Grading Texas – Page 81 – Texas State Teachers Association

School budgets depend on legislators, not lottery players

Many Texans apparently have never outgrown fairy tales, although some fairy tales – like testing and privatization will help students, parents and educators live happily ever after – are too preposterous for anyone, except maybe Dan Patrick, to believe.

One 25-year-old fairy tale just won’t die, and that’s the one about the Texas Lottery putting public education on Easy Street. I still see Facebook comments wondering why the lottery isn’t solving one school budgetary problem or another, when, in fact, the lottery never has been a major financial contributor to public education and never was intended to be.

Voters, however, were encouraged to think that the lottery would be a financial windfall for schools when Gov. Ann Richards and legislative leaders were pushing the lottery in 1991 as a new revenue source. Voters approved it, and the misperception still hasn’t completely gone away.

The state’s share of lottery proceeds weren’t even dedicated to public education until 1997, and since then the lottery has contributed more than $19 billion to the Foundation School Program, including $1.225 billion in fiscal 2015.

That is a lot of money but only a small fraction of the more than $50 billion (with a b) in state, local and federal funds spent on public education each year. It’s a welcome drop in the bucket, but only the Legislature – not lottery players – can solve public education’s funding shortfall.

Many lottery players may have visions of unbelievable riches, but those are different fairy tales with (mostly) disappointing endings.

Another detour by education “reformers”

The Senate Education Committee heard testimony this week on what could become another detour from the main challenge facing public education in Texas – adequate and equitable funding for all school children.

This committee charge, handed down by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, calls for a “comprehensive performance review” of all of Texas’ public schools and a study of “performance-based funding mechanisms that allocate dollars based upon achievement versus attendance.”

Would-be vendors eager for a share of tax dollars for assisting in such a study already are lining up, I am sure. It was interesting, though, that the first two school performance “experts” to testify before the panel yesterday had different opinions on which school districts should be on the high performance list and apparently were measuring student performance differently.

If the Legislature persists in ordering such a study, the result could be even higher stakes for STAAR testing, even though a large number of educators and parents want lawmakers to abolish or heavily curtail standardized testing, not enhance it.

The study also may lead to proposals to reward school districts with financial incentives for being more “efficient” in churning out high test scores or producing higher graduation rates. But if lawmakers don’t add more money to the system, that would worsen the financial plight of districts with limited tax bases and high-needs and low-performing students who require more – not less – resources.

Instead of tinkering with performance-based funding, the first thing the Legislature needs to do next session is draft a new school funding plan that provides adequate funding for all of Texas’ 5.2 million public school children.

If they really want to improve the educational climate in Texas, lawmakers also will repeal or sharply cut back on standardized testing, except as a diagnostic tool, and will beat back attempts to pass vouchers and other school privatization schemes being proposed under the fiction of “school or parental choice.”

Some legislators, however, are easily diverted by just about any fad or privatization gimmick that ignores the real needs of educators and their students.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/08/03/scrap-school-finance-system-gop-school-groups-agre/

Politicians, not educators, have made testing a “complex” issue

After the study commission with the overly long name punted on the issue of STAAR and standardized testing, some of its members apparently felt the need to offer excuses for ignoring the growing, anti-standardized testing sentiment among educators and parents.

Pauline Dow, the chief instructional officer for North East ISD in San Antonio, was quoted in The Texas Tribune as saying that testing and measuring student achievement is a “complex issue and that we have to think about it in that way.”

Politicians, not educators, have made testing a “complex issue.” And I mean the politicians – the legislative majority and recent Texas governors – who have spent more energy imposing punitive, high-stakes tests on third-graders than they have on providing the resources that all students and educators need for real classroom success.

Educators know the importance of testing in measuring student progress and, just as importantly, in diagnosing a student’s strengths and weaknesses and planning how to address them.

Instead of addressing educators’ and parents’ concerns, the commission issued a report full of bureaucratic language that doesn’t really address the damage that the standardized testing regime has inflicted on Texas classrooms for more than a generation now. In fact, Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, the retiring chairman of the House Public Education Committee, warned its potential interpretation by the Legislature could result in an expansion of standardized testing.

The Legislature, which convenes in January, ultimately will decide the future of testing in Texas. But if parents and educators don’t make it clear – loudly and often – to their legislators that high-stakes, standardized testing has to go, the legislative majority isn’t likely to make meaningful changes.

Another idea for ripping off schools and taxpayers

Add another organization to the list of advocates trying to rip off taxpayers and shortchange millions of school children under the guise of education “reform.”

The new group, Texans for Education Opportunity, will promote various so-called “school choice” alternatives. Its main goal is to create “education savings accounts” – another name for vouchers — that would give tax dollars to parents, as much as $7,800 per year per child, to spend on private school tuition, private tutors or even books and other materials for homeschooling.

It’s a bad idea, which means it – or something very similar – also will be promoted by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the advocate-in-chief for vouchers and any number of other bad school privatization schemes. As he has made clear by words and deeds on numerous occasions, Patrick would rather take money from public schools than adequately fund them. And that is exactly what this plan would do.

Thomas Ratliff, a Republican member of the State Board of Education, has accurately described the proposal as an entitlement program. At $7,800 per child, he said, it would cost taxpayers $4.7 billion a year for the 600,000 kids who already attend private schools or are home-schooled. And it would do nothing to fulfill the state’s obligation under the Texas Constitution to provide a system of free public schools to its children.

In fact, it would weaken our already under-funded public schools by diverting more money from them, even though public schools will continue to educate the vast majority of Texas school children.

It’s a selfish, shortsighted idea.

In an article published in Quorum Report, Ratliff also warned that some alleged “home-schoolers” would pull their children out of school and use their state education debit cards issued under the program to put money into their own pockets while ignoring their children’s education. If you think people like that don’t exist, think again.

“The state will then pay again, either to remediate those kids or absorb the social costs of welfare, prison, etc. due to their lack of education,” he wrote.

Ratliff also noted that the term “education savings account” was misleading because many families don’t pay as much as $7,800 per year per child in taxes. Instead, it’s an entitlement.

“This idea takes the word ‘entitlement’ to a whole new level for Texas,” he said. “It is nothing more than a huge handout with no way to control the price tag. Hardly a conservative idea.”

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