Jason Stanford is a political journalist in Texas who keeps
a close watch on the nexus between money, politics, and education.
He is especially interested in how lobbyists shape decisions about
where the education money should be spent. In this post,
he sees the usual lobbyists pressing to make more money for their
clients: Forcing schools to buy a graphing calculator for
every single 8th grader in Texas would make Texas Instrument
probably in excess of $1 million at a time the state is failing to
increasing funding to keep up with population growth. And you can
only use a TI graphing calculator to do one thing; schools can use
tablet computers for innumerable purposes. In a state that prides
itself on being miserly with the public purse, you’d think this
would be a no-brainer. Enter Sandy
Kress, a lobbyist for
Pearson (the testing company), for Amplify (Robert
Murdoch’s pre-K tablet company), and, as it turns out,
for Texas
Instruments as well. And initially, Texas Education
Agency commissioner Michael Williams sided with Texas Instruments,
saying that using a tablet could help students cheat on tests.
Using the calculators would prevent that, he claimed. This might be
true if the kids have never heard of YouTube where one can find
numerous tutorials on how to use TI graphing calculators to cheat
on tests… Read more to see what happened.
Win some, lose some.
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The $100 TI84, with its miserly little monochrome screen is the standard graphing calculator in use. To force its use, just for the sake of exams, deprives kids the learning opportunities that a real display would provide.
This just further demonstrates the dominance of testing over learning.
Wait, now it’s a no-brainer that schools *should* be buying tablets? I can’t keep this stuff straight.
Yes, FLERP, this is a sucker punch. Schools don’t need to buy ANY tech items “for the test”.
There is no choice needed between a tablet for every eighth grader or an iPad for every eighth grader, and if there were, I’d go for Chromebook.
We keep buying buggy apps for the damned iPads, the screens are crowded with stuff that doesn’t work. A two line TI 30X scientific calculator would be great for my tenth graders, please. I keep my classroom set replenished at my own expense, at $14 each from staples.
My own district is a serial adopter of every corporate tech initiative that comes along, and DOES NOT TEACH any kind of coding. Our “tech” department is limited to producing devotional exercises honoring last generation’s sacred tech “entrepreneurs”, and promoting consumer electronics. We’ve undergone Pearson flipped training, but they’ll be taking the PARCC pilot with pencils in my building. For this reason, we have no storage space left for all the awards that have been heaped on our fast-tracked administrators.
I should clarify. If they HAVE to provide graphing capability, a tablet is better than a TI84. Do they need either? In this math teacher’s opinion, not in the general math classes.
Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams was the former Railroad Commissioner. He has NO expertise in EDUCATION, and he apparently doesn’t like kids, or he would have put a stop to the punitive testing obsession in Texas that is causing horrific psychological damage to children.
Commissioner Williams like to use the excuse that the testing mandate is coming from federal. That is a crock. He remains silent and does nothing while knowing full well that the school districts like Austin ISD are doing non stop teach to the test, with four hour practice STAAR test every week in elementary grades 3 – 5. These kids also have NO recess since their “15 minute” daily recess has been replaced with more boring test prep. They no longer teach Social Studies since that was replaced with test prep.
The Texas schools are “Racing to Insanity”!
This new expose by Jason Stanford is just one more example of how the taxpayers and the kids of Texas are getting RAILROADED BY THE FORMER RAILROAD COMMISSIONER.
When the BATS present their charge of “Violation of Children’s Human Rights” to UNICEF by Obama, Gates, and Duncan, I hope they add Commissioner Williams name to the list.