On May 27, the legislature ends its session. Supporters of public education are keeping fingers crossed that no damaging measures pass in the next two weeks.
The head of the Senate Committee on Education, Dan Patrick, loves vouchers and most anything except public schools. The head of the House Committee on Public Education, Jimmie Don Aycock, is a Republican who believes in public schools.
Meanwhile various lobbying groups are fending off or advancing their own views.
Raise Your Hand Texas generally supports public schools and is opposed to vouchers.
Texans for Education Reform is strong for online charters and charters in general.
Texas parents and teachers are fortunate to have a wealthy Texan who supports public schools, name of Charles Butt.
Mr. Butt made his fortune in the grocery business and he has a keen sense of civic duty.
The sides are not clear-cut. Mike Feinberg of KIPP is a member of the board of Raise Your Hand Texas, which is anti-voucher.
Texans for Education Reform mouths the usual deform platitudes about how they are “for” something (privatization) and their opponents are just against.
Meanwhile, parents are eager to see the legislature restore some of the $5.4 billion they cut from the public schools two years ago–before they discovered the state had a surplus.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
At least the opposition has some financing by Butts to assist them in the fight and he, as they said, has a civic responsibility. That is what it is all about, or supposed to be all about anyway.
You can’t spell Texas without H-E-B! Glad to hear our local grocery scion is a supporter of public education.
I saw a Texans for Education Reform tv spot during network primetime programming a few days ago in the Austin tv market, they’re clearly very well-funded and they’re playing to win. These are critical (and scary) times.
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.
Until Texas focuses on our public schools and returns to a effort centered on constant improvement, our children are loosing priceless time. Charter schools are a costly distraction from community based public K-8 schools that are repeatedly shown as the best alternatives in national research. (http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2012/02/separate-middle-schools-vs-k-8.html) Middle schools waste time and destroy students according to both experience and research.
“. . . a effort centered on constant improvement.” God, I despise that concept brought into public education discourse from the for profit business sector. No, I don’t look to “constantly improve”. I have what I believe are tried and true strategies for the teaching and learning in my subject area based on twenty years of experience. Do I adjust what I do on a hourly, daily, yearly basis? Of course and I do look at new ideas, stategies, etc. . . but unless I am really conviced that they will be good for the students I don’t implement them. But then again, I’m just a LIFO just waiting for retirement type of teacher.
Just went (had to due to administrator pressure) to a conference last week to be professionally developed so that I can be constantly improving. What a joke. The basis of the conference was teach less vocabulary and don’t teach the grammar, except for the singular forms of conjugations. Students will just “naturally” learn it. Right! Talk about dumbing down the teaching and learning process.
TAMSA and RYHT have been instrumental in making change happen in Texas. They have literally turned the discussion 180 degrees. What sets them apart from the various groups–including local groups such as CVPE is the bipartisan and business/parent component to the membership. The shift in opinion of GOP elected officials was a result of the grassroots change at the Republican primary electorate level.
Having spent a year inside the voucher schools of Milwaukee, I found they are wonderful people but did nothing different and are failing in the same way traditional public is forced to fail. Let teachers teach and let children really learn.
Children will blossom at different times and shouldn’t be put further behind if they are behind. Being behind is just nature of human growth and development. Take kids from where they are and they will succeed. Push them out before they blossom and WE make them fail.
And then teach them what is real. Don’t force them to memorize what they can get with a search engine in 10 seconds.
Business say their young people arrive in the workforce without the ability to think critically. DUH! We don’t allow critical thinking when we teach to the test.
“And then teach them what is real. Don’t force them to memorize what they can get with a search engine in 10 seconds.”
Be careful with those kind of statements! You will have people thinking kids don’t have to learn their multiplication tables because they can just google the answer in 10 seconds or less…… It is hard to think critically in Algebra when you never memorized the foundation number facts necessary for solving problems. I see a huge decrease in my students’ ability to remember multi-step processes necessary in upper level mathematics. I cannot help but wonder if the increasing reliance on using search engines for even basic tasks is creating a greater inability to process, analyze and retain information among our children. Are we literally losing our ability to think because we are no longer exercising the brain in certain ways? I hear daily, “Why do I need to learn that when I can just look it up?” Yup, I guess you can. It still seems odd though, that a majority of my Algebra 2 students do not know the answer to a single-digit multiplication problem without consulting a search engine.