In my list of categories on this blog, the words “Texas” and “testing” are side-by-side. One of the biggest stories in the nation today is how ordinary folks–moms, dads, and students–in Texas are slaying the monster that ate their education.
Over the past 20-30 years, Texas became drunk on testing. The lobbyists for Pearson–headed by Sandy Kress, the architect of NCLB–made sure that Pearson won a five-year contract for nearly $500 million in 2011 at the same time that the legislature striped away $5.4 Billion from the public schools.
After I wrote a post about the last minute flurry of bills about vouchers and charters and online charters in this legislative session (which ends May 26), I received this informative comment about the state of education in Texas:
“Texas public schools will survive. Sen. Patrick is doing some good things by shepherding HB5 through the Senate. He learned from his mistakes in past sessions when he championed the expansion of testing. I should let him use my time machine to see what a confusing and hopeless mess expanding charters and vouchers will be leading to graft and corruption.
There’s lots of bills that need help! HB5, HB2836, HB866 primarily. Not only will HB5 reduce standardized testing, but it will put some controls in place such limiting benchmark testing by districts and removing testing company lobbyists from state education committees and other policy making bodies. Sandy Kress and others were allowed to sit on various committees while being paid by Pearson. The others will strip testing in lower grades as HB5 only deals with the 15+ End-of-Course exams in High School which my daughter is taking now along side her AP exams.
Thanks to other groups as well, one of which is in the chambers tweeting updates including photos-Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessments. They are active on facebook and send out regular and timely email calls to action. They’ve also been out barnstorming around the state for nearly a year having just spoken at Eanes ISD to parents and other interested members of the community.
The other group is Houston’s Community Voices for Public Education that stays in touch with Houston’s local communities producing and holding meetings in multiple languages. CVPE members have packed Houston Independent School District Board meetings and motivated students, teachers, parents and professors to testify about the damage that standardized testing does to those that need a real education most. Besides the State required tests, HISD has been doing benchmark testing for years adding to the testing mania. At some campuses benchmarks are given on a 2-3 week cycle. CVPE just last week spoke again before the Board requesting limits on this and pushing for HISD to track and report the time and expenses related to benchmarking. This is a district that slashed nearly 1,000 staff two years ago and then adopted a TNTP inspired teacher appraisal tool within months that required way more of everyone left.
Texans are realizing that we’ve been doing the accountability thing the longest, (spending 90 million a year on testing alone!) and have little to show for it. The spending inequity is stark in Texas and to think of all the services and opportunities that we could have provided to kids that went to Pearson’s bottom line is heartbreaking.
The first school I worked at in Houston was on the East Side and already by the late 1990’s the band was gone. The school paper eliminated. The auto tech space was being converted into classrooms for the extra math and reading teachers and tutors that were on their way. I scratched my head thinking that a healthy journalism program would be great way to inspire kids to write. Administration decided that workbooks were the way to go. Wealthier schools and districts did not do this as parents would not have stood for it. Those schools and districts are still doing fine. In suburban Dallas, Allen High School is about to break ground on a 60 million dollar football stadium. Man, what I could have done with a piece of Pearson’s 90 million or Allen’s 60 million.
Make those calls to your representatives and then to Governor Perry and Lt. Governor Dewhearst. They need to hear from real Texans, not Bloomberg, Broad, Gates and Waltons.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on thefreshmanexperience and commented:
Look at the money being spent…
Texas has been totally insane with their crazy policies and textbooks. Go see the You Tubes on their person who chooses their textbooks. Even the testing companies think they are crazy but there is too much money there. I was told this in private by one of their people. Good to see blowback from the public there. Keep it up.
The fact that the number of high school STAAR tests may be reduced to 5 from 15 is an enormous victory for anti-testing activists. Hopefully, Perry won’t veto this bill.
There is also some attempt to reduce the tests in the elementary and middle school grades.
One STAAR test per grade is too many. High stakes testing needs to be completely eliminated. STAAR tests are as bizarre in their content as they are in their number. Many examples of ridiculous, confusing, and often too difficult for the grade level. They also deter real learning.
Sample questions that Pearson has “allowed” us to see may be found at:
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/released-tests/
While Texans are grateful that the number of abusive tests may be reduced, it appears to me that there is a desperate attempt on the part of legislators to keep the money flow going to Pearson.
The same thing is happening in Seattle where the MAP tests have been eliminated for high school – because of massive protests – but will still be given to K-8 because “the tests are not very effective for high school students,”
I wouldn’t give Sen. Dan Patrick any praise. He sponsored in one way or another every one of the privatization bills that was introduced this session: parent-trigger, Achievement District (a la Louisiana’s Recovery District), Families First Schools, Home Rule, Taxpayer Savings Grants, Scholarship Opportunities, online course expansion, charter expansion, etc. He has had several press conferences with extremist organizations to support those bills, and he has pushed for them hard. We have seen for a couple of weeks now a barrage of radio and tv ads pushing the parent-trigger bill (SB 1263) and the Achievement District bill (SB 1718), and these ads have been paid for by a group called Texans Deserve Great Schools. They are funded by Americans for Prosperity (Koch) and are aligned with former senator Florence Shapiro, Rod Paige, Jeb Bush and his foundation, and some wealthy conservative foundations.
He also cut deals with two education lobbies, we are told. He would allow HB 5 to advance IF they would not oppose his charter expansion bill and his online course bill (at a minimum). And that is what has happened. Typical political horse trading and never mind what is good for kids! Frankly, HB 5 had so much momentum behind it anyway from years and years of assessment abuse that it would be political suicide to oppose it. It got only two NO votes in the House, and it passed the Senate without dissent.
Here is another rumor worth watching. The word is that Gov. Perry will appoint a Blue Ribbon Commission after the legislative session ends and charge it to report before he calls a Special Session of the legislature to respond to the court orders on school finance. That Commission will be charged to design a system that would operate much less expensively (we rank 49th in the nation on per-student expenditures) than the one we have for 5 million children.
And then we will see an even more radical and universal plan for privatization. Perry, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the likes of Dan Patrick have been planning this for years! We are in for the fight of our lives!
There is no doubt that the austerity budgets that Texas has adopted In recent years were intentionally designed to create a crisis–and not just for education. Evil forces are also at work to privatize drinking water so that we will have to pay big bucks to private companies. Bill Hammond from the Texas Association of Business had a column in Texas’s Sunday papers calling for a public-private partnership to build badly needed roads. In other words, toll roads paid for by taxpayers and then given to private companies to profit from. Perry has opposed Medicaid expansion in Texas because it isn’t market driven. And the dust-up between Perry’s appointed regents for UT? That is about his desire to privatize Texas universities. He wants to eliminate the universities’ research agendas and to teach all courses online, thus eliminating the cost of professors’ salaries.
Perry’s minions have done everything they can to maintain the idea that we lack money, when we don’t. He is demanding tax cuts that will further harm schools. He is refusing to use the Rainy Day Fund. He is playing tricks to lower the spending cap. And he is playing the interests of water and health and transportation and education against each other, deflecting the blame from him.
Education is under siege throughout the land, but we must also be aware that so are ALL government services. After all, there is money to be made by taxing the middle class to death and transferring that wealth upward. And there is money to be made by privatizing services, with the new owners contributing mightily to campaign coffers. A billionaire never has quite enough money, you see, and certainly not what he deserves. Look around!
How do we stop it? The ONLY way is through democratic action. We have to organize the grassroots around the issues that people care about. We have to register to vote. We have to recruit decent candidates. And then we all have to go vote! And our struggle is ongoing. We can’t be done with political action after an electoral win. As Melissa Harris-Perry says, “the struggle continues.”. The money is on the side of the privatizers. We must use people power!
Well said, and Amen!
Insofar as your earlier post, Diane, on Paul Vallas perhaps doing a Ravitch (my descriptor, as you are the first, most admirable originator!) 180, & a reader asked you to think of someone else and your reply, “I’m thinking…I’m thinking…” One such person could be Sen. Patrick. There are most likely other Texas legislators/school board members doing the Ravitch 180 as well, from the information posted on this blog. Should this be the case, hopefully the other states will have their eyes on Texas, and follow accordingly. (Meant to be clever–reverse of “the eyes of Texas are upon you!”)
Ooops! Just read balesley’s comment.
>Man, what I could have done with a piece of Pearson’s 90 million or Allen’s 60 million.>
Do the kids have paper and pencils to do their work? Mine frequently do not. I am expected to fill that gap.
Since the rest of you folks followed us into the accountability abyss, I hope you start to follow us out. It seems there are some hopeful signs. Weingarten and others’ call for a Common Core moratorium seems similar for similar reasons.
Before STAAR rolled out in 2011-2012, the Texas Education Agency issued message after message about how it was going to be much harder than any previous exam. We were told that the highest level under the older test would be barely passing under STAAR. There would be a phase in period and every year the cut scores would be elevated. No materials or training of any sort were provided from the TEA or Pearson. There were many meetings at the state, district and campus level that said the same thing, “STAAR is going to be much harder. We have no idea what the test looks like and cannot provide samples. We have no money and nothing to provide you with any help of any kind. We expect great results. Good luck.” Seems lots of Common Core states have been sending the same message.
In Texas, the publishers and profiteers came out of the wood work with “proven” workbooks and programs that promised to get kids ready to “Reach for the STAAR!” before the first test was given. Even though budgets had been slashed, some panicked schools found money for those programs and consultants. Most didn’t have the funds. I’ve been seeing Common Core prep ads all over the education landscape for a while now.
Schools in Houston held parent meetings trying to use TEA materials to explain the new system, but it seemed to create more confusion and concern. Texas parents got so angry at STAAR’s 15% rule that then Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott announced a one year suspension for 2011-2012. Under continued community pressure his replacement Michael Williams, a lawyer with NO teaching experience, also announced a suspension last Fall for this academic year. STAAR’s 15% rule was that the subject End-of-Course rule would count for 15% of the entire year’s grade. When parents started receiving their child’s first STAAR era report cards for Fall 2011 and saw “No Credit” for the first time even though their child passed, they were alarmed. Imagine seeing an A or a B and then no credit!
When the results came out early last summer, they were predictable in many ways. Wealthier districts, schools and kids did fine. Others not so much. Dr. Jeffrey Lash. a Geography professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, has generated a series of maps that show World Geography STAAR results from the Houston Independent School District level to the Houston Metro Area to all of Texas. It’s worth a look, but it will confirm what you already suspect. The highest poverty parts of Texas like the Rio Grande Valley did worse than wealthier ones. The higher income parts of the Houston Metro area like Clear Lake, home of the Johnson Space Center, did better than others. And in HISD, the West and near Southwest side of Houston which includes areas such as Bellaire, West University, River Oaks and Southside Place did well. Not surprisingly, this part of town is where the most desirable open enrollment high schools are:Westside, Lamar and Bellaire. It’s also home to HISD’s most select Magnet and Charter High Schools:Carnegie Vanguard, HSPVA, DeBakey and Challenge Early College. Want to guess where the really expensive private schools are?
http://jeffreylash.com/
I hope Common Core parents will ask the same questions and demand changes like we are in Texas. My daughters think the tests are a joke and don’t inspire them at all. Their friends think the same and all find them tortuous for varying reasons. Before he resigned, Robert Scott famously quipped that with STAAR, the tail was wagging the dog. It’s time to snip it off.
Call your representatives today.
To see how many kids react to an overemphasis on testing, watch Dropout Nation. PBS Frontline’s Dropout Nation series featured HISD and its Apollo Program in its September broadcast. While there are some good things about Apollo-individulized tutors, more support staff, etc., it’s data driven focus contains the seed of its own destruction. Talking about tests all the time, doing test prep all the time, making kids take tests that they are not relevant to them and that they are not prepared for is wrong.
Watching these kids tell their stories is painful. Watching what some staff are willing to do help kids is heroic. Seeing testing be a focus is exasperating. I was not surprised by the emotional and physical reactions of these kids as staff kept trying to get them and keep them in school. The kids keep saying that the learning is irrelevant. They keep saying that school is boring. They keep saying that no one understands them and their plight. Telling them, “No Excuses!” is disrespectful. Children are not responsible for the circumstances that they are born in and a pat phrase is offensive.
At one point a kid shows up after being gone for days and the staff try to get him to take an SAT test that is about to start.
The Apollo program is in its 3rd year and only the featured high school, Sharpstown, has shown slight improvement. Much of those gains may be to student attrition. Teacher attrition has been high as well. Perhaps that is why Frontline did not show one classroom teacher in the whole episode.
Superintendent Dr. Grier has asked for 17 million more from the Board. If only there were a way to make sure that money went to anything but testing. Social workers, psychologists, teachers, etc. but not a dime for testing.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dropout-nation/
Dan Patrick does what it takes to get re-elected. He was on the school accountability band wagon when it was popular with his Tea Party campaign backers, but when one of his key backers became vocal about his (actually his wife’s) opposition to over testing students in Texas so did Patrick. He is still on the Charter School band wagon because his Tea Party constituents are all for privatizing education. Big Money talks when it comes to politics in Texas.
Sen. Patrick flexed his political muscles today. Everyone needs to know that he has placed SB 23 on the Senate Intent Calendar for a vote tomorrow. This is one of the worst of the voucher bills which he introduced. If you live in Texas, please tell your senator to oppose this bill!
Also, his deal-making paid off on SB 2, his big charter expansion bill. The House passed it today. We need to kill it tomorrow on third reading or just hope the clock runs down before it can become law. If you live in Texas, please tell your House member to vote NO on this bill.
I have no idea what other bad news we are going to hear tonight and tomorrow.
This is disgusting!
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