Archives for category: Texas
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Wesley Null and Diane Ravitch: The Heart of a School is Its Teachers: Treat Them with Love and Respect

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2019 //
19

Wesley Null, vice provost for undergraduate education at Baylor University, and I wrote this piece for the Dallas Morning News.

Texas legislators are revising the state’s school finance laws. We wanted to put before the public the importance of paying teachers well.

Some legislators are enthusiastic about what they call “outcomes-based funding,” which would send more money to affluent districts and less money to needy districts. This would be a huge mistake for obvious reasons. It’s reverse Robin Hood.

Long ago, Texas had visionaries in the legislature who understood that the future of the state relied on having a strong public education system. Current legislators think they can use charters as a substitute for adequate funding.

In 1948, those visionaries proposed a dramatic increase in state funding and equalization. Gilmer and Aiken persuaded their colleagues to raise the state share of funding to 75-80% of costs. This year, the state share will fall to 39%, shifting the burden of financing schools to localities, which favors the richest districts.

We wrote:

The heart of any school is the teacher. The only way to ensure that every Texas child receives a quality education is to place a well-educated, well-prepared teacher in every classroom. That truth will never change.

The attractiveness of teaching, however, continues to decline. The results are tragic. Labor Department statistics reveal that public educators are leaving the profession at the highest rate in 20 years. Low pay and disrespect are key factors in this alarming decline.

The Texas Legislature this session will have the job of remedying the state’s public school finance system. As historians of education, we think some background is helpful.

The last time Texas overhauled public school finance was immediately following World War II. The need for change was great. Many young Texans had been denied the opportunity to serve during the war because of their poor level of education. Such news was embarrassing to Texas leadership. 

Compulsory attendance laws existed, but they had many loopholes. Only 65 percent of school-aged children attended school. Only 40 percent of adults had a high school education. Many school buildings were dilapidated and dangerous. 

School finance was based on a census count of how many school-aged kids lived in a county regardless of whether those students attended school. Consequently, funds were commonly distributed but no education took place. Pay for teachers was embarrassingly low, leading to difficulties with recruitment and retention.

Fortunately, Texas had leaders who were driven by foresight and determination. Named in honor of legislators Claud Gilmer and A.M. Aikin, the Gilmer-Aikin Laws modernized Texas education. They revolutionized school finance, substantially increased pay for teachers, rebuilt dilapidated buildings, and redesigned teacher education and certification.

Please read it all!

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Texas

Longview, Texas: New Charter Schools Will Get More Funding than Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2019 //
5

The Longview (Texas) News-Journal doesn’t understand why Longview needs charter schools. A chain of 7 is opening.

But the answer, the newspaper says, is money.

The charters will get more money than the public schools. After all, they need more money for field trips, for international field trips. What?

The charter industry is making its move in Texas.

Will Beto stand up for public schools even though his wife operates a charter?

If he doesn’t, he can write off the votes of teachers and public school parents.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Texas

Texas: Vouchers Are Dead!

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2019 //
7

At the last legislative session in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick attended the major school choice really to show their enthusiastic support for vouchers. This week, neither of the state’s top elected officials showed up at the school choice rally.

Two years ago, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick stood on the steps of the Texas Capitol before a throng of waving yellow scarves and urged lawmakers to vote for programs that give parents state money to attend private schools.

This Wednesday, those two top Republicans may not even attend the rally for National School Choice Week, let alone have speaking roles. [They didn’t attend the rally.]

Although “school choice” supporters will still excitedly don their signature bright yellow scarves Wednesday, they will likely be fighting an uphill battle the rest of this session to get support in the Capitol.

In the months after 2017’s rally, House lawmakers unequivocally voted to reject school vouchers or similar programs that allow parents to use public money for private education. In 2018, a key election ousted some of the programs’ largest supporters, including Rep. Ron Simmons, R-Carrollton, one of the loudest cheerleaders in the House. And as state Republicans tour the state making constituents a new set of education-related promises, many have swapped the words “school choice” for “school finance.”

So far, even Abbott and Patrick have rarely brought up their former pet issue without being asked — beyond Abbott’s routine proclamation for this year’s School Choice Week. New House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, an Angleton Republican, said last week that the House would not pass legislation approving vouchers — and that he had consistently voted no on similar bills.

“I’m not willing to say, ‘Hey, this issue is dead.’ But leadership seems to be saying that, at least for this particular session,” said Monty Exter, lobbyist for the Association of Texas Professional Educators, one of the biggest opponents of those programs.

As vouchers fade off into the sunset, choice advocates are doubling down on charters. There is a major push in every city in Texas to expand the number of charters. In San Antonio, the big charter push came from Mayor Julian Castro, who pledged to put 20% of all students into charter schools and invited major chains to set up shop in his city. Castro recently announced his candidacy or the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, joining Cory Booker as an openly pro-charter candidate.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Texas, Vouchers

Tennessee: Disastrous Choice for State Commissioner of Education

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2019 //
25

Newly elected Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, picked a privatizer from the Texas Education Agency to be State Commissioner of Education. Penny Schwinn, chief deputy commissioner for academics in Texas, is Lee’s choice. She is a supporter of school choice, including vouchers, which was never passed in Texas despite multiple efforts by the hard-right there. For some reason, she is described as a “reformer.” Apparently if you want to underfund public schools by diverting money to religious and private schools, that qualifies you to be called a “reformer.” The word “reformer” has become anathema.

In Texas, rural Republicans combined with urban Democrats to stymie vouchers in the legislature, year after year.

Tennessee also has rural Republicans who will question why public money should be diverted from their community schools to religious schools.

Schwinn has promised to fix Tennessee’s longstanding testing mess. Testing in Texas has been used to label and stigmatize schools and students. Remember the phony claims of a “Texas miracle” that brought NCLB to the nation? Legislators in the Lone Star State still has a zealous faith in standardized tests.

Worse, Schwinn was controversial in Texas.

Schwinn moves from Texas amid controversy there.

A September audit found Schwinn failed to report a conflict of interest between her and a subcontractor who got a $4.4 million contract to collect special education data. As a result, the Texas state commissioner canceled the contract, according to the Dallas Morning News.

The canceled contract cost the state more than $2 million, according to the Texas Tribune.

The Dallas Morning News also reported that Schwinn told auditors that while she had a professional relationship with the subcontractor, she didn’t try to influence the contract. In the wake of audit, Texas revamped its procurement process, the Texas Tribune reported.

Schwinn will need to help secure an assessment vendor to administer the TNReady test with the state’s contract with Questar Assessment set to expire.

This is not an auspicious start.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Tennessee, Testing, Texas, Vouchers

Trustees of Houston Independent School District Protest State’s Hostile Privatization Plan

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2019 //
3

Two trustees of the Houston Independent School District strenuously object to the state’s plan to disrupt and takeover the district. It is no accident, they say, that such takeovers target predominantly black-and-brown districts. The state’s goal is to resegregate the district, while enriching charter chains that will swoop in to grab public schools.

The article was written by Board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones and Elizabeth Santos.


“Last month the Houston Independent School District Board of Trustees made a difficult decision. At risk of losing the elected positions for which we all campaigned passionately, we rejected an ultimatum created by state law: Privatize four historically black and brown schools or face a hostile state takeover of the entire district. We were elected to see to it that our public schools thrive, not facilitate their transfer to charter managers who can make money off our students.

Now the state is in a position to remove us from office because four schools have been on the “improvement required” list for at least five years.

Some of us reasonably felt that turning these four schools — Wheatley High School, Kashmere High School, Henry Middle School and Highland Heights Elementary — into charter schools would prevent even worse sanctions from the state. While that may have been true for this year, there was no guarantee that we would not face the same dilemma next year and each year after that for different campuses until our district became segregated into two different communities — those that have direct electoral control over their school leaders and those that do not. Such a system of haves and have-nots is simply unacceptable.

The charter vultures are circling.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Houston, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Resistance, Texas

Carol Burris: Texas Has Some Really Bad Ideas about How to Fix School Funding

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2019 //
28

In 2011, the Texas government cut $5.4 billion from the budget for public schools; thousands of teachers were laid off. (If you open the links, you will see that the NPR report says the budget cut was “over $4 billion” and describes the devastating impact on schools, but the actual figure was $5.4 billion in cuts.) In the seven years then, the state has restored some of that deep cut, but the enrollment in the schools has far outstripped any increases in the budget.

The state created a commission to study school finance, which recently issued its report. Its most controversial recommendation is “outcomes-based funding.” Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, reviews that report today at Valerie Strauss’s “The Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post, based on a careful review of the evidence about “outcomes-based funding.”

Burris begins:

Texas has a problem. After years of inadequately and inequitably funding its public schools, the chickens have come home to roost. Texas now ranks 46th in the country in fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress reading proficiency, dropping from its previous dismal rank of 41 in 2015. For several years there has also been discontent around the college readiness of its high school students.

The Texas decline should come as no surprise. For nearly a decade, the state has decreased its funding for schools, making an inequitable school funding system even more unequal. The rapid expansion of charter schools has further drained public schools of funds.

Texas public schools have two revenue streams — the local property tax and state funding. State funding is supposed to make the system more equitable — closing the gap between districts that are property poor and property rich. Texas itself is not a poor state and yet state funding has steadily decreased.

Last fall, UT News estimated the decline in state revenue to schools to be close to 12.6 percent per pupil between 2008 to 2017, despite a 13.7 percent increase in student enrollment.

In order to address the problem, the Texas Commission for Public School Finance was created. Last month it issued its final report, “Funding for Impact: Funding for Students Who Need it the Most.” As its title notes, the commission concluded that school funding should be redesigned to provide “equitable funding for students who need it the most.” This is critical in a state where nearly 40 percent of all households are supported by single moms living in poverty.

There are some good things in the report. The commission acknowledged that poverty matters and preschool should be expanded. It also proposed the usual ineffective and harmful ideas like evaluating teachers by test scores and merit pay.

But perhaps the most startling feature of the report is its recommendation to use outcomes-based funding as a critical component of the school funding system. Outcomes-based education funding is highly controversial. It is ineffective and can make inequities worse. And this Texas version, which is especially bad, will result in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer with funding going to students who need it the least, not the most.

What is outcomes-based funding in education?

Outcomes-based funding, also known as performance-based funding, is based on the belief that if schools are paid for performance, better outcomes will result. It carries with it the unspoken assumption that somehow teachers and principals are “slackers” and have far more control of how students perform on tests than they are willing to admit. The foremost Florida legislative advocate of performance funding was described as believing this: “[Y]ou could get performance altered by money. If you put a pot of money out there, people would change their behavior in order to chase that money.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Texas

Texas: Watch Out for Governor Abbott’s Bait and Switch of Billions from Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2019 //
8

Chris Tackett of Fort Worth has posted a timely warning about Governor Greg Abbott’s bait and switch, which steals billions from public schools.

He writes:

$30 Billion over 10 years. Do I have your attention? Good, now keep reading.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott put forth a Property Tax Policy on January 16th, 2018, that will get a lot of attention in the new 86th Legislative session. You can read an article about it here, or you can read the full policy proposal here. The element I’m going to focus on is the cap on property tax revenue growth.

Abbott wants to limit the revenue that a city, county or school district can collect from property taxes to an increase of 2.5% year-over-year. This isn’t a cap on what you, the individual, might be assessed or have to pay (which is how Governor Abbott seems to be pitching things on Twitter)…

I’ll dive into the details if you want to keep reading, but here is key element. If the Governor’s 2.5% Tax Revenue cap was in place for the past 10 years, the additional dollars that the state would have had to make up, just to keep our school districts even (cities and counties would have their own costs not included here), would have been approximately $30 Billion. Yeah, that’s right. $30 Billion.
How did I come up with that really big number? You have to look year by year at every district, as the cap applies on a district by district basis. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has data from the Texas Comptroller that details the property value assigned for school funding as well as the M&O rate (maintenance and operations, or what pays for the things inside the school, rather than the building itself)…

Texas on the whole is growing. This is generally a good thing, much better than the alternative that other states are facing. But when Texas grows, supply and demand says that property gets more expensive. This drives up valuations. Many people chose cities and districts based on the services available to themselves and their families, which creates more demand and again drives up valuations. Do we really want to jeopardize our schools and our communities by imposing a state level of control, which will impact the level of services that those who reside in these communities are asking for?
Many in the legislature and our governor talk about “local control”, but they seemingly don’t want to actually give communities and school districts the ability to set their own tax rates and create an environment for continued growth all across our state. This cap will potentially cripple our school districts, as well as our cities and counties. Why would we do that to ourselves?

Why would Governor Abbott and the Legislature want to steal money from the state’s children? That’s bad for them and bad for Texas?

Categories Funding, Texas

Our Ally, Charles Foster Johnson, Was Named “Baptist of the Year”

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2018 //
17

Charles Foster Johnson, one of our best allies in the fight against vouchers and for adequate funding for public schools, was named “Baptist of the Year.”

Congratulations,Charlie!

Charles organized Pastors for Texas Kids to advocate for children in public schools and for separation of church and state. He has helped to organize similar groups in other states because he has a deep commitment to the common good.

EthicsDaily.com’s board of directors is pleased to announce that Charles Foster Johnson is the 2018 Baptist of the Year.

Johnson, a pastor who has become a tireless advocate for public education, is the executive director of Pastors for Texas Children.

The organization, founded by Johnson in 2013, is a statewide ecumenical group mobilizing the faith community for public education support and advocacy.

In Texas, Kentucky, Arizona, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma and other states, adequately funding public education has become a significant political – and campaigning – issue.

Johnson and his supporters deserve much credit for mobilizing Christians to support and advocate for public education.

Their efforts paid off with both Democratic and Republican officeholders recommitting themselves to making public education funding a top priority in upcoming legislative sessions.

“With his deep, infectious voice and his black cowboy boots, he never meets a stranger and never backs down from a challenge,” said Sharon Felton, minister to youth and students at Faith Baptist Church in Georgetown, Kentucky, and the head of Pastors for Kentucky Children. “But what makes Charlie one of my favorite Baptists is his gentle and kind heart.”

Felton says Johnson’s personality is “larger than life,” and anyone who knows him will agree.

In an interview with EthicsDaily early this year, Johnson reminded Baptists about the importance of educating all children for the common good.

“People of faith embrace public education as a provision of God’s common good,” he said, “as a basic, core, fundamental, social justice expression in society.”

“When Oklahoma pastors noticed their local public schools falling apart due to a severe lack of funding, we turned to our neighbors to the south in Texas for guidance and help,” said Pastors for Oklahoma Kids Executive Director Clark Frailey. “Charles Johnson answered the call and spoke at what would ultimately become our first organizing meeting.”

Johnson worked with the leaders of Pastors for Oklahoma Kids when thousands of Oklahoma teachers walked out of the classroom to protest a decade-long trend of defunding public education.

Their efforts gave great support to teachers and helped frame the conversation for people of faith.

Johnson, also the founder and co-pastor of Bread, a faith community in Fort Worth, Texas, knows a thing or two about organizing.

He brought a stellar career of pastoring churches in Texas, Mississippi and Kentucky with him to his current advocacy work.

Categories Education Reform, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

Houston: Chaos as Parents Fight County Treasurer’s Call for a State Takeover of District

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2018 //
7

Houston parents heckled the County Treasurer, Orlando Sanchez, as he tried to hold a press conference where he called for the state to take over the district. One parent even dumped a bottle of water on his head.

Why he thinks the Texas State Education Department is qualified to run the public schools of Houston is a mystery.

Only a few years ago, Houston won the Broad Prize as the most improved school district in the nation. Actually, Houston won it twice, in 2002 and 2013, probably because it pleased Eli Broad by opening many charter schools. Shows you the value of the Broad Prize. About the same as Broad superintendents.

“I’m calling on the governor, and imploring our governor and the Texas Education Agency to step in and take over HISD,“ said Sanchez.

“HISD has had ample opportunity to provide a quality education for the children and the taxpayers and they have failed,” added Sanchez.

That was the message that took almost two hours to deliver. As soon as Sanchez tried to speak, he was drowned out by more than a dozen protesters chanting, “Go away TEA!,” “Whose house? Our house!,” and “Shame!”

“We fight and fight and fight because every child deserves an education,” said Kandice Webber, one of the protesting parents. “They do not deserve what Orlando Sanchez is trying to do two communities that he has never even spoken to.”

The situation quickly escalated when someone in the crowd dumped a bottle of water over Sanchez’s head. The crowd then claimed that a member of Sanchez’s staff had assaulted them.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Houston, Privatization, Texas

Texas: Superintendent Says, “We Need to Fund Our Public Schools. Stop Diverting Money to Charters!”

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2018 //
11

For some reason, Texas is now being besieged by charter operators, who see good pickings there and who want to act fast before another blue wave washes away the supporters of school choice, as the November blue wave washed away supporters of vouchers. The Texas legislature cut deeply into school funding after the 2008 recession and never restored what it cut. The legislature just doesn’t seem to care about funding public school, only charter and (someday) vouchers, even though 90% of the state’s children are in public schools. Someone should ask the Legislature about what they have in mind for the generation now in school. Do they want them to be productive citizens? Do they want them to be creators, innovators, doctors, scientists, artists, and engineers? Or do they expect those millions of children to be unskilled laborers?

Lorena Garcia is a superintendent in a small district in the Rio Grande Valley. She tells it like it is. She has the courage to stand up to the charter billionaires.

Lorena Garcia, assistant superintendent for human resources and support services at Mission CISD, sparked a lively debate over the level of support state lawmakers are providing charter schools.

Garcia brought up the subject of charters in a Q&A about public school finance at a luncheon held at the Cimarron Club in Mission.

“There does not seem to be much support for public education by the legislature. In addition to that there is a lot of talk about support for vouchers and private schools,” Garcia said, after hearing a presentation on public school finance.

“The accountability that these charter entities have is a lot lower than the high standards that public schools have to achieve. So, that is going to cut into that pie of funding that is available to public schools.”

Chandra Kring Villanueva, program director for economic opportunity at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, was one of the speakers at the luncheon. She welcomed Garcia’s comments.

“Charter schools and how they are funded is a huge concern for us because it really is inefficient to be running two parallel education systems,” Villanueva said.

“One of the things that we are seeing is that the growth in recaptured funding is almost the exact amount as we are spending for the charter system. So, a lot of us education advocates are really monitoring how the things are trending together. Recapture and charter are tied in a lot of different ways.”

Recaptured money is funding that a public school returns to the State of Texas. Those that have to do this, as part of the so-called Robin Hood equalized funding system, are deemed property-rich.

“Recapture is based on your wealth per student. So, if you are losing students to a charter school, it makes your wealth per student grow. That is one of the only reasons why Houston ISD fell into recapture. Because of their extremely high charter population. If those charter students were actually enrolled in Houston ISD, they would have gotten twice as much money from the state as their recapture payment was,” Villanueva said.

“So, there is a lot of concern that the legislature is basically using recapture to fuel the growth of charter schools without having to put any more dollars into it. Which in essence means our property tax dollars are going to these charter schools.”

Villanueva made the case that, in essence, local property tax dollars are going to charter schools. However, she said, local taxpayers are unable to vote for a charter’s board of directors, have no say on where they are located, nor when and where they build their campuses.

“So, there are some huge concerns around how charters are funded and the impact on schools.”

Villanueva claimed that when charters are taken out of the equation, the level of state funding for public education drops from 38 percent to 32 percent, noting that charter schools are 100 percent state-funded.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Texas
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »