Grading Texas – Page 143 – Texas State Teachers Association

Rick Perry’s report card

Now that Rick Perry has ended the governor-for-life speculation, this is a good time to start filling in the “Fs” on his education report card. He will be in office for another 18 months, but let us hope – fingers crossed – that most of the damage to public schools already has been done.

This account is far from complete, but here are some low points of Perry’s education record:

# A school finance overhaul in 2006 that provided fleeting property tax “relief” while permanently digging a multibillion-dollar hole in the public education budget.

# An erosion of financial support for public schools and teachers. In 2003-04, according to the earliest data I could readily obtain from the National Education Association, per-pupil spending in Texas was $1,094 less than the national average, and average teacher pay in Texas lagged $6,259 behind the national average. That was about halfway through Perry’s first elective term in the governor’s office. By the just completed 2012-13 school year, Texas’ per-pupil spending had fallen to $3,055 behind the national average, and its average teacher pay lagged $8,273 behind.

# A big chunk of the Texas erosion occurred in 2011, when Perry insisted upon and signed a budget that slashed $5.4 billion from public education. The Legislature restored about $4 billion of that this year, but spending is still lower than what it was three years ago. And, at Perry’s insistence, legislators left several billion dollars sitting untouched in the Rainy Day Fund.

# The 2011 budget cuts cost the jobs of 25,000 school employees, including 11,000 teachers, and crammed thousands of students into overcrowded classrooms.

# High-stakes standardized testing became more dominant and time-consuming under Perry, until parental outrage prompted the Legislature to start cutting back this year.

# Funding for higher education also has suffered under this governor. And, because of a tuition deregulation law that he signed, tuition has soared, while student financial aid has been cut back.

Perry doubtlessly will continue to try to claim job creation as a key part of his legacy. But it takes more than low taxes, lax regulations and government handouts to friendly corporations to create permanent, well-paying jobs and maintain a strong economy.

Tomorrow’s jobs require a strong public education system today, and Texas public schools can’t afford any more of Perry.

Throwing more water on Texas charter schools

A bad idea just got worse. The bad idea was the Legislature’s recent enactment – over TSTA’s opposition – of Senate Bill 2, which will significantly expand the number of charter schools in Texas over the next several years. Potential problems with the new law just got highlighted with the release of a new study from Stanford University showing that the existing charters in Texas, on average, are still performing more poorly than traditional public schools.

According to the study by Stanford’s Center for Research on Education, the average charter student in Texas received the equivalent of 22 fewer days of learning in reading and 29 fewer days of learning in math per year than students in traditional public schools.

The study, which covered several school years through 2010-11, measured the impact of charters on academic growth for Texas, 24 other states and the District of Columbia. Nationally, charter students realized an average of eight additional days per year of learning gains in both reading and math, but results varied widely among the states that were studied, with Texas among those on the short end.

You can read the entire report, including its methodology, by clicking on the link at the end of this post. The bottom line is that charters are still unproven for many states, including Texas, and are not the magical solution for educational problems, as supporters of SB2 claimed.

SB2 will allow the granting of as many as 305 additional charters – some with multiple campuses – in Texas by 2019. This would more than double the number of charters Texas has now, at a time when the Texas Education Agency doesn’t have enough resources to adequate regulate existing charters.

This expansion also was approved at a time when traditional public schools, which is where the vast majority of Texas students will continue to be educated, remain underfunded.

http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/NCSS%202013%20Final%20Draft.pdf

Confusing politics and educational needs

Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams, a Republican African American, praised today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act because, he said, it eliminates a “major hurdle” to helping children in ineffective school districts, such as Harris County’s North Forest ISD.

Huh? How does gutting a law designed to protect minority voters help children in struggling, largely minority school districts? It doesn’t, except in Williams’ mind.

The commissioner’s argument, however, is that the high court decision clears a potential barrier – Justice Department approval – to the Texas Education Agency’s plan to abolish North Forest and its elected school board on July 1 and put North Forest’s students into Houston ISD.

Williams obviously considers the gutting of the Voting Rights Act a political victory, but he shouldn’t confuse that with improving educational opportunities for the mostly African American students in North Forest. The biggest barrier to a quality education for them has been – and remains — an inadequate and unfair system of education funding, which has a particularly harmful effect on many low-income students. Simply moving these students from one school district to another is not going to change the basic problem. The much larger Houston ISD has more resources, but many of its students also are struggling for the same basic reason.

As the state’s public education commissioner, Williams has championed private school vouchers, high-stakes standardized testing and, now, a reversal of minority voting rights. When is he going to advocate for the resources that students and their teachers really need?

Merit pay a bad idea

El Paso ISD’s caretaker board of managers recently approved a 2.5 percent pay raise for all district employees. Yes, that is a bit of good news, but you may want to hold your applause because the board also has asked district officials to consider merit-based raises for the 2014-15 school year.

Merit pay is a very bad idea, and no one should know better than administrators in El Paso ISD. But some memories can be very short.

As a reminder, the El Paso district is still recovering from a cheating scandal that resulted in the previous superintendent – who had a financial incentive to artificially raise test scores — being sentenced to prison. The district was taken over by the state, and teachers are trying to help hundreds of children recover lost educational opportunities.

In naming the district’s temporary board of managers, state Education Commissioner Michael Williams included former state Rep. Dee Margo as president, even though Margo had used his one term in the House in 2011 to strike a blow against public schools. He voted for $5.4 billion in school budget cuts.

The cuts crammed tens of thousands of school children into overcrowded classrooms, cost thousands of school employees their jobs and prompted many of our best, most experienced teachers to take incentives to retire early. Consequently, over the past two years, the average teacher pay in this state dropped by $528 a year. Texas now has the dubious distinction of paying its teachers more than $8,000 below the national average.

This year, the Legislature, with the help of Margo’s successor, state Rep. Joe Moody, restored part of the $5.4 billion, and El Paso ISD and a number of other school districts have been approving pay raises. The raises, however, will do little to cure Texas’ compensation deficiency.

With average teacher pay in Texas lagging so far behind the national average, a Texas school district has no business considering merit pay for a small group of teachers.

We need to continue to raise pay for all teachers, the vast majority of whom are good educators. Overpaying “bad” teachers in Texas is not a problem. The problem is underpaying good teachers and forcing many of them to leave the classroom in order to be able to support their families. That is the real threat to educational quality for school children.

Education is a collaborative effort that takes several years to develop. A teacher’s success in the middle and later grades is affected by how well his or her students were taught in earlier grades. So, it wouldn’t be fair to single out, say, an eighth grade teacher for a merit pay raise without taking into account all the other teachers who have taught the same students over the years.

Another problem with merit pay is that it usually is based heavily on students’ scores on standardized tests, a woefully incomplete measure of a teacher’s success. High-stakes testing has become such a flash point for parent and educator frustration that the Legislature this year significantly reduced the number of graduation tests for high school students.

El Paso ISD, in particular, should know better than to try to tie pay to test scores. The district’s managers need to pull their heads out of the Chihuahuan Desert sand and shelve the merit idea.