Grading Texas

With the lion’s share of attention focused on school funding and property tax relief during the recent legislative session, one of the most-hated features of our public schools – the STAAR testing regime – was allowed to tighten its stress-inducing hold on our educational system.

STAAR is hated by many educators, parents and other voters, based on TSTA polling, but the powers-that-be in Austin still think they know better than educators about how to rate the performances of Texas students and schools. So, legislators inflicted only minor wounds on the monster.

They repealed the requirement that fourth and seventh graders take a stand-alone STAAR writing test, effective Sept. 1, 2021. They ordered some changes in the administration of other exams, including a new prohibition on the tests having more than 75 percent of questions in multiple choice format. And they will allow some STAAR tests to be spread over multiple days to shorten testing periods.

Lawmakers also ordered the state education commissioner to appoint two advisory committees on test development to assure the validity and academic appropriateness of exams, following reports that some STAAR exams were written above grade level.

And they decreed that school districts not use STAAR scores in developing new performance pay programs for teachers, a ban that I expect many districts will try to circumvent.

The Legislature inflicted minor wounds when a full-frontal assault was what most of their constituents really wanted. So STAAR test scores will continue to play the dominant role in allegedly measuring student “success” and remain the backbone of the school “accountability” system.

Accurately or not, test scores will continue to define “struggling” campuses and, in turn, keep the door wide open for more takeovers of neighborhood schools by corporate-style charter chains. This, in turn, will transfer more of our tax dollars from school districts into the bank accounts of for-profit charter management companies.

The same STAAR scores, beginning this summer, will determine which schools get As, Bs, Cs, Ds or Fs. Most of the Ds and Fs will go to campuses with high percentages of low-income students, who historically have struggled the most with STAAR testing. Even with the new school finance law, those kids still may not get all the financial support they need from the state, but they will get a new stigma

And taxpayers who hate STAAR will continue to shell out millions of dollars every year to pay for it.

Does anyone know anyone in the teaching profession, at least in Texas, who believes he or she is lavishly paid? Yes, it’s a stupid question.

The reason I ask is because I saw a story in a major Texas newspaper the other day about the state Senate’s so-called “merit” pay proposal. The story said the plan would allow “local school districts to lavish additional salary increases upon the top-ranked teachers.”

Lavish? That’s about as likely as the city of Austin building a subway system.

According to one online dictionary I consulted, the word, “lavish,” when used as a verb, means to “bestow something in generous or extravagant quantities on.” Or, according to another dictionary, “to expend or give in great amounts or without limit.”

When used as an adjective, the word means sumptuous, luxurious, opulent, rich or expensive.

Only in a teacher’s wildest dreams….

The average teacher salary in Texas is $54,122, according to the Texas Education Agency, or $54,155, based on the National Education Association’s calculations.

Compared to other states and the District of Columbia, that pay isn’t even average. It’s $7,600 below average, which is hardly opulent.

Even the $5,000 across-the-board pay increase approved by the Senate would keep Texas teacher pay below average, and that figure may get smaller as the House and the Senate negotiate a final school finance bill.

Merit pay, which TSTA opposes, wouldn’t make any teachers rich either. Instead, if it were tied to test scores, as allowed in the Senate bill, it would keep lavishing millions of dollars on testing companies.

House Speaker Dennis Bonnen says he opposes tying merit pay to STAAR scores because the House doesn’t want to increase the emphasis on high-stakes testing. And the House wants to give all school employees – other professional and support staff, in addition to teachers — a raise.

So stay tuned for the final word on educator pay as the House and Senate continue their negotiations. We hope a pay raise will be broad and substantial, but we all know better than to expect anything lavish.

This may sound strange, but I want to give Rolando Posada, a regional director for the IDEA charter chain, a little credit, but not for trying to shutter untold numbers of neighborhood public schools in San Antonio and a growing number of other cities.

Posada doesn’t deserve credit for undermining the promise of a free public education for every Texas child, regardless of family circumstances, classroom behavior, academic record or ability to win a lottery. He does deserve some credit, though, for being candid, although it probably was unintentional.

Posada recently was interviewed by Texas Public Radio about IDEA’s plan to double its San Antonio enrollment to nearly 24,000 students, aided and abetted by a $117 million taxpayer grant from U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the country’s top cheerleader for school privatization.

Posada said publicity was good for IDEA because “it draws all sorts of customers.”

Customers? I thought we still called them students. You know, the boys and girls who come to school every day. They are students, and with their parents and educators they form a school community.

To IDEA and other corporate-style charter chains, though, students and their families are customers who feed the bottom line – with our tax dollars. And these tax dollars — $2.2 billion in 2017 alone — are being diverted from under-funded traditional public schools.

Oh sure, charters are technically public schools. But there are distinct differences between charters and the public schools that most of us grew up in and graduated from.

Charters are mainly considered “public” schools because they get tax money. Aside from that, corporate charter chains, such as IDEA, operate like private schools.

They may be organized as non-profits, but many are operated by for-profit management companies, and they love the smell of money that their “customers” bring with them.

They get paid for each student, just like regular public schools do. But your neighborhood public school is operated by a local school board accountable to voters. The people who run corporate charters don’t answer to taxpayers, and some charters are operated by private boards headquartered in other states.

Unlike traditional public schools, which enroll every school-age child who lives in the district and applies, charters can polish their reputations by cherry-picking their “customers.” They don’t have to accept children with disciplinary problems – IDEA tries to avoid them – and they often find ways to exclude children with poor grades and special needs. Just 5 percent of IDEA’s students receive special education services.

And many charter schools require a lottery for admission.

Traditional public schools don’t have lotteries. They just seek waivers from class-size limits or haul in more portable classrooms when demand exceeds capacity.

Charters, overall, don’t perform any better than traditional public schools. Many perform worse. According to Texas Education Agency data from 2012-17, charters in Texas had an overall dropout rate three times that of traditional public schools and overall poorer performance records.

Posada has said his goal is to have an IDEA school less than 10 minutes away from every family In San Antonio. This isn’t the pursuit of educational excellence so much as it is greed for tax dollars. And, in IDEA’s view, the customers – with their backpacks full of taxpayer cash — are there for the picking.

Let us assume for a moment that legislators – either during the closing weeks of this regular session or in a summer special session – will agree on a plan to boost state funding for public schools by $6.3 billion over the next two years. If they do, applaud politely but don’t get carried away.

Think of $6.3 billion as a down payment on long-neglected repairs, the start of a long climb out of a deep hole, and make it clear to the governor and lawmakers that we expect them to make school finance improvements a priority for years to come.

I say $6.3 billion because this is the amount of new education funding that the House and the Senate have approved in separate legislation but with different details for spending it. House and Senate leaders are attempting to find agreement on those differences.

Even with the new funding, though, the hole for educators and Texas school children will remain very deep. As indicated by the National Education Association’s latest analysis of TEA’s school finance data, Texas is actually spending $71 less per student in average daily attendance (ADA) this school year than it did in 2017-18.

NEA determined that Texas is spending an average $10,712 per student in 2018-19, the school year drawing to a close, compared to $10,783 last year. This includes state, local and federal funding for school operations. It is more than $2,900 below the national average and ranks Texas 39th in per-ADA spending among the states and the District of Columbia.

The average teacher salary in Texas increased from $53,334 in 2017-18 to $54,155 in 2018-19 but still trailed the national average of $61,700 by more than $7,000.

“These figures mean overcrowded classrooms, high teacher turnover and a growing threat to the Texas economy,” TSTA President Noel Candelaria pointed out.

“We are happy that the Legislature is taking steps this session to increase state funding for public schools, but this will be only a down payment. It will take several more sessions to fully overcome years of neglect and misplaced priorities,” he added.

Candelaria also noted: “School finance changes must include guaranteed pay raises for all teachers and all other school employees who devote every day to educating our children and providing for their safety and well-being.”