Grading Texas

I am not sure who came up with the concept of merit pay for teachers, but I suspect it wasn’t a teacher. More than likely it was a collection of selfanointed education “experts” who haven’t set foot in a classroom – except for maybe a few photo ops – since their own graduation days. Those are the folks, including Gov. Rick Perry, who have been persistently promoting the bad idea.

As you may have read by now, merit pay was shot down (again) by a new study. This one was conducted over three years by Vanderbilt University on the Nashville school system. It reinforces a study, released last fall, dismissing as ineffective a $300 million, Perrypromoted merit plan in Texas.

The Nashville study concluded that offering teachers annual bonuses of as much as $15,000 had no effect on student test scores. It suggested that teachers already were working so hard that the promise of extra money failed to convince them to work harder or change the way they taught.

About 300 math teachers in grades 5 through 8 participated in the study, which was backed by federal funding. Half the teachers were offered bonuses for hitting targets for gains on annual test scores, and half were ineligible for bonuses. Researchers found no significant differences on class results between the two groups.

“Pay reform is often thought to be the magic bullet. That doesn’t appear to be the case here,” Matthew Springer, a Vanderbilt education professor who led the study, was quoted in the Washington Post.

In the Texas study last year, researchers from Vanderbilt, Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri concluded that the meritbased Texas Educators Excellence Grant (TEEG) program also had no impact on student achievement gains. Their findings were based on TAKS reading scores for more than 140,000 students from participating schools.

The TEEG program, which grew out of a pilot merit pay program established by Perry, was discontinued by the Legislature after the 200809 school year. Lawmakers replaced that plan with a $200 millionayear firstcousin, the District Awards for Teacher Excellence (DATE), which also is based on improved test scores, among other indicators of student achievement. The program is optional with districts.

Merit pay is based on a faulty premise, the premise that teachers are in it for the money. Teachers want and deserve decent pay, but they aren’t in the classroom to get rich. They are in the classroom because they want to educate kids. Teachers who decide they can no longer afford the profession will soon try something else, not wait around for a chance at bigger paychecks because their students had higher test scores than the kids in the classroom down the hall.

Texas needs to take steps to increase teacher retention, including more opportunities for professional development and higher pay for experienced teachers. But merit pay isn’t the answer.

http://www.statesman.com/news/education/studyteacherbonusesdidntboostscores930377.html

Senate Education Chairwoman Florence Shapiro got some attention last week by announcing the obvious – Texas needs to scrap its school finance system and rebuild it. Hope may spring eternal, but I would be more encouraged were it not for a couple of things, namely:

# A revenue shortfall now forecast as large as $21 billion – It could inspire courage and creativity under the big pink dome in downtown Austin, particularly if there is a new governor next year. Or, it could spark blind, slashandburn panic.

# The current state leadership – Gov. Rick Perry and legislative leaders have known for years that the school finance system was in trouble but have largely ignored it, unless nudged by the courts. Perry made things even worse in 2006 (only four years ago) by insisting on legislative approval of a law that gave more emphasis to cutting local property taxes than funding schools. The result was a state finance scheme that falls $4.5 billion short each year of fully paying for those tax reductions, while many school districts struggle to balance their budgets.

Talk, even from legislative chairs, is inexpensive. Following through with positive action won’t be. Meanwhile, Texas’ future is on the line.

As reporter Gary Scharrer pointed out in the Houston Chronicle, Texas spends about $50 billion a year – in state, local and federal funds – to educate nearly 5 million children.

But the system is still heavily dependent on local property taxes. And, thanks to wide disparities in property wealth throughout the state, there are still large inequities in funding among school districts, despite the “Robin Hood” school finance law. Many schools are underfunded.

Rep. Scott Hochberg, a Democrat from Houston who understands the school finance system better than most of his colleagues, noted that previous efforts to calculate the true costs of education have been unsuccessful.

“When we get that information, we have historically ignored it because it’s too expensive,” he said.

Charles Miller, a financial expert from Houston who serves on a school finance study committee with Shapiro and Hochberg, proposed the creation of a new, independent policy center to provide legislators and taxpayers with recommendations for making public education more efficient and productive.

That may be a good idea, provided the Legislature doesn’t use it to simply delay providing some overdue financial assistance to school districts next session.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7204962.html

Sometimes, there is a very thin line between being political and being disingenuous, and the Republicans who purport to represent the best interests of Texas taxpayers in Washington have crossed it.

First, they thumb their noses at thousands of Texas educators and millions of Texas school kids by voting against the $830 million allocated to Texas in emergency federal education funding because of a Democratic amendment to ensure that the education dollars are actually spent on education.

Thanks to a Democratic majority, Congress passed the bill a few weeks ago anyway. But Texas’ money is still held up because Gov. Rick Perry has refused to assure the federal government that the education dollars will be spent on education.

What’s wrong with spending education money on education? Absolutely nothing, unless, apparently, you would rather monkey around with your constituents.

Now, the congressional Republicans are pushing for an amendment to strip the “education dollars for education” requirement from the funding law and allow the $830 million to begin flowing – sooner or later to Texas.

The ploy may work. But without a written restriction in the federal law, there will be absolutely no guarantee of a net gain of $830 million for Texas classrooms. The current state leadership – barring significant changes on Election Day more than likely will deduct at least part of that $830 million from state education funding, which is what congressional Democrats were trying to prevent.

Trust us, the Texas Republicans in Congress are saying.

But why should anyone in the education community trust the GOPers? First, they voted against educators. Now, I suspect, they are trying to fool them.

Most of you, I am sure, have never heard of Randy Rives. He is a rightwing businessman from Odessa who ran for the State Board of Education last spring but was defeated by Bob Craig of Lubbock, the more moderate incumbent, in the Republican primary.

He ran. He lost. End of story, right? Not exactly.

Rives apparently is still on a mission to “protect” the public schoolchildren of Texas from too much exposure to Islam. And, in case you haven’t heard or guessed by now, his likeminded advocates on the State Board of Education are ready to give him a forum.

According to The Dallas Morning News, the SBOE will consider a resolution next week warning publishers not to promote a proIslamic, antiChristian viewpoint in world history textbooks. The resolution was prompted by Rives.

A preliminary draft states that “diverse reviewers have repeatedly documented gross proIslamic, antiChristian distortions in social studies texts” across the United States and that some previous social studies textbooks in Texas also have been “tainted” with proIslamic, antiChristian views.

Some conservatives also claim that Middle Easterners are buying financial interests in textbook publishers.

The books about which the draft resolution complains no longer are being used in Texas schools. And, if adopted, the resolution won’t be binding on future boards adopting new textbooks.

The rightwingers pushing the resolution contend they want “balance” in the historical treatment of religion in the classroom, when, in truth, they do not. They want about as much “balance” as they gave to Hispanic and black historical figures in the recent rewrite of Texas’ social studies curriculum standards.

This is a slap at Islam, a religion practiced peacefully by millions of people worldwide, including many Texans. The resolution is promoted by a group of fearmongers who also deny the separation of church and state because they believe wrongly that the United States should be a Christian theocracy.

The main thing from which our school kids need protection is the State Board of Education.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091510dntexeducation.28d07a4.html