Grading Texas – Page 138 – Texas State Teachers Association

Merit pay plan unfair and backwards

The administrators running Waco ISD have their heads in the sand. They are considering a so-called “merit” bonus plan that would reward teachers for good test results but miss the boat on how student achievement is accomplished.

You can read the Waco Tribune story linked below for more details. But essentially every campus in the district that met state standards on STAAR tests would receive $10 for each student at the school, and the principal would determine how to use the money. It could be spent on instructional materials, staff development or merit pay.

The merit pay option apparently would be limited to teachers whose students either did well on STAAR or Advanced Placement tests, while ignoring other teachers who didn’t administer the tests but who definitely contributed to student success.

For example, K-2 teachers, according to the story, wouldn’t be eligible for the bonuses because students don’t take STAAR tests until the third grade. The superintendent suggested those teachers – if they felt overlooked – could transfer to a STAAR tested grade. That type of thinking ignores the reality that few third-graders would pass STAAR tests without the hard work of K-2 teachers who begin building children’s critical learning foundations. Failing to reward the contributions of K-2 teachers would be unfair — and preposterous.

These so-called merit, incentive or performance pay plans ignore the reality that education is a cumulative, collaborative effort to which the entire faculty – K-2, art, music and others whose subjects aren’t tested on STAAR or AP – contribute.

Merit pay is a cheap non-fix, a backwards way of trying to reward teachers in a state where the average teacher pay is more than $8,000 below the national average and many teachers are struggling to make ends meet. TSTA’s recent moonlighting survey showed that 44 percent of teachers have to take extra jobs during the school year and about 60 percent are seriously considering leaving the profession.

Instead of toying around with these minimal, unfair merit proposals, school administrators and board members in Waco and throughout Texas should be demanding that their legislators give all Texas teachers the professional pay they deserve.

The Waco superintendent admitted that the merit idea was “not a perfect system.” It isn’t even close.

http://www.wacotrib.com/news/education/waco-isd-board-of-trustees-discusses-teacher-incentive-pay/article_5cee474a-2456-543d-ba2d-e0c52be6c2d3.html

While teachers moonlight, Rainy Day Fund keeps growing

For the legislative majority to feign poverty as a reason for short-changing public education is short-sighted. It also is disingenuous, and if that word is too long, it is dishonest.

With the economy improving, the Legislature this year restored most of the funding that was slashed from the public education budget two years ago, and that was a step appreciated by thousands of teachers and other education workers. But school funding is still behind where it was during the 2010-11 school year, and school enrollments have increased by 80,000 to 85,000 students each year since then.

And, the Legislature could – and should – have provided more education funding last spring by dipping into the state’s Rainy Day Fund.

Many legislators – those who actually want to give the public schools more than lip service – tried. But they were outgunned by a majority fueled by stingy, short-sighted ideological politics, which would rather bleed school districts – and the professionals who work in them — in favor of charters, home-schooling or maybe even one-room schoolhouses. The latter, 18th century alternative to education certainly would match the 18th century mindset that apparently thinks we already spend too much money on public schools.

In truth, Texas never has spent too much money on public schools and, at present, isn’t spending enough and isn’t spending what it does spend in a fair and equitable fashion. That’s why Texas is under a court order – again – to fix the school finance system. That’s why Texas ranks near the bottom of the states in per-pupil funding and teacher pay. And, that’s why 44 percent of Texas teachers, an all-time high, according to a new TSTA-commissioned survey, find it necessary to take extra jobs during the school year to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, the Rainy Day Fund sits in the bank, growing and growing with tax revenue from the oil and gas boom. According to new projections by the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, a business group, the fund could reach its maximum percentage of the state budget – or $16.1 billion – by 2017. Even if constitutional amendments that would tap into the fund for water and highway spending pass during the next two years, the fund would still have $11.6 billion by 2017, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Those water and highway amendments were approved by the Legislature despite right wing opposition. But efforts to tap into the Rainy Day Fund for schools fell short, even though an educated workforce also is critical to the state’s future. The money in the Rainy Day Fund belongs to the taxpayers, folks. The fund wasn’t created to simply grow and give right-wingers bragging rights for some misguided notions of “stewardship” or to save for some unknown, future emergency when we already have pressing needs now.

Cherry picking students with tax dollars

A parent named Laurel, whose daughters attend the new BASIS charter school in San Antonio, took strong exception to my recent blog post about BASIS’ cherry-picking practices. The cherry-picking – or taking the best students from public schools and being paid tax dollars to do it — is just fine with her because she got to take her daughters out of an “awful” public school – her description – and put them in a better school for which she doesn’t have to pay private school tuition.

Sounds like a win-win, eh? It obviously is for Laurel, at least so far, and I hope it is for her daughters. But it isn’t a win for thousands of other students in San Antonio, nor is it a win for other Texas taxpayers, including me. I live in Austin, but a share of my state tax dollars find their way to charter schools in San Antonio and elsewhere.

You can read all of Laurel’s comments, if you wish, by clicking on my previous blog post at the link below.

The point of my earlier post was that BASIS, by weeding out struggling students and failing to meet the needs of special education students at its schools in Arizona and Washington, D.C., posed a threat to a public education system in Texas that already is inequitably financed and is getting worse.

Charter chains, such as BASIS, which is run by a for-profit operating company, are neglecting the needs of millions of struggling students and children with special needs – many from low-income minority households – the very children that Senate Education Chairman Dan Patrick claimed to be trying to help when he convinced the Legislature last spring to expand the number of charters in Texas. Patrick shed crocodile tears during a public committee hearing one day as he pleaded the plight of the educational also-rans.

But that point apparently is lost on Laurel and, doubtlessly, many others.

“I would not say that BASIS is for every child, and the fact that parents with disabled kids have had to find a better option for them than BASIS is NOT necessarily a problem,” Laurel wrote.

But it is a problem for millions of Texas parents and taxpayers because the more cherry-picking that BASIS and other corporate charters practice with our tax dollars, the weaker become our traditional, under-funded public schools, the only resort for the vast majority of Texas children. Those children are overwhelmingly poor, many have special needs and they, too, represent the future of our state.

Laurel contends that charter schools are not under-mining the budgets of traditional public schools because they are paid only for teaching the children they enroll. But that argument misses the point that school districts can’t reduce their costs when they lose students to charters. The money goes with the students, but districts have fixed costs that remain, including building maintenance, bus routes and other costs that simply cannot be reduced proportionately.

And, remember, the Legislature still hasn’t fully restored the $5.4 billion cut from the public education budget two years ago, although total school enrollment has grown by about 170,000 students since then. Laurel, nevertheless, makes the tired old argument that public school budgets are “fat.” They aren’t. If they were, 11,000 teachers wouldn’t have lost their jobs in the first year after the budget cuts were imposed.

Laurel makes it clear she is not impressed with the public schools she has seen. Yes, many public schools in Texas are struggling, while many others do great jobs, much better than many charter schools. The bottom line for public education in Texas is the bottom line of the public education budget. And, as long as Texans continue to elect a legislative majority that is more interested in transferring tax dollars from neighborhood schools to cherry-picking corporate charters than it is in adequately and equitably funding the public school system, many parents will remain unhappy.

http://www.tsta.org/grading-texas/charter-schools/charter-schools-worsening-educational-equity

Political war on public schools continues

I am not sure whether to call the political era in which we are living the Teapot Age or the Crackpot Age, but rest assured that future historians will label it anything but Golden. The Tea Party-brewed insanity in Washington is bad enough, and now comes news that most states are still putting the squeeze on school funding, despite an improving economy.

Although it is true that the Texas Legislature this year restored most of the $5.4 billion that the legislative majority had cut in 2011, school districts still are receiving less money per student than they did in the 2010-11 school year. And, Texas schools, unfortunately, are not alone.

According to the report linked below, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found that 34 states are spending less per student than they were before the recession. As the author, associate education professor Matthew Lynch, notes, “These dismal numbers mean a continued crackdown on school budgets despite an improving economy.”

“If we cannot fully fund our public schools how can we expect things like the achievement gap to close or high school graduation rates to rise?” he asks.

Good questions.

But the Tea Partiers around the country and their elected yes-people who are intent on crippling government don’t have an answer. Neither do the education profiteers, beyond milking every tax dollar they can for private schools or corporate charters.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/education_futures/2013/09/economy_improves_school_spending_continue_to_fall_-_so_what_gives.html?cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS2

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