Read here for first summary.
Will post again when new stories available.
Archives for category: Texas
Wayne Slater, senior political writer for the Dallas Morning News, tweeted this:
@WayneSlater Put a fork in school vouchers in Texas — ban on taxpayer money for private schools passes overwhelming in conservative TX House
I bet the rural Republicans balked at destroying their communities’ public schools.
A great post here by Carolyn Heinrich of the University of Texas.
She explains that Texas spends more than any other state in the nation on testing, but is seeing no returns on its heavy investment.
The cost is not just in dollars, but in the amount of time that students spend preparing for tests and taking tests, not to mention the distortion of the purpose and content of education.
This is a great analysis of how a well-meaning state can make disastrous decisions that hurt the quality of education.
One of the most adamant critics of the Texas legislation to reduce the number of tests that students must take to graduate happens to own franchises for Sylvan Learning Centers, which offer test preparation and tutoring.
Was it a conflict of interest? No, he said, everybody votes on things that affect their self-interest.
He was just concerned about keeping standards high.
In Texas, that is known as “bidness as usual.”
Julian Vasquez Heilig is one of the bloggers I enjoy enormously because he has the statistical smarts and energy to vet dubious claims. Follow his blog. He always has smart insights, with the data to back them up. It is called cloakinginequity.com.
The other day I put up a post about an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that asserted that Texas needs many, many, many standardized tests because students don’t know the classics. Presumably, the more Pearson bubble tests they take, the more they will know about Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, and the Founding Fathers. They went on to tout their own charter schools, which presumably were succeeding at all these tests while turning children into philosopher kings.
Gosh darn, Julian checked the data. He discovered that their charter chain was underperforming the regular public schools on those tests that the authors touted.
Raise Your Hand Texas ACTION ALERT
Bad Bill Alert!
Your Action Is Needed TODAY!
March 27, 2013
Let the Senate Education Committee Know You Oppose SB 1263!
SB 1263 by Senator Larry Taylor is the “Parent Trigger” bill.
The “Parent Trigger” Is About Destroying Public Schools, Not Saving Them
SB 1263 radically undermines efforts to turn around a struggling school and may be voted out of committee Thursday (tomorrow) if we don’t act now.
We already have a parent trigger.
Texas’ current parent trigger law operates only after the Commissioner has reconstituted the campus, developed an intervention plan, and the campus has remained academically unacceptable for three years. SB 1263 blows up a campus for two years of academically unacceptable performance before any of the proven methods of intervention have been tried.
Historically, interests outside our school districts and even our state are the ones pushing for parent triggers. This is no exception.
SB 1263 undermines the authority of elected school boards: SB 1263 undermines the authority of locally elected school boards. While the statute allows the school board to petition the Commissioner to take a different action, it only he says he “may” order the action requested by the elected school board.
SB 1263 is brought by well-heeled national advocacy organizations, not parents. Many of the same groups pushing for school vouchers and other means of privatization are pushing this legislation.
Let the Senate Education Committee know you oppose SB 1263 by Taylor today.
Contact these legislators:
Dan Patrick, Chairman
(512) 463-0107
Dan.patrick@senate.state.tx.us
Eddie Lucio, Jr, Vice-Chair
(512) 463-0127
Eddie.lucio@senate.state.tx.us
Donna Campbell
(512) 463-0125
Donna.campbell@senate.state.tx.us
Robert Duncan
(512) 463-0128
Robert.duncan@senate.state.tx.us
Ken Paxton
(512) 463-0108
Ken.paxton@senate.state.tx.us
Kel Seliger
(512) 463-0131
Kel.seliger@senate.state.tx.us
Larry Taylor
(512) 463-0111
Larry.taylor@senate.state.tx.us
Leticia Van de Putte
(512) 463-0126
Leticia.vandeputte@senate.state.tx.us
Royce West
(512) 463-0123
Royce.west@senate.state.tx.us
To learn more, please visit our website
David Anthony, CEO
RAISE YOUR HAND TEXAS
This is a good summary of the debate about high school graduation requirements in the Texas House of Representatives.
I couldn’t help but think back to my own experience in Texas public schools many years ago (to be exact, I graduated from San Jacinto High School in 1956). To the best of my knowledge, the Legislature set minimum requirements and left the details to educators.
These days, legislators in Congress and the states seem to think they must decide everything in education and tell educators what to do. When I was in North Carolina last week, the dean of the UNC education school told me that the legislature passed laws requiring that students learn cursive writing and memorize the multiplication tables.
It is a good thing the legislators are not telling doctors how to make their diagnoses and conduct surgical procedures.
The Texas Legislature heard the voices of parents, students, teachers, and employers.
The Texas House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, 145-2, to reduce high-stakes testing.
Under the legislation, the number of tests required for high school graduation would be reduced from 15 (the highest in the nation) to five.
The Texas Senate earlier passed a bill to cut back on testing,
As former Texas Commissioner of Education Robert Scott said last year, the testing industry in Texas turned into a vampire. Only weeks ago, at the mass Save Texas Schools rally in front of the State Capitol, he called testing “the flea that wags the tail that wags the dog.”
Legislators are talking about getting some flea powder.
An article in the Wall Street Journal goes on a rant against critics of standardized testing. It was written by a charter school advocate in Texas and a professor at ultra-conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. The authors are shocked that so many parents and local school boards in Texas want to reduce the number of tests needed to graduate high from 15 to only three or four.
They insist that American students are really incredibly stupid and the best way to make sure they gain the wisdom of the ages is to demand more of Pearson’s multiple choice tests.
You can see that they really care about the Higher Things because they drop names like Homer, Milton, Melville, and Shakespeare. They also drop some references to the Founding Fathers.
Two things are odd about this article (in addition to the fact that the statistics they cite were based on a telephone survey of 1,200 students, who were asked multiple-choice questions and had no reason to take the survey seriously).*
First, when American students were classically educated, many eons ago, as the authors yearn for, they were not taking any standardized tests. None. Zero. Zip. They were writing essays and examined orally by their teachers. It seems the authors yearn for the good old days of 1910, when the high school graduation rate was about 10%.
And then there is the irony that the authors are the sort who usually rant about the importance of respecting parental choice. Why do they deny the choice that so many Texas parents so clearly and passionately want: an education where more time and resources are devoted to teaching, not testing?
Gosh, with more time for teaching and learning, the students would actually have time to read Homer, Shakespeare, Melville, and Milton, instead of test prep.
*Full disclosure: I was co-chair of the organization that commissioned the survey and co-authored the introduction. The organization, named Common Core, has no connection to the Common Core State Standards. It was created to advocate for the liberal arts and sciences, not for testing them. I resigned from it in 2009.
P.S. a comment below points out that Hillsdale College attracts many home-schoolers who do not take batteries of standardized tests annually.
Gary Rubinstein noticed a burst of TFA tweets making dramatic claims. They said that a new study found that students of TFA teachers gained one year more than teachers with same experience, and that middle students gained a half year more from TFA teachers than from other new teachers.
Gary read the study and found that these dramatic claims were over hyped.
In eight comparisons, five showed no statistically significant difference.
In the middle school study, the students in TFA classrooms got two extra questions right on a 40 question test. The amazing one-year of alleged gains were based on three more questions right.
Gary concludes:
“I think that TFA needs to back off on the miracle stories. The fact is that new TFA teachers are not much better, if they even are any better, than new non-TFA teachers. Neither are that good, really. Teaching has a big learning curve, but by the time you figure it out, you generally have to wait until next year to have a fresh start with a new group. As far as alumni teachers, yes, I think they are generally pretty good. I’d let an alum teach my kids. But as good as they might be, to ignore the fact that most of the comparisons were pretty neutral and then buy into the idea that when one group of students learns a year more than another group, they will only get, on average, three more questions correct on a multiple choice math test, well that’s the kind of thing that is going to keep me investigating these kinds of claims and spreading the word.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 