The Texas legislature is starting a new session and once again Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (former rightwing talk show host) will lead a fight for vouchers.
Once again, legislators from rural and urban districts–Republicans and Democrats–will combine to defend their community’s public schools. This year, the state launched the failed policy of giving every school a single letter grade, and now educators realize that these measures are invalid and are setting them up for privatization.
Imagine if your child came home from school with a report card and it contained only a single letter grade. As a parent, you would be furious. No child is only one dimension; no child can be reduced to an or B or C or D or F. How much more absurd it is to attach a single letter grade to a complex institution like a school, staffed by many people, and subject to decisions made by the superintendent, the state education department, and the legislature.
Educators in North Texas see that the letter grades stigmatize their schools, damage their communities, and are intended to create demand for vouchers. There is zero validity, zero research, zero evidence for letter grades for schools.
“With the new legislative session starting Tuesday, educators from 60 North Texas districts united Monday to fight school vouchers and a new statewide grading system they say serves only to vilify public schools.
Frustration among school leaders has been mounting since provisional A-F grades were released Friday.
On Monday, area superintendents and trustees gathered in Garland to tell lawmakers that the grading system is flawed and that they are worried it is just a gimmick to get support for school vouchers or similar options.
“Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said school choice, which could include voucher-like tax credits or similar options, is among his top priorities for this session so families have the ability to leave failing schools.
But the area’s school leaders said such efforts would only siphon money from public schools and hurt children most in need because they don’t have the transportation and other means to take advantage of such options. Only affluent families, many of whom aren’t in public schools now, would benefit, they said.
“This is subsidies for the rich. … A equals affluent. F equals free and reduced,” Terrell ISD Superintendent Micheal French said, referring to the likelihood of poor students remaining in struggling schools that would be labeled failures.
“The provisional grades released last week were a first look at the state’s new school accountability system that takes effect in 2018. Lawmakers required the Texas Education Agency to release a sneak peek of how schools would have scored, just before they returned to Austin for the legislative session.
“That timing only reinforced educators’ fears that the new A-F system is politically motivated.
“Monday’s group represented 60 of the 80 districts in the TEA’s Region X, which includes Collin, Dallas, Ellis, Kaufman and Rockwall among its 10 counties. Combined, the districts represent 15.5 percent of Texas’ public school students.”
Pastors for Texas Children–an extraordinary group of religious leaders from across the state–is in the thick of the fight on behalf of public schools, fighting vouchers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“…There is zero validity, zero research, zero evidence for letter grades for schools.”
Again and again, it seems, the truth is that the truth doesn’t matter, and that credible research and experience count for little in the face of well funded agendas.
I take hope in the conviction of Martin Luther King that: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’
We’re just at a point in this arc where justice is particularly obscured.
When the whole of the school reform show has become nothing but obscuring smoke screens which hide the larger hoax, very few actions from teachers, students, school staff, parents and communities will have any effect on the long-term outcome: “these measures…are setting them up for privatization.”
These educators should be joined by those in the rest of the state as well as parents, community and social justice groups. As Jonathan has stated, there is zero evidence that letter grades or vouchers have any value. There is also evidence that these policies are harmful to public schools.http://www.nea.org/home/16970.htm
As day follows night, the enablers and enforcers of corporate education reform in Texas will indignantly sputter in frustration at their opposition—
“Well, if you have criticisms, why don’t you just tell us how to improve and fix it?”
It’s the same old same old. For example, the purveyors of standardized tests, especially the high-stakes varieties, have promised now for decade after decade after decade ad nauseam that all that’s needed is a tweak here and a little more time there and all will be well. Amend ‘em, don’t end ‘em!
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Never happened. Never happens. Never will happen. And whatever theoretical benefits standardized testing may have in the minds of its makers and proponents, in practice it is not only misused and abused, not only a substitute for driving genuine teaching and learning, but one of the most pernicious obstacles to a “better education for all.”
I don’t care about the political coloration of those legislators defending public schools against this form of stack ranking that will guarantee few winners and many many losers. I hope they take to heart what a genuine American hero once said:
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” [Frederick Douglass]
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“Well, if you have criticisms, why don’t you just tell us how to improve and fix it?”
I address that bit of adminimal non-wisdom in the afterword to my forthcoming book:
Afterword
‘If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.’ Emile Zola
• Correctly identify malpractices that hinder the teaching and learning process and that cause harm to or do injustice to students. (see just a few identified above).
• Immediately reject those malpractices, cease doing them as soon as is practically possible.
• Maintain a “fidelity to truth” attitude in identifying those malpractices and instituting new practices.
• Focus on inputs and resources. Are they adequate to provide that all children have access to a learning environment in which they can learn to “savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
• Involve all, interested community members, parents, students, teachers, aides, other support personnel, administrators and the school board in revising and formulating new policies and practices so, paraphrasing the voice from the movie “Field of Dreams”:
IF WE PROVIDE IT, THEY WILL COME!
It being the proper resources implemented with a fidelity to truth attitude.
They being results in line with the fundamental purpose(s) of public education–“to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
Let us remember that Betsy DeVos’ staff, when pressured to come up with ANY accountability policy she’s promoted for charters/ vouchers [when not busy lobbying against all such accountability policies], promptly popped up w/ “A-F grading systems for schools!! [Yay!] Sadly, a significant proportion of of MI charters have landed in D/F territory…
bethree, she learned about the A-F grading system from Jeb Bush.