Grading Texas – Page 82 – Texas State Teachers Association

Education is a life-changer – for most people

Formal education is a life-changer, and over the years it obviously has improved countless millions of lives. But education has its limits. It can’t always erase prejudicial thinking, as we are constantly reminded.

Two of the most recent reminders are Steve King, a U.S. congressman from Iowa who believes only white people have made significant contributions to the development of civilization, and Cynthia Dunbar, a former member of the State Board of Education who has helped publish a proposed textbook that denies and misrepresents the contributions of Hispanics to Texas and American culture. In truth, people of all colors and ethnicities have made important contributions to what Texas, America and the world are today.

King and Dunbar are educated people, although Dunbar, as an SBOE member several years ago, denounced the public education system as a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.” It is a public education system that, in Texas, has a majority enrollment of Hispanic students.

King and Dunbar can’t see past their near-sighted, white views of history, culture and politics in a rapidly changing world that people like them just can’t bring themselves to accept. And many of their kindred spirits were in the convention hall in Cleveland this week, cheering what they would like to believe is Donald Trump’s promise to “make America white again.”

Some people could draw that interpretation from Trump’s pledges to build a wall on the Mexican border, round up undocumented immigrants and ban Muslims from entering the country. Moreover, the convention’s delegates were overwhelmingly Anglo. According to a preliminary figure reported by the Washington Post, only 18 of the 2,472 delegates who gathered in Cleveland were African American.

It’s a dangerous world, at home and abroad, but prejudice and fear aren’t solutions.

The Dallas Morning News column linked below discusses King’s comments, Dunbar’s textbook and the ongoing battle to educate young people against intellectual blindness and intolerance. It’s a tough fight that’s getting tougher.

http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20160719-texas-students-need-better-history-books-to-avoid-becoming-like-steve-king.ece

When education isn’t a priority

State Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes and members of the State Board of Education were squabbling with each other yesterday over who was dropping the ball in preparing Texas young people for college. They were squabbling with the wrong people.

The discussion included, among other things, high school graduation requirements, scores on college entrance exams and whether Texas universities were adequately training K-12 teachers. The basic problem, however, is not with the universities, the public schools and certainly not with teachers.

The problem – and it has been this way for a long time — is with a governor and legislative majority that is intent on wrecking public education by under-funding public schools and wasting tax dollars and teachers’ valuable time on punitive, counter-productive standardized testing. That is the message that Paredes and members of the state board need to take firmly and repeatedly to Gov. Abbott and the legislators who are morally failing their responsibility to Texas school children. Education Commissioner Mike Morath, Paredes’ counterpart over K-12, should join them.

Consider these factors, which were missing from yesterday’s discussion:

# Texas spends $2,690 below the national average in per-student funding, and many school districts haven’t recovered from the $5.4 billion in education budget cuts imposed by the legislative majority in 2011. That means thousands of school kids are in over-sized classes with insufficient individual attention from teachers.

# Average teacher pay in Texas is more than $6,000 below the national average. Consider below-average pay and the fact that teachers have to waste hours of instruction time on STAAR preparation and it is small wonder that about half of the teachers who will begin their careers this fall will find another line of work within the next five years. That is a loss of good teachers that Texas can ill afford to keep suffering.

Abbott and the legislative majority even deliberately shortchanged a pre-K program that the governor claimed was a top “priority.”

In truth, nothing about the public education system is a real priority of the governor and his legislative allies, and that’s the real problem.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/20/Texas-Leaders-Spread-Blame-Over-Not-Prepping-Kids/

http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Texas-education-officials-differ-on-student-8399660.php

Pre-K money doesn’t match Abbott’s rhetoric

Despite the release of $116 million in state pre-K grants this week and despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s claims to the contrary, early education has never been the governor’s top priority. It certainly wasn’t during last year’s legislative session, when the money was appropriated.

The governor’s top priorities then and now were tax cuts and limited government, which includes squeezing education and other programs for children.

The $116 million in pre-K grants pales in comparision to the $3.9 billion – that’s billion, with a b — that Abbott and the legislative majority approved in tax cuts last year. The lion’s share of those cuts — $2.6 billion – were to the state’s main business tax. And state leaders left several billion additional dollars in the bank, rather than invest in the children they claim to support.

So Texas still spends much less per student on education than most states, while enrollment continues to grow by about 85,000 students per year. And Abbott already has asked the Legislature to continue shortchanging schools when lawmakers convene in January.

About half of the state’s school districts received the pre-K grants. But they will receive only $734 per student, about half of the $1,500 per kid that Abbott had dangled in front of the schools if they agreed to impose “tougher” pre-K standards.

The new grant program doesn’t even completely restore the $200 million that the legislative majority cut from pre-K in 2011. And it doesn’t fund full-day pre-K, despite research showing that full-day pre-K is much more effective, particularly for low-income children, who now account for about 60 percent of Texas’ public school enrollment.

As the AP story linked below points out, the Duncanville school district from which Abbott graduated was among more than 20 districts that applied for a pre-K grant but ended up passing on the money.

“It kind of became diminishing returns,” a Duncanville spokeswoman explained.

Abbott no doubt will continue to talk about how important pre-K is, but his commitment doesn’t match his rhetoric.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Abbott-s-pre-K-funding-falls-short-8344735.php?mc_cid=b03922c831&mc_eid=d716db2067

Hillary Clinton vows to rein in testing

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, she will part company with her two predecessors – George W. Bush and Barack Obama – and reduce the role of standardized testing in public schools.

In an address to the National Education Association’s annual convention today, Clinton said testing should be restored to its “original purpose” and that is as a diagnostic tool to help teachers and parents see how their kids are doing and where they need addtitional work for improvement.

“When you’re forced to teach to a test, our children miss out on some of the most valuable lessons and experiences they can gain in the classroom,” she said.

Over-testing, she added, hurts low-income children the most because the poorest schools are forced to cut back on art, music and other electives essential to a full educational experience, opportunities to which students in wealthier neighborhoods have more ready access.

“This is a form of inequality, and we are not going to stand for it,” Clinton said.

Clinton also called for universal pre-K, higher pay for educators and giving educators a break on student loans. She vowed to work to improve public schools, not privatize them, and to actually listen to educators.

In other words, her view of education is the opposite of what has been practiced by the political majority in Austin for the past several years.

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