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Texas: The State Obsessed with Testing

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2016 //
26

The Texas legislature has a strange obsession. Its members think that the best and only way to improve education is to require standardized tests and to make them harder every few years. Those tests can never be too hard. A few years back, the legislature decided that all students had to pass 15 tests to graduate, and parents across the state rebelled, forcing the test-lovers to scale it back to five tests to graduate. But they still believe that harder tests=better schools.

The legislators of Texas should take the Great Testing Challenge: Take the tests you mandate and publish your scores. Any legislator who can’t pass the eighth grade math test should resign. How many do you think would dare to take the tests?

 

This year, for the first time, ETS wrote the tests, and surprise!, there were computer glitches. Open the link and you will see a picture of little children at an elementary school in Abilene cheering the bigger children who were on their way to take the tests that would determine their worth and put a number on it.

 

Veteran teacher Jennifer Rumsey writes here about the state’s mandates and how they affect her and her students.

 

She writes:

 

 

“It’s that time again. Time for STAAR testing in Texas. STAAR is the legislatively mandated series of high-stakes tests for public school children in Texas, and it is the most recent and most difficult of several testing program iterations that began in the 1980’s.

 

“I’ve seen them all. I have been a Texas public school teacher since 1999. I have experienced TAAS, TAAS prep, TAAS workbooks, TAAS-aligned textbooks, TAAS packets, and even a TAAS pep rally.

 

“Once students’ statewide overall TAAS scores became pretty high, the legislature made the costly move (paid to Pearson) to TAKS. The public schools adjusted: we adopted TAKS-aligned textbooks (published by Pearson), bought TAKS workbooks, held TAKS bootcamps and tutorials.

 

“And then came STAAR, or State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, which is the most ambitious testing program yet. The Texas legislature decided to gut public education funding that year, 2011. The cuts amounted to a loss of $5.4 billion, while they voted to create STAAR and pay Pearson $500,000,000. At first adoption, high school students were required to pass 15 end of course exams to graduate. Now, thanks to grassroots efforts to change excessive testing requirements, high school students only take five graduation exams. However, their future life success remains impacted by rules that they must pass these exams to graduate, even with their academic credits earned. [Note: Because of the deep cuts, Texas schools had larger classes and took cuts to librarians, school nurses, the arts, and physical education.]

 

“This week my freshmen students must take the 5-hour English I end of course exam. I will be one of the lucky test administrators. During one of my test administration trainings, I found out that I am now required to write down the name of each student who leaves the testing room to use the bathroom, the time the student leaves, and the time that they return. This information, along with a seating chart, will be turned in to the Texas Education Agency. I am not sure why. Is it an additional measure of control over the students? Is it an additional measure of control over myself and other education professionals? Is it a deliberate attempt at de-professionalization of educators? When I mentioned to my students that I had to keep track of their times in and out from the restroom, they were puzzled and irritated. One savvy freshman girl asked, “Do they want to know the stall I used also?”

 

“What I do know for sure is that these tests have become far too important. They are treated as top secret, national security-level documents. Why is the material in a standardized test treated as more confidential than the information in the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails? I have already signed my oath, and in my test administrator’s manual I am threatened with the loss of my hard-earned professional certification if I share information relating to what is on the test. I am cautioned to in no way purposely view the tests. Ironically, I am allowed to read the writing prompt to a student who requests it.

 

“Tuesday was a big day for my own family. My 10-year-old daughter is one of the unlucky guinea pig fifth graders in the state of Texas. She is one of the unlucky children affected by the State Board of Education decision in 2015 that “pushed down” developmentally inappropriate math objectives. Some of the newly required fifith grade material was, until 2015, not taught until the children were in the seventh grade.

 

“What does this “pushing down” of objectives do? It requires more material to be taught during the school year, stealing valuable time that math teachers need to teach the foundational material for that year. It makes math harder and more rushed for the children. It is wrong. The TEA suspended the math passing requirements for 5th graders last year. But not so this year. Nope. My child and her peers must pass this test or face retention in grade.

 

“And wait, the news just gets better. The outgoing Commissioner of Education announced near his departure that, “STAAR performance standards have been scheduled to move to the more rigorous phase-in 2 passing standard this school year. Each time the performance standard is increased, a student must achieve a higher score in order to pass a STAAR exam.” Thus, my daughter and all her 10- and 11-year old friends are being held accountable for inappropriate math standards and will be judged at a higher performance standard at the same time. Something is not right here. Something is very, very wrong. My child is not a subject to be experimented on.”

 

Categories Standardized Testing, Students, Testing, Texas

Texas: How Far Out Can a Candidate for State School Board Be?

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2016 //
25

The New York Times introduces the public to Mary Lou Bruner, 68, a former kindergarten teacher who is running for the state school board.

 

I don’t like to insult individuals on this blog, but the views of Ms. Bruner make me embarrassed to be a native Texan.

 

She believes:

 

that President Obama had worked as a gay prostitute in his youth, that the United States should ban Islam, that the Democratic Party had John F. Kennedy killed and that the United Nations had hatched a plot to depopulate the world….

 

Ms. Bruner’s anti-Obama, anti-Islam, anti-evolution and anti-gay Facebook posts have generated national headlines and turned an obscure school board election into a glimpse of the outer limits of Texas politics. In a part of the state dominated by conservative Christians and Tea Party activists, Ms. Bruner’s candidacy has posed a question no one can answer with any certainty — how far to the fringe is too far for Texas Republicans?

 

Ms. Bruner was a relative political newcomer when she started her campaign to represent a 31-county section of northern East Texas on the 15-member board that sets curriculum standards, reviews and adopts textbooks, and establishes graduation requirements in Texas public schools. Because of the board’s clout in selecting textbooks for all of the state’s schools, it can influence the content of textbooks produced nationwide.

 

Here in Ms. Bruner’s hometown, Mineola, and elsewhere in intensely conservative East Texas, her views fit a widely accepted anti-Obama and conspiracy friendly antigovernment mind-set. Inside Kitchens Hardware and Deli, the combination hardware store and diner where Mr. Clark was eating, a sign on a shelf read, “Hillary for Prison 2016.” A woman in a nearby store who declined to give her name said she would not hold Ms. Bruner’s Facebook posts against her, and spoke at length about her belief that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was a government-staged hoax.

 

Tammy Blair, the chairwoman of the Republican Party in nearby Cherokee County, said there were differing definitions of extreme, adding that she was sympathetic to the movement to have Texas secede from the United States.

 

If Ms. Bruner wins election to the state board, then perhaps Texas should give serious thought to seceding from the U.S. It will get to be an independent nation again. Bring back the great days of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845), when Texas had its own flag and all the trappings of independence. Lord knows it won’t unite with Mexico.

 

 

 

 

Categories Texas

What Texas Should Know About Charters, from a Floridian

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2016 //
5

A civic leader in Texas asked on the blog whether there was any impartial information about charters and their effects. I forwarded her request to Sue Legg of the League of Women Voters in Florida.

 

Sue wrote the following response:

 

 

We have been studying charter and other choice systems for several years. See: http://lwveducation.com​
In Florida, we have non-profit and for profit management companies. The biggest concern with for-profits are their associated real estate firms that build/purchase facilities and then charge the school excessive amounts for leases. Since the charter schools are privately owned and managed, the facilities are paid for by public tax dollars but revert to private owners if closed. We have relatively few charters located in publically owned buildings.

 

There are issues with charter boards. Most are not independent from the management company. Thus, the business model often depends on high staff turnover and low salaries. There are many regulation problems including conflict of interest and nepotism. Big charter firms create umbrella non profits that receive the charter. Their boards often have overlapping board members. Academica, for example, the largest Florida charter chain created Mater charters, Somerset charters, Doral, and Ben Gamla charters among others.

 

Many small independent charters have inexperienced or profit seeking people who start and then close charters, thus keeping substantial start up money awarded by the state. Some legislation has tried to curb this.

 

Charters in Florida tend to duplicate public school programs. Some do focus on children who need a different approach and many of these are successful. The school grade policies complicate their existence, however. For example, schools that focus on children with dyslexia are chronically called ‘F’ schools because those children struggle to learn even though they do make significant progress. ​

 

Florida has 650+ charters. The evidence of resegregation is clear. The high closure rate has received legislative attention. The practice of selective admission/retention is evident even though the admission process is supposed to be random. Achievement based on test scores does not differentiate charter and traditional public schools if well matched samples are used.

 

We have annual audits of each charter. There are also data on racial and economic demographic characteristics as well as school grades.

 

This legislative session has centered on charter authorization systems that would take even more control away from local school boards. Thus far, these proposals look like they will fail.

 

A Citizens for Strong Schools lawsuit over the failure of the state to support public education begins on March 14th.

 

Let me know if I can help.

 

Sue M. Legg Ph.D.
President, Alachua County LWV
Chair, School Choice Project Florida LWV

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Florida, For-Profit, Texas

Texas Superintendent of the Year Tells State Board: “I Have Given Up the Testing and Accountability Game”

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2016 //
35

Mary Ann Whiteker, superintendent of the Hudson Independent School District and Texas Superintendent of the Year, told the State Board of Education that she has given up on the “testing and accountability game.” A veteran administrator, she is now trying to shape the curriculum to meet the needs of the students. This is a video that is well worth watching.

 

Texas has the good fortune to have a significant group of superintendents who realize that the longstanding regime of testing and accountability has not helped their students. In 2006, thirty-five of these creative superintendents got together and started meeting regularly to plan a new “vision statement” to describe what they wanted to do. They produced their document, meant to lead the way to a new approach to children across the state, and you will see Mary Ann Whiteker holding it up as she speaks. If you go to this link, you can learn about the process of writing the document. It is supported by the Texas Association of School Administrators. Open this link to find the document that changed her views of what children need.

 

The Vision statement has a number of important principled statements. Here is one:

 

We envision schools where all children succeed, feel safe and their curiosity is cultivated. We see schools that foster a sense of belonging and community and that inspire collaboration. We see learning standards that challenge, and intentionally designed experiences that delight students, develop their con dence and competence, and cause every child to value tasks that result in learning. Ultimately, we see schools and related venues that prepare all children for many choices anWed that give them the tools and attitudes to contribute to our democratic way of life and live successfully in a rapidly changing world.

 

Here is another:

 

The schools we need are community-owned institutions. They are designed and established as learning organizations, treating employees as knowledge workers and students as the primary customers of knowledge work. They are free of bureaucratic structures that inhibit multiple paths to reaching goals. Reliance on compliance is minimized, and generating engagement through commitment is the primary means to achieving excellence. Leadership at all levels is honored and developed. All operating systems have well-defined processes that are constantly being improved. Attention of leaders is focused on the dominant social systems that govern behavior, beginning with those that clarify beliefs and direction, develop and transmit knowledge, and that provide for recruitment and induction of all employees and students into the values and vision. The evaluation, boundary, and authority systems are submissive to the directional system, allowing for major innovations to ourish, new capacities to emerge, missions to be accomplished, and the vision to be realized in an increasingly unpredictable world.

 

 

Whether you agree with every statement in the document, you must give credit to these visionary superintendents for taking the steps to steer Texas away from its expensive and useless obsession with standards and accountability.

 

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Texas

Texas: The Charter Waiting List is a Myth

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2016 //
11

Brian T. Woods, a district superintendent in Texas, wrote an article exposing the myth of charter schools’ waiting lists.

Charters claim they must expand because 100,000 students are on waiting lists. Woods says that recent hearings before the state senate education committee demonstrated the falsity of that claim, based on data presented by the Texas Education Agency.

Some charters have waiting lusts, but most don’t. Charters actually have at least 108,000 vacant seats in the state. There are 250,000 charter students in the state, which is 5% of public school enrollment. About 30% of charter seats are empty. Why open more charters?

Woods also pointed out:

“The other revelation was a new study on the funding of charter schools versus that of independent school districts. A well-respected educational consulting group released a report examining the various funding structures. Among its findings, according to a Texas Association of School Boards report, if ISDs of all sizes were funded like charters, total state support would increase by more than $4.7 billion.

“That $4.7 billion would equate to about $940 per public school student per year, or more than $20,000 per elementary classroom. What a dramatic difference that could make to Texas public schools.

“The playing field is built to give an advantage to charter schools. This is what we mean when we say funding for charter schools draws resources from independent school districts.”

Despite the advantages of charters, public schools usually outperform the charters.

By the way, if you open the link, you will see a picture of charter children demonstrating for more charters and more money. Using children and staff as foot soldiers at political rallies is now common practice for the charter lobby. Public schools are not allowed to use students as props.

You may also notice that all the children attend a Harmony charter. These are Gulen schools, run by associates of a Turkish Muslim imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania, yet controls a political movement in Turkey. It is odd to have a large charter chain controlled by foreign nationals and taking the place of community public schools.

When I visited Texas not long ago, I met legislators who had received all-expense paid trips to Turkey, at the invitation of the Gulen schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Funding, Hoax, Texas

Texas: GOP Candidate Injects Anti-Semitism into Race Against Moderate Republican

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2016 //
29

Joe Straus is speaker of the House in the Texas legislature. He is a moderate Republican from San Antonio. He is a friend of public schools. He happens to be Jewish.

 

Now his Tea Party opponent is challenging him because he doesn’t represent “Christian values” or even “Judaeo-Christian values.”

 

This is plain, old-fashioned bigotry.

 

Jeff Judson, a local tea party activist challenging Straus’ re-election, is sounding the same dog whistle himself, warning voters of “the disconnect between conservative, Christian voters and Joe Straus” in a rambling treatise titled “The Biblical Basis for Jeff Judson’s Candidacy for Texas House District 121 in the Republican Primary on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.”

 

Judson is known locally as an anti-streetcar crusader, not an actual crusader for Christ — until now.

 

“As Christians, we are citizens of two kingdoms: the Kingdom of Heaven and the political kingdom here on earth where we reside,” he began in the political ad. “We have obligations to both … As a Bible-believing Christian who attends Grace Northridge, an Evangelical church, I know that God created the institution of government to reward good and punish evil (Romans 13:1-4).”

 

Judson, the pious punisher, is casting Straus, a moderate Republican, in the role of evil.

 

“The Texas Senate passes God-honoring, conservative legislation which is often killed by Joe Straus, my opponent who is House Speaker,” he continued in the letter, before listing issues that Straus has tried to “stab … in the heart,” including “religious liberty” and “protecting life.”

 

“These are only a few examples of the disconnect between conservative, Christian voters and Joe Straus,” he continued. “If Christians do not speak out publicly about the moral and ethical issues facing a nation, who will?”

 

And then another Republican leader jumped into the fray, spewing his own bigotry:

 

On Sunday, the leader of Conservative Republicans of Texas sent an email blast announcing rallies in Houston to “take back our party.”

 

“Speaker Joe Straus and his RINO lieutenants, members of the Homosexual Political Movement (LGBT and Log Cabin Republicans), their corporate business donors and pro-Muslim sympathizers are organizing and spending millions of dollars to drive Christian conservatives and their values out of the Texas Republican Party,” he wrote. “I am not going to tell you that if this liberal, secular cabal has its way, then the will be the order of the day.”criminalization of Christianity will be the order of the day.”

 

I grew up in Texas. I am Jewish. I have strong Judaeo-Christian values. These expressions of hatred are not “Christian values.” They are the values of people who despise anyone who does not agree with them. It is a free country, and the bigots can say and believe what they want. But it would be tragic if the people of Joe Straus’s district allow these zealots to come to power and impose their views on everyone else.

 

I thank the Pastors for Texas Children for forwarding this disturbing article to me. They and their tireless leader, Pastor Charles Foster Johnson, remind me that there are many good people in Texas who don’t share the extremist views expressed by Joe Strauss’s political opponents.

 

 

Categories Politics, Texas

Texas: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Wants a Voucher Program Like the One in Nevada

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2016 //
7

The Lt. Governor has a powerful role in Texas government. Unfortunately, the Lt. Gov. right now is Dan Patrick, a former radio talk show host, who is a zealous supporter of vouchers. When he headed the Senate Education Committee, he put forward voucher bills but they died in the House. They died because of rural opposition to vouchers; it seems that rural Republicans in the House don’t see any good reason to kill off their public schools and divide their communities.

 

But Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick now says he wants “education savings accounts” so that public money can flow to private and religious schools, as well as homeschoolers, and he wants to model his plan along the lines of the one enacted in Nevada. It is still public money going to religious schools, but that’s what he wants. As he says in the article, he wants school choice for all children, not just the poor.

 

The Nevada plan is being challenged in court by several organizations, because it violates the explicit language of the Nevada state constitution. Studies show that it primarily benefits well-to-do families, not poor families.

 

As in most other states, about 90% of the children in Texas go to public schools. Those schools are underfunded, especially since a dramatic $5.4 billion cut in 2011. Some of the money was later restored, but not most of it. The children in Texas are poorer than they were five years ago. The pupils are majority-minority. This is the scenario in which Dan Patrick proposes to gut public education.

 

It is time for the Texas Pastors for Children, for Friends of Texas Public Schools, and for every organization that believes in democratic control of public schools in Texas to step up and beat back Patrick’s bills.

Categories Education Reform, Nevada, School Choice, Texas, Vouchers

Texas: Governor Appoints Businessman as State Commissioner, Texans React with Concern

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
6

Pastors for Texas Children is an outstanding group of clergy who strongly support public education.

 

Their executive director, Reverend Charles Foster Johnson issued a statement remarking on Governor Greg Abbott’s appointment of a businessman as State Commissioner of Education and expressing the group’s earnest hope that he would recognize his responsibility to protect the children and to listen to experienced educators. The new commissioner served on the Dallas school board.

 

 

We wish Mike Morath all the best as he assumes the position of Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency. We look forward to working closely with him to ensure quality public education for all 5.2 million schoolchildren entrusted to our social responsibility, and to oppose any attempt to privatize this essential public trust.

 

We stand with our highly qualified, well-trained, and thoroughly experienced educators in Texas and trust their judgment on what is best for our schoolchildren. Education is a sacred servant-calling before God. We are privileged to submit to the authority and expert testimony of our proven educational leaders. We exhort our policymakers to do the same.

 
It is somewhat puzzling that Gov. Abbott would choose as our state educational leader someone from outside the field of public education, who has no formal training as an educator, no classroom experience as an educator, and no direct administrative experience in stewarding and shepherding the education of students. We hardly believe that such an individual could not be found among the 1200 active superintendents of our great state alone, not to mention the thousands more Texans who possess sterling educational credentials. Therefore, as we congratulate our new Commissioner, we invite him to join us in full cooperation with our established educational leaders.

 
We are eager to join Mr. Morath in empowering schoolteachers and school administrators in our 8500 community and neighborhood schools, in advocating for the proper funding of those schools, and in opposing any measure to privatize this public and communal trust. To take a center of learning overseen by the public interest and turn it into a center of profit controlled by private entities is a violation of God’s common good. We have every full expectation that Mr. Morath will join us in the protection of the fundamental provision of universal education for all Texas children by the public and at the public expense.

 

 

*******************************************************************

 

And here is a withering condemnation of this choice by Governor Abbott, written by Donna Garner, a conservative teacher-blogger in Texas:

 

As a conservative, I appreciate Gov. Greg Abbott for the many courageous positions he has taken for Texas; but he really missed it on this one!

 

I cannot think of very many people whom Gov. Greg Abbott could have appointed who would have been a worse choice than Mike Morath as Texas Commissioner of Education. (12.14.15 — Press release- “Gov. Abbott Appoints Mike Morath As Texas Education Commissioner — http://gov.texas.gov/news/appointment/21773 )

 

Mike Morath is supporting almost everything bad in education – the same Type #2 philosophy of education that opens the door to subjective, digitized curriculum and assessments found in Common Core/CSCOPE; the same “innovative” school model pushed by TASB and TASA with their 21st century transformational “visioning” approach to education; and the greedy consultants, lobbyists, and vendors who make a fortune off education’s “Golden Goose” of public dollars.

 

Gov. Abbott had previously appointed Mike Morath as the chairman of the Texas Commission on Next Generation Assessments and Accountability (NGAA). It seems clear to me that the purpose of this commission is to recommend to the Texas Legislature that they replace the traditional public school classroom (where teachers teach fact-based curriculum directly and systematically while face-to-face with their students) WITH the 21st century transformational model where students receive all their instruction through digitized curriculum. Grading is done through subjective assessments (e.g., portfolios, projects, group work); and curriculum focuses on students’ feelings, emotions, and opinions – not on hard facts with right-or-wrong answers. Students graduate through online and dual credit courses with wishy-washy accountability standards and unsecure testing procedures.

 

Obviously if Mike Morath was chosen as the chair of this NGAA commission, he intends to implement this same Type #2 philosophy across Texas as the newly appointed Commissioner of Education.

 

America has hundreds of years of historical data to prove that the traditional Type #1 philosophy of education produces success. Americans became the leader of the world because of the many scientists, inventors, technicians, entrepreneurs, engineers, writers, historians, and businessmen who used their Type #1 education to elevate themselves to great heights. They were educated on a Big Chief Tablet.

 

Where is the proof that the Type #2 digitized “global citizen of the world” approach will make America great? In fact, there is no long-term, independent, peer-reviewed research to prove that that method of education works.

 

 

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Texas

Beaumont, Texas: 13-Year-Old Opts Out, State Officials Freak Out, Online Campaign Ignites

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2015 //
15

Thirteen-year-old Alex Trevino decided to take a stand against the Texas STAR test: she opted out. She might be held back and not promoted with the rest of her class. She and her mother say she is willing to take the consequences.

Alex told 12News, “I feel that we are not learning anything that we can use in life, we’re taught to a test, nothing comes out of it.”

State officials say she is not allowed to refuse the test.

Her parents support her actions. Her mother said she is proud of her. Rebellion against unjust authority is a tradition in Texas. It also is a tradition in the United States. Our nation was born of a Revolution, led by men who pledged their lives to fight for independence.

Alex is not backing down. She has started a Facebook page called STAAR SOS to encourage others to take a stand. To her surprise in the first four hours that the page was up, it gained more than 9,000 followers.

Alex’s Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/STAAR-SOS-373783632791962/timeline/

One determined teen could spark an opt out movement in Texas.

Categories Opt Out, Parents, Students, Texas

Beardsley: Does the Texas State Constitution of 1876 Require High-Stakes Testing and VAM?

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2015 //
21

Audrey Amrein Beardsley patiently waded through a report produced by the George W. Bush Institute in Texas and discovered an argument that the language of the Texas State Constitution leads inexorably to high-stakes testing and value-added-modeling for teachers. The key word is “efficiency,” you see, and Texas can’t have an “efficient” education system without measuring everything. Some people would argue that a system cannot be “efficient” unless it has adequate resources to accomplish its purposes. But no, the folks at the GWBI think that what the writers of the Constitution had in mind was measurement.

Beardsley writes:

The Texas Constitution requires that the state “establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools,” as the “general diffusion of knowledge [is]…essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people.” Following this notion, The George W. Bush Institute’s Education Reform Initiative recently released its first set of reports as part of its The Productivity for Results Series: “A Legal Lever for Enhancing Productivity.” The report was authored by an affiliate of The New Teacher Project (TNTP) – the non-profit organization founded by the controversial former Chancellor of Washington DC’s public schools Michelle Rhee; an unknown and apparently unaffiliated “education researcher” named Krishanu Sengupta; and Sandy Kress, the “key architect of No Child Left Behind [under the presidential leadership of George W. Bush] who later became a lobbyist for Pearson, the testing company” (see, for example, here).

Authors of this paper review the economic and education research (although if you look through the references the strong majority of pieces come from economics research, which makes sense as this is an economically driven venture) to identify characteristics that typify enterprises that are efficient. More specifically, the authors use the principles of x-efficiency set out in the work of the highly respected Henry Levin that require efficient organizations, in this case as (perhaps inappropriately) applied to schools, to have: 1) Clear objective outcomes with measurable outcomes; 2) Incentives that are linked to success on the objective function; 3) Efficient access to useful information for decisions; 4) Adaptability to meet changing conditions; and 5) Use of the most productive technology consistent with cost constraints.

The authors also advance another series of premises, as related to this view of x-efficiency and its application to education/schools in Texas: (1) that “if Texas is committed to diffusing knowledge efficiently, as mandated by the state constitution, it should ensure that the system for putting effective teachers in classrooms and effective materials in the hands of teachers and students is characterized by the principles that undergird an efficient enterprise, such as those of x-efficiency;” (2) this system must include value-added measurement systems (i.e., VAMs), as deemed throughout this paper as not only constitutional but also rational and in support of x-efficiency; (3) given “rational policies for teacher training, certification, evaluation, compensation, and dismissal are key to an efficient education system;” (4) “the extent to which teacher education programs prepare their teachers to achieve this goal should [also] be [an] important factor;” (5) “teacher evaluation systems [should also] be properly linked to incentives…[because]…in x-efficient enterprises, incentives are linked to success in the objective function of the organization;” (6) which is contradictory with current, less x-efficient teacher compensation systems that link incentives to time on the job, or tenure, rather than to “the success of the organization’s function; (6), in the end, “x-efficient organizations have efficient access to useful information for decisions, and by not linking teacher evaluations to student achievement, [education] systems [such as the one in Texas will] fail to provide the necessary information to improve or dismiss teachers.”

The two districts highlighted as being most x-efficient in Texas, and in this report include, to no surprise: “Houston [which] adds a value-added system to reward teachers, with student performance data counting for half of a teacher’s overall rating. HISD compares students’ academic growth year to year, under a commonly used system called EVAAS.” We’ve discussed not only this system but also its use in Houston often on this blog (see, for example, here, here, and here). Teachers in Houston who consistently perform poorly can be fired for “insufficient student academic growth as reflected by value added scores…In 2009, before EVAAS became a factor in terminations, 36 of 12,000 teachers were fired for performance reasons, or .3%, a number so low the Superintendent [Terry Grier] himself called the dismissal system into question. From 2004-2009, the district
fired or did not renew 365 teachers, 140 for “performance reasons,” including poor discipline management, excessive absences, and a lack of student progress. In 2011, 221 teacher contracts were not renewed, multiple for “significant lack of student progress attributable to the educator,” as well as “insufficient student academic growth reflected by [SAS EVAAS] value-added scores….In the 2011-12 school year, 54% of the district’s low-performing teachers were dismissed.” That’s “progress,” right?!?

The other exemplary district, according to the report, is Dallas. It may or may not be relevant that the superintendents who led these two districts are now gone (Mike Miles of Dallas) or on their way out the door (Terry Grier of Houston).

The current Texas State Constitution was adopted in 1876. Do you think the Founding Fathers of the Lone Star State gave a tinker’s dam about VAM? As a native Texan, I say no. Do you think those rough-and-ready guys could have passed a high-stakes test? Sorry, but I think they had plenty of smarts, but not the kind that the George W. Bush Institute treasures. My thought: Why not ask Sandy Kress and the other GWBI fellows to take the 11th grade math test?

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Texas
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