if reliability of funding for instructional and curriculum materials is the issue here, we should have that discussion. You will find that our coalition fully supports the necessary funding for the implementation of HB 3 on schedule, including the end-of-course exams, and I cannot conceive of legislators leaving town without fully funding the instructional materials our students need to begin the next school year. And we support the principle of local control as it pertains to the concept of full operational authority commensurate with responsibility, but accountability standards should be a matter of state policy.
We also support the maintenance of funding that provides intervention to support remedial initiatives in the schools for those students who need it. But we shouldn't allow the budget crunch to be a red herring in delaying the full implementation of these enhanced standards and altering the ultimate mission of public education. And we shouldn't allow the mantra of local control to undermine the most rigorous high school graduation standards in the nation that have put Texas back at the top in our expectations for our educators and our kids.
Windham is chairman of the Texas Institute for Education Reform.
-Patricia
Let's keep commitment to accountability in schools
By JIM WINDHAM, TEXAS INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATION REFORM | Houston Chronicle
April 26, 2011
The current Texas legislative session is largely about the budget crisis, and the media reports have particularly sensationalized the potential cuts in public education funding. But if one looks more closely, there is a larger threat in public education policy, one that would undermine much of the progress we have made in standards and accountability.
Let's retrace why the recent Texas public education reforms were necessary and why the Legislature spent so much time and effort crafting them.
Prior to the adoption of the landmark House Bill 3 in 2009, we needed a more rigorous high school curriculum with serious and focused assessment and accountability. Among other provisions, these reforms called for the end of the dreaded TAKS exit exam in high school, to be replaced with end-of-course exams in the 12 core high school subjects.
This was a big step forward because these exams could be used as finals, total testing time would be reduced and instruction could be devoted entirely to the curriculum instead of teaching to an unrelated test. Educators, parents and students would take these courses and exams seriously because the exams would count as 15 percent of course grades.
This means that for the first time, after HB 3 is fully implemented, postsecondary readiness, defined as college and workplace readiness without the need for remediation, will be the organizing principle of the Texas school accountability system. In addition, it means that we have adopted a postsecondary ramp, with benchmarks for achievement at every grade level and vertically aligned assessments that tell us where every child is on that ramp leading to the postsecondary readiness standard as the exit.
We have been on a journey leading to this standard and these expectations for our students and our educators for more than a decade. With the adoption of HB 3 in 2009, we are there.
These reforms increased focus on quality instruction, eliminated time spent teaching to an unrelated test and the assessments mattered in students' grades, providing great hope to getting students more prepared for college or a meaningful career. This was a very big deal, a stop-the-presses moment in reform. In fact, Achieve Inc., a national consortium of business and education leaders, named Texas as the only state that met all of its criteria for college- and career-readiness graduation standards.
Now a series of proposals in the current session, primarily House Bill 500 recently passed by the House, threaten to roll back much of that progress, to revisit the old HB 3 debates, to refight the last war.
If these proposals become law:
• End-of-course high school exams will not count as part of the student's grade in the course.
• Graduation standards will be lowered so that students will be able to fail as many as eight of the 12 end-of-course exams and still receive a high school diploma. This means a student would have no motivation whatsoever to take seriously English I or II, geometry, two of the science exams and two of the social studies exams.
Many would like to do away with state testing in the interest of local control or delay implementing end-of-course exams on a hollow argument about costs. But if reliability of funding for instructional and curriculum materials is the issue here, we should have that discussion. You will find that our coalition fully supports the necessary funding for the implementation of HB 3 on schedule, including the end-of-course exams, and I cannot conceive of legislators leaving town without fully funding the instructional materials our students need to begin the next school year. And we support the principle of local control as it pertains to the concept of full operational authority commensurate with responsibility, but accountability standards should be a matter of state policy.
We also support the maintenance of funding that provides intervention to support remedial initiatives in the schools for those students who need it. But we shouldn't allow the budget crunch to be a red herring in delaying the full implementation of these enhanced standards and altering the ultimate mission of public education. And we shouldn't allow the mantra of local control to undermine the most rigorous high school graduation standards in the nation that have put Texas back at the top in our expectations for our educators and our kids.
Windham is chairman of the Texas Institute for Education Reform.
Changes mean tougher road for schools
Unclear future on credit for student gains
Kimberly Reeves | Austin KXAN News
Updated: Tuesday, 26 Apr 2011
AUSTIN (KXAN) - Education Commissioner Robert Scott ended the use of the controversial Texas Projection Measure on Friday, and the impact of his decision on Austin-area school district ratings is still hard to determine.
The Austin Independent School District, like many across the state, benefited from the Texas Projection Measure last year. More than half the school districts in Texas saw their ratings boosted because of it, along with thousands of school campuses.
The accountability system's newly incorporated measure , requested by lawmakers and created by the Texas Education Agency, bumped up ratings based upon a statistical model’s prediction of how well students would do on the next year’s state-mandated test. That raised a lot of doubts in the public about the soundness of the measure, which the elimination of TPM now addresses.
"The commissioner made the right call," said Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce senior vice president Drew Scheberle. "Elimination of TPM will restore the credibility of the Texas accountability system. Business people throughout the region had a hard time believing that students who fail the TAKS test but might pass some time in the next three years should be counted as passing."
How significant was the impact of eliminating TPM? Well, if you go to the Texas Education Agency's accountability website and type in the name of your school district, it appears more than two-dozen campuses in Austin benefited from TPM, along with more than a dozen campuses in the Round Rock school district and four campuses in San Marcos CISD.
Here are a number of area campuses that have higher ratings, in all or part, due to a boost from TPM: Austin and Bowie high schools in Austin ISD, along with Kealing Middle School; Westwood, McNeil and Stony Point high schools in Round Rock ISD; Lake Travis High School and Hudson Bend Middle School in Lake Travis ISD: and Bowie Elementary and Miller Middle School in San Marcos CISD.
The commissioner, along with a focus group and an advisory committee, makes key decisions about changes in the state’s accountability system each year, such as the percentage passing required to qualify for each rating category. In his annual announcement on Friday, Scott chose to toss out TPM after some scathing reviews from key lawmaker Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, and a unanimous vote in the House to end the use of TPM as part of House Bill 500.
Scott wrote, in his decision document released on Friday, that such criticism of the TPM detracted from actual gains in student test scores, which showed growth in every subject and every student group.
“Unfortunately, this hard work is overshadowed by criticism of the use of the TPM, including an assertion made on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives during debate on House Bill 500 that school ratings in 2010 went up without demonstrations of increases in performance,” Scott wrote. “The commissioner does not want the TPM to continue to detract from the achievements of students and educators.”
Scott called the TPM sound and statistically valid after a year of use, comparing it to the methodology behind SAT and ACT tests, but lawmakers such as Hochberg had doubts. Scott's own children attend Bowie High School, and he told reporters he thought no less of the school's quality and achievement because TPM had bumped the campus from "academically acceptable" to "recognized."
To many lawmakers and parents, however, the decision to base better ratings on a statistical model that predicted what students might do one or two years down the road was questionable, and the model’s reliability grew fuzzier and less accurate the closer the scores drew to the passing score.
Criticism of the TPM was no more than political rhetoric seized by Democrat Bill White’s campaign for governor last year, Scott has told numerous audiences. The vote to end TPM, however, was bipartisan and unanimous in the House.
Hochberg, for his part, released a single sentence on Scott’s decision yesterday: “The Commissioner's decision will provide better confidence that improved ratings really reflect the hard work of students, teachers and parents, instead of the results of statistical manipulation.”
The agency has no firm predictions about what the future, minus TPM, might hold. New school and district ratings, based on this spring’s test scores, will be released at the end of July.
Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe did predict that the exclusion of the projection measure would probably have the greatest impact on those campuses that had moved from “recognized” to “exemplary” with the use of TPM, even more than those that moved from "academically acceptable" to "recognized."
Just because TPM is gone doesn't mean growth measures are out. A new growth will have to be incorporated when the state starts its new STAAR testing system . In fact, the state will not be issuing accountablity ratings in 2012, waiting until 2013 to break in the new ratings system.
Kimberly Reeves | Austin KXAN News
Updated: Tuesday, 26 Apr 2011
AUSTIN (KXAN) - Education Commissioner Robert Scott ended the use of the controversial Texas Projection Measure on Friday, and the impact of his decision on Austin-area school district ratings is still hard to determine.
The Austin Independent School District, like many across the state, benefited from the Texas Projection Measure last year. More than half the school districts in Texas saw their ratings boosted because of it, along with thousands of school campuses.
The accountability system's newly incorporated measure , requested by lawmakers and created by the Texas Education Agency, bumped up ratings based upon a statistical model’s prediction of how well students would do on the next year’s state-mandated test. That raised a lot of doubts in the public about the soundness of the measure, which the elimination of TPM now addresses.
"The commissioner made the right call," said Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce senior vice president Drew Scheberle. "Elimination of TPM will restore the credibility of the Texas accountability system. Business people throughout the region had a hard time believing that students who fail the TAKS test but might pass some time in the next three years should be counted as passing."
How significant was the impact of eliminating TPM? Well, if you go to the Texas Education Agency's accountability website and type in the name of your school district, it appears more than two-dozen campuses in Austin benefited from TPM, along with more than a dozen campuses in the Round Rock school district and four campuses in San Marcos CISD.
Here are a number of area campuses that have higher ratings, in all or part, due to a boost from TPM: Austin and Bowie high schools in Austin ISD, along with Kealing Middle School; Westwood, McNeil and Stony Point high schools in Round Rock ISD; Lake Travis High School and Hudson Bend Middle School in Lake Travis ISD: and Bowie Elementary and Miller Middle School in San Marcos CISD.
The commissioner, along with a focus group and an advisory committee, makes key decisions about changes in the state’s accountability system each year, such as the percentage passing required to qualify for each rating category. In his annual announcement on Friday, Scott chose to toss out TPM after some scathing reviews from key lawmaker Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, and a unanimous vote in the House to end the use of TPM as part of House Bill 500.
Scott wrote, in his decision document released on Friday, that such criticism of the TPM detracted from actual gains in student test scores, which showed growth in every subject and every student group.
“Unfortunately, this hard work is overshadowed by criticism of the use of the TPM, including an assertion made on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives during debate on House Bill 500 that school ratings in 2010 went up without demonstrations of increases in performance,” Scott wrote. “The commissioner does not want the TPM to continue to detract from the achievements of students and educators.”
Scott called the TPM sound and statistically valid after a year of use, comparing it to the methodology behind SAT and ACT tests, but lawmakers such as Hochberg had doubts. Scott's own children attend Bowie High School, and he told reporters he thought no less of the school's quality and achievement because TPM had bumped the campus from "academically acceptable" to "recognized."
To many lawmakers and parents, however, the decision to base better ratings on a statistical model that predicted what students might do one or two years down the road was questionable, and the model’s reliability grew fuzzier and less accurate the closer the scores drew to the passing score.
Criticism of the TPM was no more than political rhetoric seized by Democrat Bill White’s campaign for governor last year, Scott has told numerous audiences. The vote to end TPM, however, was bipartisan and unanimous in the House.
Hochberg, for his part, released a single sentence on Scott’s decision yesterday: “The Commissioner's decision will provide better confidence that improved ratings really reflect the hard work of students, teachers and parents, instead of the results of statistical manipulation.”
The agency has no firm predictions about what the future, minus TPM, might hold. New school and district ratings, based on this spring’s test scores, will be released at the end of July.
Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe did predict that the exclusion of the projection measure would probably have the greatest impact on those campuses that had moved from “recognized” to “exemplary” with the use of TPM, even more than those that moved from "academically acceptable" to "recognized."
Just because TPM is gone doesn't mean growth measures are out. A new growth will have to be incorporated when the state starts its new STAAR testing system . In fact, the state will not be issuing accountablity ratings in 2012, waiting until 2013 to break in the new ratings system.
House Bill on Student Testing Reopens a Familiar Debate
This Texas discussion on college ready standards, the use of high-stakes, end-of-course exams, and budget constraints is important on a national level, especially among those states (and districts) that signed on to national common core standards. The Texas case study once again leads the nation on educational policy in practice.
-Patricia
By MORGAN SMITH | NY Times
April 16, 2011
When Representative Rob Eissler, Republican of The Woodlands, brought House Bill 500 to the Texas House floor on April 6, he emphasized what it did not do.
It did not, he said, lower testing standards. Nor did it delay the planned 2011-12 rollout of the state’s more rigorous Staar exams.
Mr. Eissler was setting out to correct what he called the “misrepresentations” and “false claims” surrounding the bill, which, despite its overwhelming support in the House — more than two-thirds of his colleagues signed on to it, and only five voted against it — has generated vocal opposition from some within education circles who view it as a dramatic retreat from hard-won reforms.
The bill also reveals a divergence between the Legislature’s two public education chiefs — Mr. Eissler, who heads the House Public Education Committee, and his counterpart in the upper chamber, Senator Florence Shapiro, Republican of Plano — on how the state should hold students and educators accountable.
Ms. Shapiro staunchly supports moving forward with the testing standards in H.B. 3, the 2009 legislation that set up the transition to the new Staar exams from the state’s current TAKS subject area tests .
“It’s a shame that it’s happened at the very same time that we are having problems with the budget,” Ms. Shapiro said, “but that doesn’t change the idea that this is the direction we should be going.”
Worried about how operating with fewer teachers will affect classroom instruction and whether they will be able to afford updated textbooks, districts have pushed to delay the new exams.
H.B. 500 makes significant modifications to H.B. 3, with the goals of reducing costs and easing districts’ concerns that the new testing regimen could lead to large numbers of students failing to graduate. Instead of the end-of-course Staar exams counting 15 percent of a student’s final grade, H.B. 500 permits school districts to set their own policies. It also would allow districts to suspend a new requirement that students receive a cumulative score on 12 exams in four subject areas to graduate; instead, students would have to pass a total of four exams, one in each subject.
Business groups — including the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Coalition for a Competitive Workforce and the Austin Chamber of Commerce — oppose the measure because they believe it represents a step back for student accountability.
Drew Scheberle, a senior vice president at the Austin Chamber, said H.B. 500 “represents the first time in 25 years that we would actually reduce the expectations for graduation.”
To some extent, the divide between Mr. Eissler and Ms. Shapiro is a rehashing of an old battle between the House and Senate on student testing.
“This is basically a fight we had two years ago in conference committee, when the Senate wanted the standards as they are on the books today, and the House wanted relaxed graduation standards,” said Andrew C. Erben, president of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, which opposes Mr. Eissler’s bill.
The House more than the Senate has traditionally aligned with school districts on student accountability, Mr. Scheberle said. “The House has not always been the strongest on this issue,” he said. “It has usually been the Senate.”
Now, lawmakers in the House are looking for ways to soften the blow of their stark budget, which allocates about $4 billion less to public education than the Senate. “The House is dealing in a very different arena than the Senate is dealing,” Ms. Shapiro said. “If I was in their shoes and didn’t have money for textbooks, I didn’t have any money to keep our teachers or to keep our schools whole, I would be looking for ways to lessen the pressure, too.”
Mr. Eissler told his colleagues that his bill represented the “middle ground” between those who want a delay of the Staar tests and those who want to hold firm. On Friday, he acknowledged he had “some missionary work” to do in the Senate.
“It’s not like there’s a difference in philosophy,” he said. “It’s a difference in application. Florence Shapiro and I agree that we need to have rigor, relevance, and responsibility or strong accountability, but how that translates to day-to-day operation in the school district is what made H.B. 500.”
-Patricia
By MORGAN SMITH | NY Times
April 16, 2011
When Representative Rob Eissler, Republican of The Woodlands, brought House Bill 500 to the Texas House floor on April 6, he emphasized what it did not do.
It did not, he said, lower testing standards. Nor did it delay the planned 2011-12 rollout of the state’s more rigorous Staar exams.
Mr. Eissler was setting out to correct what he called the “misrepresentations” and “false claims” surrounding the bill, which, despite its overwhelming support in the House — more than two-thirds of his colleagues signed on to it, and only five voted against it — has generated vocal opposition from some within education circles who view it as a dramatic retreat from hard-won reforms.
The bill also reveals a divergence between the Legislature’s two public education chiefs — Mr. Eissler, who heads the House Public Education Committee, and his counterpart in the upper chamber, Senator Florence Shapiro, Republican of Plano — on how the state should hold students and educators accountable.
Ms. Shapiro staunchly supports moving forward with the testing standards in H.B. 3, the 2009 legislation that set up the transition to the new Staar exams from the state’s current TAKS subject area tests .
“It’s a shame that it’s happened at the very same time that we are having problems with the budget,” Ms. Shapiro said, “but that doesn’t change the idea that this is the direction we should be going.”
Worried about how operating with fewer teachers will affect classroom instruction and whether they will be able to afford updated textbooks, districts have pushed to delay the new exams.
H.B. 500 makes significant modifications to H.B. 3, with the goals of reducing costs and easing districts’ concerns that the new testing regimen could lead to large numbers of students failing to graduate. Instead of the end-of-course Staar exams counting 15 percent of a student’s final grade, H.B. 500 permits school districts to set their own policies. It also would allow districts to suspend a new requirement that students receive a cumulative score on 12 exams in four subject areas to graduate; instead, students would have to pass a total of four exams, one in each subject.
Business groups — including the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Coalition for a Competitive Workforce and the Austin Chamber of Commerce — oppose the measure because they believe it represents a step back for student accountability.
Drew Scheberle, a senior vice president at the Austin Chamber, said H.B. 500 “represents the first time in 25 years that we would actually reduce the expectations for graduation.”
To some extent, the divide between Mr. Eissler and Ms. Shapiro is a rehashing of an old battle between the House and Senate on student testing.
“This is basically a fight we had two years ago in conference committee, when the Senate wanted the standards as they are on the books today, and the House wanted relaxed graduation standards,” said Andrew C. Erben, president of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, which opposes Mr. Eissler’s bill.
The House more than the Senate has traditionally aligned with school districts on student accountability, Mr. Scheberle said. “The House has not always been the strongest on this issue,” he said. “It has usually been the Senate.”
Now, lawmakers in the House are looking for ways to soften the blow of their stark budget, which allocates about $4 billion less to public education than the Senate. “The House is dealing in a very different arena than the Senate is dealing,” Ms. Shapiro said. “If I was in their shoes and didn’t have money for textbooks, I didn’t have any money to keep our teachers or to keep our schools whole, I would be looking for ways to lessen the pressure, too.”
Mr. Eissler told his colleagues that his bill represented the “middle ground” between those who want a delay of the Staar tests and those who want to hold firm. On Friday, he acknowledged he had “some missionary work” to do in the Senate.
“It’s not like there’s a difference in philosophy,” he said. “It’s a difference in application. Florence Shapiro and I agree that we need to have rigor, relevance, and responsibility or strong accountability, but how that translates to day-to-day operation in the school district is what made H.B. 500.”
Monday, April 4, 2011
I am Educator, Hear Me Roar! An Interview with John Kuhn
This is powerful!
-Patricia
By Anthony Cody
March 23, 2011
A week ago, a friend shared a video with me of a school superintendent giving a fiery speech at a Save Texas Schools rally. That is how I met the superintendent of Perrin-Whitt School District, John Kuhn.
After watching this video, I felt I had to get to know this man. He responds to my questions below.
Question: You have become widely known due to your Letter from Alamo. Can you explain the circumstances that led you to write this?
A Texas state senator spoke to a group of administrators in Austin back in February. It just so happens that this senator is the chair of a couple of very important education-related committees and is a former school teacher. As a result, she is kind of seen as an "education expert" among our legislators. This particular senator, however, has been at the forefront of drafting policies that I see as counterproductive for our public schools: she has pushed for more and more high stakes testing, and less and less funding. She also has advocated for maintaining the Target Revenue System, which is a school funding scheme in Texas that gives certain schools more funding than others, seemingly at random. In Texas, the luckiest schools have a Target Revenue of $12,000 per student and the unluckiest schools have a Target Revenue of $4,000--but all schools are held to the same hard-and-fast standards when it comes to state and federal accountability measures. It's unjust on the face of it.
So, going into this meeting, I was already angry about the moral underpinnings of our whole system. It just all seems like a parody of bad government to me, like something you'd read in a dystopian novel like 1984 or A Brave New World--except that it's real.
So this senator spoke to us and, after letting us know that there will be severe funding cuts due to the economic downturn--and never once mentioning the 2006 school funding tax swap that she and her colleagues adopted which capped property tax rates and slashed 1/3 of schools' revenue, replacing it with a business tax that generated billions less than what was cut (and which was labeled at that time by our state comptroller as "the biggest hot check in state history")--she then began to talk about a pet project of hers: the new State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR test. She spoke about it with a gleam in her eyes, as though it were her new grandbaby. And then she said a word that pushed me over the edge. After having spoken at length about making hard decisions and sacrificing and cutting local budgets, she bragged that spending on STAAR was "non-negotiable." Teachers' jobs are on the line, but not the precious test. I had trouble getting on board with her priorities.
She took questions at the end of her presentation, and I let her know my concerns. I pointed out to her that I had given myself a 10% pay cut and would be cutting positions soon, and I asked if anyone at Pearson (the firm that makes the test) would be taking a pay cut. I told her she was "saving the test but not the teachers."
Her responses to my (probably impertinent) questions left me even more concerned and frustrated than I had already been. Anyway, this particular senator has been a steadfast critic of public schools, calling us inefficient and creating layer upon layer of bureaucracy to watch over us and micromanage everything we do. This session she has often repeated a dubious statistic about the "1-to-1 ratio" of teachers to non-teachers in Texas schools, and how that ratio was 4-to-1 back in the 1970s--never mind the fact that a.) the state's statistics in the 1970s didn't include lunch ladies, bus drivers, and other non-teachers, creating a false comparison, and b.) the amount of bureaucratic nonsense and inflexible accountability measures piled on Texas schools beginning in the 1980s has created countless man hours of reporting and testing paperwork and has led schools to hire testing coordinators, math coaches, parent involvement coordinators, etc. When this senator implies that the state of Texas is broke because superintendents like me just go wild hiring unnecessary non-teachers, it feels very much like I'm being slapped for doing what the senators forced me to do. I feel like public school officials are the Official Scapegoat of Texas.
So, in short, I got my belly full. I went back to my hotel room that night and wrote the Alamo letter. I have written a million rants about government insanity in guiding educational policy over the course of my career, but I have always deleted them after venting. But not this time--I typed that bad boy out and sent it to my hometown paper and to Diane Ravitch, to heck with it. And it ended up on Valerie Strauss's blog at the Washington Post website. Then I spent about three nights not sleeping and asking myself, "What have I done?" But, even as I was pretty sure I was going to die from a heart attack over the near-certainty I would lose my job, I was kind of glad I had taken the things we school people gripe to each other about and put it out there for everyone to read. A wise superintendent friend once told me that teachers who complain to each other in the teachers' lounge don't really want things to change, they just want to gripe; but those who want things to be better will actually voice their concerns to the people who have the ability to fix them. So that's why I wrote the letter--I'm begging our legislators to quit driving us down what I believe is the fundamentally wrong trail.
Question: What has been the effect of NCLB on children in your district?
Well, they get to take plenty of bubble tests, and if they do poorly they get lots of remediation in the core areas that get tested. I guess NCLB has ensured that our teachers and administrators feel lots of pressure to perform on these tests. Like everyone else, we do diagnostic benchmarking and use released tests in the classroom to get ready. Like someone (I think it was Matt Damon, actually) recently said, we are doing less teaching of kids and more training of them, with an eye toward that test. I'm not blaming our teachers, though, for "teaching to the test," as I have often heard parents and citizens bash the schools for doing. Our leaders have created this creepy environment where standardized test scores are the great false god. If I raised my kids at home according to the prevailing philosophies, we would have a simplistic scoring device for how effectively my kids did their chores--ignoring every other, less measurable way they show me that they love me--and I would then meter out hugs accordingly. If I were to establish such a dazzlingly, nauseatingly wrong system at home, I couldn't very well then turn around and criticize my kids for adopting certain mechanical approaches to getting the results I wanted, could I?
So of course teachers are going to teach to the test, and even more so when those scores are tied to them personally (coming soon to a Texas public school near you!) As we move forward, I see the electives withering on the vine and the classroom increasingly becoming a place where kids work on "fundamentals" like they do on the football practice field--after all, that high-stakes test IS the big game, and the consequences of losing are very real.
Question: What do you see as the positives and negatives of current education reform efforts in your state and across the country?
First, I am not against accountability, just the incredibly convoluted, inefficient, and mean-spirited kind of accountability we have right now. In my mind, we should treat teachers the way we want them to treat students. But we don't. We ask them to encourage and remediate and support kids while we whip, label and threaten them. So the positives would have to be that teachers work hard (which they always did anyway in the rural school I grew up in), and that the top-down pressure has led schools to align their curriculum and really look at what they are teaching. The negatives are huge, however.
First, accountability has narrowed our focus down to--in Texas--just four subjects. It doesn't matter to Texas if kids learn anything in any subject but math, science, social studies, and language arts. Therefore, the only saving grace in the arts and foreign languages and vocational classes and athletics is that we have passionate people teaching those subjects who really care about their students and their subjects. And that is the core of my disdain for this ugly baby called accountability--if the test-and-label philosophy really worked, then you would think there would be far worse teaching going on outside the core classes, but there isn't generally. Why? Because good teachers are motivated by passion and a moral sense of mission, not by the threats of absent bureaucrats.
We are putting the wrong fuel in our car--it runs best on support, and we are gassing up with intimidation and blame. We are going to burn up this engine by making education a place where only hyper-competitive type-A individuals can feel comfortable, while all of those wonderfully kind and dedicated, supportive people who were born to teach abandon the classroom in search of a kinder profession where their skill sets are valued.
The other major gripe I have is this: if we really believed that accountability works, wouldn't we have accountability for all public servants? Why do we not require our legislators to make "Adequate Yearly Progress"? We have the data from their congressional districts, do we not? There is crime data, health care data, poverty figures, and drug use statistics for every state and federal legislative district. Why, exactly, do we not establish annual targets for our legislators to meet? We could eliminate 100% of poverty, crime, drug abuse, and preventable illness by 2014!
If accountability is the answer, we must move from the selective accountability that merely targets schools to a universal accountability that targets all players. We know that poverty, illness, crime, and addiction in the home all have a direct impact on the educability of our students--when legislators fail, schools fail. But we only blame the second domino to fall--it seems very cynical to me. It appears that accountability is currently more about finding a convenient scapegoat for our national failings than about really solving problems. I will believe this as long as we hold teachers accountable and not legislators. (I know that a legislator would instinctively say he or she is held accountable at election time, but an election is not remotely like an education-style accountability measure--when superintendents get their contracts renewed, we have a state-assigned label stamped on our foreheads. When politicians go out for re-election, they get to define themselves for voters, sans a state-issued label as to their fitness to serve. This happened recently in Texas, when our governor ran ads touting Texas' huge budget surpluses, which we discovered shortly after his re-election were actually huge shortfalls. Educators can't participate in those kind of games when their contracts are up--we have a label that we can't explain away. If this kind of system truly works to create positive outcomes, why do we not apply it to other public servants?)
Question: You seem unusually outspoken for an administrator. Have you experienced any repercussions?
My community and school board have supported me, and educators around Texas--as well as nationally--have emailed, called and written letters of support. It's been inspirational. I have received one letter expressing disappointment that I spoke at the Texas Rally to Save Public schools. There have been a few vicious comments posted in the comments sections of articles about the Alamo letter, but I don't take anonymous commenters very seriously. One superintendent indicated in an interview that he felt my letter was inappropriate--he's probably right, but appropriate behavior is what got us here. My contention is that quiet meetings in legislators' offices with frustrated school people asking for support has gotten us the current Rube Goldberg systems. I personally want the general public to be aware of these machinations and the back room legislative wheeler-dealing that gives rise to clearly immoral and self-defeating policies such as the Target Revenue System. I can't bring myself to believe that the average person wants a standardized-test-centric, blame-the-teachers-for-all-social-ills education for their kids. I am tired of educators' silence allowing the public to blindly criticize teachers and local schools for the effects of elected officials' foolish decisions. If elected officials want to play the blame game--and boy do they!--then I'm going to play it with them. There is enough blame to go around.
Question: How do you weigh the decision to speak out in this way?
I say what I believe to be true. And I'm willing to live with the consequences.
Question: Feel free to extemporize if there is something more you would like to share that I have not asked.
I have always believed that if a person has the audacity to accept the mantle of leadership, they'd better have the courage to lead. Unfortunately, many of my state elected officials play games and issue half-true sound bites rather than exhibiting true leadership. The greater good is dying on the floor while they preen and play to their fan clubs. (They use the word "constituents" because it sounds more grown up than "fan clubs.") It's all very sad to me, because historically we did education right, and now American education is writhing in hideous deformity on the experimenters' table while other countries do it right. And it's a vicious cycle: the more they mess things up, the more eagerly they then come at us with more clumsy surgeries to "fix" us.
I would like to note an incident that gave rise to my speech in Austin. Following the publication of the Alamo letter, I was invited to speak at a college here, and I spoke just before a nationally-known school reformer who is a high school principal. So he spoke about how he got miraculous results in his school, and how 100% of his students went on to four-year colleges, etc. It was all very inspirational. And then, in the middle of his speech, he felt the need to say, "I don't work at a charter school, either. I work at a public high school."
The implication was clear--he plays be the same rules as public school principals, he just gets better results. We all play the same game, he's just a better coach.
So I was troubled when I got home. I was a public school principal for several years, and I couldn't get 100% of my students to graduate, much less go to college. And I worked hard! What was he doing that I didn't do?
So I went to his school's website and I saw an interesting button on the home page. "Apply now!" it said. Weird, I thought. Nobody "applies" at my school. So I clicked on it and discovered that his "public" school is actually a "public magnet" school.
He strategically left out that important detail in his speech.
You have to apply and be accepted to get into his school; you only have to breathe and live in the district to go to my school. If you don't toe the line at his school, this golden child principal will--wait for it--send you back to the public school! He drafts his players and I play with the Bad News Bears over here, and then he sticks his chest out and tells us all what a skilled coach he is.
In short, he deliberately, calculatingly lied by omission to an unsuspecting audience.
And that's when I realized that the school reform movement is populated by self-promoting snake oil salesmen, and our elected officials are buying their tonic by the truckload. It's hard for me to watch this train wreck slowly unfold.
The narrative of the school reformer is a simple formula: kids are victims, teachers are the villains, and some administrator is the messianic hero. A dynamic personality comes into a bad school and doesn't accept mediocrity. He or she cleans up the discipline and fires all the bad teachers, confronting the wicked teachers' union along the way. The hero is this lone special individual and the administrative mechanisms the he or she put in place. It is, basically, the Heroic Ballad of the Bureaucrat. It sells books and dupes legislators. It makes people rich. It only requires a certain amount of arrogance and duplicity to pull it off. It relies on the same dangerous logic that tyrants use to justify lording over peasants and restricting their liberties. In this case, the benign dictator is a self-promoting principal or superintendent with all the answers, and the poor clueless peasants in dire need of a paternalistic leader are the teachers.
The narrative I cling to is also simple, but it doesn't make anyone rich. It would also make for a remarkably boring book. In my ballad, kids are still the victims, but bureaucracy is the enemy. Legislators too afraid to accept responsibility for the persistence of poverty, crime, poor health care, and methamphetamine addiction are the villains, eager only to place blame and not willing or able to actually fix things. And the passionate, beleaguered teachers picking up the pieces in their classrooms day after day are the heroes. My story plays out over years, with a million tiny acts of heroism, each one too small on its own to matter much--but when all of them are put together, how they speak powerfully of a life well-spent! These are the teachers I am sticking up for. And my story doesn't have a Hollywood ending. 100% of my kids don't go to a four-year college. Some of them become house framers or work for our local oilfield companies. But they grow up and raise families and go to church and serve on the school board. They are successes in every sense of the word. And there are others who aren't. Some of my students have gone to prison. Some struggle with addiction. My ballad isn't tidy.
But, the nice thing is, I don't have to leave out inconvenient details when I sing my ballad. The assumption that the school reform movement doesn't permit negative outcomes requires you to believe that they fix kids when the hard, unmentionable truth is that they cull them. And I take the culled ones and do the best I can with them. And I'm good with this arrangement because you can't spin the story when you stand before God. God sees through the omissions and knows that the reformer above runs a magnet school and that I take all comers. He can convince the politicians and his readers if he wants to. I'm good with that. I'll soldier on.
-Patricia
By Anthony Cody
March 23, 2011
A week ago, a friend shared a video with me of a school superintendent giving a fiery speech at a Save Texas Schools rally. That is how I met the superintendent of Perrin-Whitt School District, John Kuhn.
After watching this video, I felt I had to get to know this man. He responds to my questions below.
Question: You have become widely known due to your Letter from Alamo. Can you explain the circumstances that led you to write this?
A Texas state senator spoke to a group of administrators in Austin back in February. It just so happens that this senator is the chair of a couple of very important education-related committees and is a former school teacher. As a result, she is kind of seen as an "education expert" among our legislators. This particular senator, however, has been at the forefront of drafting policies that I see as counterproductive for our public schools: she has pushed for more and more high stakes testing, and less and less funding. She also has advocated for maintaining the Target Revenue System, which is a school funding scheme in Texas that gives certain schools more funding than others, seemingly at random. In Texas, the luckiest schools have a Target Revenue of $12,000 per student and the unluckiest schools have a Target Revenue of $4,000--but all schools are held to the same hard-and-fast standards when it comes to state and federal accountability measures. It's unjust on the face of it.
So, going into this meeting, I was already angry about the moral underpinnings of our whole system. It just all seems like a parody of bad government to me, like something you'd read in a dystopian novel like 1984 or A Brave New World--except that it's real.
So this senator spoke to us and, after letting us know that there will be severe funding cuts due to the economic downturn--and never once mentioning the 2006 school funding tax swap that she and her colleagues adopted which capped property tax rates and slashed 1/3 of schools' revenue, replacing it with a business tax that generated billions less than what was cut (and which was labeled at that time by our state comptroller as "the biggest hot check in state history")--she then began to talk about a pet project of hers: the new State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR test. She spoke about it with a gleam in her eyes, as though it were her new grandbaby. And then she said a word that pushed me over the edge. After having spoken at length about making hard decisions and sacrificing and cutting local budgets, she bragged that spending on STAAR was "non-negotiable." Teachers' jobs are on the line, but not the precious test. I had trouble getting on board with her priorities.
She took questions at the end of her presentation, and I let her know my concerns. I pointed out to her that I had given myself a 10% pay cut and would be cutting positions soon, and I asked if anyone at Pearson (the firm that makes the test) would be taking a pay cut. I told her she was "saving the test but not the teachers."
Her responses to my (probably impertinent) questions left me even more concerned and frustrated than I had already been. Anyway, this particular senator has been a steadfast critic of public schools, calling us inefficient and creating layer upon layer of bureaucracy to watch over us and micromanage everything we do. This session she has often repeated a dubious statistic about the "1-to-1 ratio" of teachers to non-teachers in Texas schools, and how that ratio was 4-to-1 back in the 1970s--never mind the fact that a.) the state's statistics in the 1970s didn't include lunch ladies, bus drivers, and other non-teachers, creating a false comparison, and b.) the amount of bureaucratic nonsense and inflexible accountability measures piled on Texas schools beginning in the 1980s has created countless man hours of reporting and testing paperwork and has led schools to hire testing coordinators, math coaches, parent involvement coordinators, etc. When this senator implies that the state of Texas is broke because superintendents like me just go wild hiring unnecessary non-teachers, it feels very much like I'm being slapped for doing what the senators forced me to do. I feel like public school officials are the Official Scapegoat of Texas.
So, in short, I got my belly full. I went back to my hotel room that night and wrote the Alamo letter. I have written a million rants about government insanity in guiding educational policy over the course of my career, but I have always deleted them after venting. But not this time--I typed that bad boy out and sent it to my hometown paper and to Diane Ravitch, to heck with it. And it ended up on Valerie Strauss's blog at the Washington Post website. Then I spent about three nights not sleeping and asking myself, "What have I done?" But, even as I was pretty sure I was going to die from a heart attack over the near-certainty I would lose my job, I was kind of glad I had taken the things we school people gripe to each other about and put it out there for everyone to read. A wise superintendent friend once told me that teachers who complain to each other in the teachers' lounge don't really want things to change, they just want to gripe; but those who want things to be better will actually voice their concerns to the people who have the ability to fix them. So that's why I wrote the letter--I'm begging our legislators to quit driving us down what I believe is the fundamentally wrong trail.
Question: What has been the effect of NCLB on children in your district?
Well, they get to take plenty of bubble tests, and if they do poorly they get lots of remediation in the core areas that get tested. I guess NCLB has ensured that our teachers and administrators feel lots of pressure to perform on these tests. Like everyone else, we do diagnostic benchmarking and use released tests in the classroom to get ready. Like someone (I think it was Matt Damon, actually) recently said, we are doing less teaching of kids and more training of them, with an eye toward that test. I'm not blaming our teachers, though, for "teaching to the test," as I have often heard parents and citizens bash the schools for doing. Our leaders have created this creepy environment where standardized test scores are the great false god. If I raised my kids at home according to the prevailing philosophies, we would have a simplistic scoring device for how effectively my kids did their chores--ignoring every other, less measurable way they show me that they love me--and I would then meter out hugs accordingly. If I were to establish such a dazzlingly, nauseatingly wrong system at home, I couldn't very well then turn around and criticize my kids for adopting certain mechanical approaches to getting the results I wanted, could I?
So of course teachers are going to teach to the test, and even more so when those scores are tied to them personally (coming soon to a Texas public school near you!) As we move forward, I see the electives withering on the vine and the classroom increasingly becoming a place where kids work on "fundamentals" like they do on the football practice field--after all, that high-stakes test IS the big game, and the consequences of losing are very real.
Question: What do you see as the positives and negatives of current education reform efforts in your state and across the country?
First, I am not against accountability, just the incredibly convoluted, inefficient, and mean-spirited kind of accountability we have right now. In my mind, we should treat teachers the way we want them to treat students. But we don't. We ask them to encourage and remediate and support kids while we whip, label and threaten them. So the positives would have to be that teachers work hard (which they always did anyway in the rural school I grew up in), and that the top-down pressure has led schools to align their curriculum and really look at what they are teaching. The negatives are huge, however.
First, accountability has narrowed our focus down to--in Texas--just four subjects. It doesn't matter to Texas if kids learn anything in any subject but math, science, social studies, and language arts. Therefore, the only saving grace in the arts and foreign languages and vocational classes and athletics is that we have passionate people teaching those subjects who really care about their students and their subjects. And that is the core of my disdain for this ugly baby called accountability--if the test-and-label philosophy really worked, then you would think there would be far worse teaching going on outside the core classes, but there isn't generally. Why? Because good teachers are motivated by passion and a moral sense of mission, not by the threats of absent bureaucrats.
We are putting the wrong fuel in our car--it runs best on support, and we are gassing up with intimidation and blame. We are going to burn up this engine by making education a place where only hyper-competitive type-A individuals can feel comfortable, while all of those wonderfully kind and dedicated, supportive people who were born to teach abandon the classroom in search of a kinder profession where their skill sets are valued.
The other major gripe I have is this: if we really believed that accountability works, wouldn't we have accountability for all public servants? Why do we not require our legislators to make "Adequate Yearly Progress"? We have the data from their congressional districts, do we not? There is crime data, health care data, poverty figures, and drug use statistics for every state and federal legislative district. Why, exactly, do we not establish annual targets for our legislators to meet? We could eliminate 100% of poverty, crime, drug abuse, and preventable illness by 2014!
If accountability is the answer, we must move from the selective accountability that merely targets schools to a universal accountability that targets all players. We know that poverty, illness, crime, and addiction in the home all have a direct impact on the educability of our students--when legislators fail, schools fail. But we only blame the second domino to fall--it seems very cynical to me. It appears that accountability is currently more about finding a convenient scapegoat for our national failings than about really solving problems. I will believe this as long as we hold teachers accountable and not legislators. (I know that a legislator would instinctively say he or she is held accountable at election time, but an election is not remotely like an education-style accountability measure--when superintendents get their contracts renewed, we have a state-assigned label stamped on our foreheads. When politicians go out for re-election, they get to define themselves for voters, sans a state-issued label as to their fitness to serve. This happened recently in Texas, when our governor ran ads touting Texas' huge budget surpluses, which we discovered shortly after his re-election were actually huge shortfalls. Educators can't participate in those kind of games when their contracts are up--we have a label that we can't explain away. If this kind of system truly works to create positive outcomes, why do we not apply it to other public servants?)
Question: You seem unusually outspoken for an administrator. Have you experienced any repercussions?
My community and school board have supported me, and educators around Texas--as well as nationally--have emailed, called and written letters of support. It's been inspirational. I have received one letter expressing disappointment that I spoke at the Texas Rally to Save Public schools. There have been a few vicious comments posted in the comments sections of articles about the Alamo letter, but I don't take anonymous commenters very seriously. One superintendent indicated in an interview that he felt my letter was inappropriate--he's probably right, but appropriate behavior is what got us here. My contention is that quiet meetings in legislators' offices with frustrated school people asking for support has gotten us the current Rube Goldberg systems. I personally want the general public to be aware of these machinations and the back room legislative wheeler-dealing that gives rise to clearly immoral and self-defeating policies such as the Target Revenue System. I can't bring myself to believe that the average person wants a standardized-test-centric, blame-the-teachers-for-all-social-ills education for their kids. I am tired of educators' silence allowing the public to blindly criticize teachers and local schools for the effects of elected officials' foolish decisions. If elected officials want to play the blame game--and boy do they!--then I'm going to play it with them. There is enough blame to go around.
Question: How do you weigh the decision to speak out in this way?
I say what I believe to be true. And I'm willing to live with the consequences.
Question: Feel free to extemporize if there is something more you would like to share that I have not asked.
I have always believed that if a person has the audacity to accept the mantle of leadership, they'd better have the courage to lead. Unfortunately, many of my state elected officials play games and issue half-true sound bites rather than exhibiting true leadership. The greater good is dying on the floor while they preen and play to their fan clubs. (They use the word "constituents" because it sounds more grown up than "fan clubs.") It's all very sad to me, because historically we did education right, and now American education is writhing in hideous deformity on the experimenters' table while other countries do it right. And it's a vicious cycle: the more they mess things up, the more eagerly they then come at us with more clumsy surgeries to "fix" us.
I would like to note an incident that gave rise to my speech in Austin. Following the publication of the Alamo letter, I was invited to speak at a college here, and I spoke just before a nationally-known school reformer who is a high school principal. So he spoke about how he got miraculous results in his school, and how 100% of his students went on to four-year colleges, etc. It was all very inspirational. And then, in the middle of his speech, he felt the need to say, "I don't work at a charter school, either. I work at a public high school."
The implication was clear--he plays be the same rules as public school principals, he just gets better results. We all play the same game, he's just a better coach.
So I was troubled when I got home. I was a public school principal for several years, and I couldn't get 100% of my students to graduate, much less go to college. And I worked hard! What was he doing that I didn't do?
So I went to his school's website and I saw an interesting button on the home page. "Apply now!" it said. Weird, I thought. Nobody "applies" at my school. So I clicked on it and discovered that his "public" school is actually a "public magnet" school.
He strategically left out that important detail in his speech.
You have to apply and be accepted to get into his school; you only have to breathe and live in the district to go to my school. If you don't toe the line at his school, this golden child principal will--wait for it--send you back to the public school! He drafts his players and I play with the Bad News Bears over here, and then he sticks his chest out and tells us all what a skilled coach he is.
In short, he deliberately, calculatingly lied by omission to an unsuspecting audience.
And that's when I realized that the school reform movement is populated by self-promoting snake oil salesmen, and our elected officials are buying their tonic by the truckload. It's hard for me to watch this train wreck slowly unfold.
The narrative of the school reformer is a simple formula: kids are victims, teachers are the villains, and some administrator is the messianic hero. A dynamic personality comes into a bad school and doesn't accept mediocrity. He or she cleans up the discipline and fires all the bad teachers, confronting the wicked teachers' union along the way. The hero is this lone special individual and the administrative mechanisms the he or she put in place. It is, basically, the Heroic Ballad of the Bureaucrat. It sells books and dupes legislators. It makes people rich. It only requires a certain amount of arrogance and duplicity to pull it off. It relies on the same dangerous logic that tyrants use to justify lording over peasants and restricting their liberties. In this case, the benign dictator is a self-promoting principal or superintendent with all the answers, and the poor clueless peasants in dire need of a paternalistic leader are the teachers.
The narrative I cling to is also simple, but it doesn't make anyone rich. It would also make for a remarkably boring book. In my ballad, kids are still the victims, but bureaucracy is the enemy. Legislators too afraid to accept responsibility for the persistence of poverty, crime, poor health care, and methamphetamine addiction are the villains, eager only to place blame and not willing or able to actually fix things. And the passionate, beleaguered teachers picking up the pieces in their classrooms day after day are the heroes. My story plays out over years, with a million tiny acts of heroism, each one too small on its own to matter much--but when all of them are put together, how they speak powerfully of a life well-spent! These are the teachers I am sticking up for. And my story doesn't have a Hollywood ending. 100% of my kids don't go to a four-year college. Some of them become house framers or work for our local oilfield companies. But they grow up and raise families and go to church and serve on the school board. They are successes in every sense of the word. And there are others who aren't. Some of my students have gone to prison. Some struggle with addiction. My ballad isn't tidy.
But, the nice thing is, I don't have to leave out inconvenient details when I sing my ballad. The assumption that the school reform movement doesn't permit negative outcomes requires you to believe that they fix kids when the hard, unmentionable truth is that they cull them. And I take the culled ones and do the best I can with them. And I'm good with this arrangement because you can't spin the story when you stand before God. God sees through the omissions and knows that the reformer above runs a magnet school and that I take all comers. He can convince the politicians and his readers if he wants to. I'm good with that. I'll soldier on.
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