Grading Texas – Page 126 – Texas State Teachers Association

Running against public schools

Despite his long career on the taxpayers’ payroll, Attorney General Greg Abbott is running for governor as an anti-government candidate. Yes, that’s inconsistent, but it’s hardly unique. More significantly, if you are anti-government, you are anti-public education, because one of the single biggest responsibilities of state government is public education.

Now, if Abbott and dozens of legislators and legislative candidates have their way, education won’t be a major state government responsibility much longer because public school funding will continue to be cut in favor of privatization, and thousands of school kids and educators will be out in the cold.

Abbott already had been defending the $5.4 billion cut from public school budgets by the legislative majority three years ago.

Then, more recently, he ratcheted up his anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric by suggesting, at a meeting of red-meat conservatives in Fort Worth, that he would be open to repealing the state’s main business tax. Although a spokeswoman has since said that Abbott didn’t really mean what he wanted his audience to think he meant, he told the RedState Gathering, “Think how many more jobs we could attract to Texas if we also had no business franchise tax.”

A more realistic translation, though, would be, “Think how many more teachers we can lay off, how much larger our classes can get and how large our dropout rate can grow.”

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/08/20/abbotts-remarks-business-tax-spark-confusion/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Stories&utm_reader=feedly

Missing the point on school ratings

Bill Hammond, CEO of the Texas Association of Business, was at it again the other day, wringing his hands over what he views as the lackluster performance of Texas public schools. This time, his forum was an oped article in the Lufkin News, in which he questioned the most recent school accountability standards announced by the Texas Education Agency.

Clearly, he didn’t believe TEA’s claim that about 85 percent of the state’s public schools are “meeting standards.”

“Schools are certainly not meeting the standards of employers,” he wrote, calling for a stronger accountability system for schools.

What Hammond refuses to acknowledge, though, is that a strong public education system is not built on tougher tests for students. It is built on good teachers (Texas has those) and adequate funding for schools, which is where state government fails, in large part because of groups like his.

For years, the Texas Association of Business and other like-minded business and trade associations in this state have had three main priorities – keeping state regulation of their businesses weak, making it next to impossible for unhappy customers to sue them and keeping state business taxes low. And, they have been very successful at realizing all three.

But what about public education? Don’t businesses need strong schools to keep supplying highly trained workers for the future? They surely do, and many businesspeople realize that. But business leadership in Austin – or at least most of it – has for years been propping up and perpetuating short-sighted state government policy that shortchanges our children’s schools.

Most of the business lobby, including Hammond’s group, stood mostly silent while the legislative majority slashed $5.4 billion from public school budgets three years ago. Hammond, for one, has seemed much more concerned about keeping the pressure on kids to pass standardized tests than he has been about the $500 per student that was lost in state funding because of those cuts.

And, now the Texas Association of Business has endorsed education budget-cutters for the state’s top two offices and many legislative seats. Dan Patrick, the group’s candidate for lieutenant governor, voted for the school budget cuts in 2011, and Attorney General Greg Abbott, whom TAB is supporting in the governor’s race, continues to defend the cuts in court.

Of course, Hammond’s complaints about school accountability ratings could be part of a broader campaign to convince Texans that their neighborhood schools – now that they have been starved of financial resources — are a failure. The purpose of that campaign would be to win more public support for transferring tax dollars from traditional neighborhood schools to corporate charters and private schools — supported by tax-paid vouchers — all for the benefit of educational profiteers and not necessarily school kids.

Those ideas are exactly what Dan Patrick has been openly promoting for a long time and Abbott has been more quietly suggesting.

Just last week, the Texas Tribune reported that Patrick was still applying “his low-spending mentality to education.”

And, yet all the CEO of the Texas Association of Business can seem to fret about is low test scores.

http://lufkindailynews.com/news/community/article_20278fae-232b-11e4-8783-001a4bcf887a.html

Watch out! Another “education reform” group is hatched

They are calling themselves CREEED, another meaningless acronym for another ambiguous title in what I suspect is another entry into the misnamed “education reform” movement. This one, the Council for Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development, has recently popped up in El Paso, and, as far as educators and school kids are concerned, it already seems headed in the wrong direction.

Is the primary goal of this group really to help educators and students or to add more lining to the pockets of profiteers who view public education as a cash cow?

I ask that question because organizers already are talking about school “choice” – usually a euphemism for private school vouchers — more private schools and more charters, alternatives promoted by a number of other groups seeking to transfer tax dollars from neighborhood schools to unproven privatization schemes.

So, there is ample reason for parents and educators in El Paso who truly value their public schools to be suspicious of the new group, which apparently plans to get involved in local school board races and may try to influence state education policy as well.

CREEED is chaired by Richard Castro, a McDonald’s franchise owner, who told the El Paso Times that the group has three broad goals: “closing gaps in educational achievement, providing a quality education for all children and creating a ‘cradle to grave’ strategy for future workers.”

Those are laudable goals. And, in addition to the privatization schemes mentioned above, the group says it is interested in promoting programs in the public schools such as early college high schools, dual language instruction and dual credit classes. Spokesmen also say they will work with teachers and administrators.

But no one among the group’s leaders discussed (at least with the El Paso Times) a very critical element in public school success — a state school funding plan that is adequate and fair. Many other so-called “reform” groups also neglect that basic factor as they contrive ways to divert thinly stretched public education dollars from neighborhood schools into their privatization experiments.

One of the first El Paso officials to endorse the new group was Dee Margo, the state-appointed president of El Paso ISD’s board of managers. As a state representative in 2011, he voted with the legislative majority in slashing $5.4 billion from public school budgets, a whammy that cost EPISD more than $500 per student and caused EPISD to ask for a class size waiver for every K-4 classroom.

And, one of the prominent CREEED board members is El Paso businessman Woody Hunt, a major political contributor to Margo and to Attorney General Greg Abbott, the Republican nominee for governor – the man who continues defending the 2011 funding cuts in court. Hunt also has given at least $100,000 to Texans for Education Reform, a statewide school privatization group.

CREEED’s leaders believe the quality of public education in El Paso schools is inadequate, but they have said nothing about inadequate state funding that has plagued El Paso schools for decades. And, remember, the cheating scandal that rocked El Paso ISD a few years ago and wiped out educational opportunities for who knows how many low-income children wasn’t driven by a lack of vouchers or a shortage of charter schools. It was driven by a high-stress testing culture and a former superintendent’s desire to profit financially from it.

Is CREEED the right acronym for this group? Or, would GREED be more fitting?

Time will tell.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_26308728/business-advocacy-group-looks-add-voice-public-education

Fighting the testing plague

Sen. Leticia Van de Putte renewed the war on the testing plague yesterday. She vowed to significantly cut back on standardized testing in the public schools and give students more time to actually experience the joy of learning, rather than the dread of bubbling the wrong bubble.

That goal alone (plus the fact that she is fighting to save Texas from Dan Patrick) is enough of a reason, although there are many more, to vote for Van de Putte for lieutenant governor this November. So, you teachers who are sick of teaching to the test and you parents who are sick of your children being sick of testing, applaud Leticia – and then vote – because testing advocates don’t want to release their stranglehold on Texas classrooms.

Even as Van de Putte and gubernatorial nominee Wendy Davis are fighting against excessive testing, the Texas Education Agency is getting ready to launch in about 70 school districts this fall a teacher evaluation system that will be partly based on test scores. State Education Commissioner Michael Williams agreed to the program as a condition for getting a U.S. Department of Education waiver from some provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act.

School districts had to agree to participate because the education commissioner has no authority under state law to force districts to base teacher evaluations on test scores. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, one of the state’s largest school districts, declined the commissioner’s offer to take part.

The election of Van de Putte and Davis could go a long way toward heading off legislative approval of such an evaluation scheme because Williams is likely to try to get the Legislature to endorse a similar plan.

Much research in recent years has discredited using standardized test scores – or so-called value-added measures (VAM) – to evaluate teachers. The process gives an incomplete and unfair picture of a teacher’s performance, researchers have concluded, although so-called education “reformers,” including the Obama administration, persist in trying to ram it down our throats.

If these misnamed “reformers” get their way, testing will become even more stressful – for both teachers and students – and further erode the time that children need for real learning. That threat makes Van de Putte’s stand even more welcome.

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