Grading Texas – Page 84 – Texas State Teachers Association

As mistakes go, STAAR is a doozy

State Education Commissioner Mike Morath did the right thing by ruling that fifth and eighth graders who failed STAAR exams this year wouldn’t be held back a grade. He was reacting to problems with how STAAR exams have been handled by the testing vendor. But the commissioner still doesn’t get that the basic problem with STAAR is, well, STAAR.

“Kids in the classroom should never suffer from mistakes made by adults,” Morath announced.

That’s right, but the mistakes he was addressing – lost tests and other administrative snafus — are only symptoms of a much larger mistake – the entire STAAR testing regime and the high stakes it unnecessarily imposes on students and teachers. The entire scheme was concocted by adults, and children in classrooms will continue to suffer.

It’s time for Morath to tell the Legislature to listen to parents and educators and deep-six the entire testing program or, at least, scale it back significantly. But, despite being angered and embarrassed by problems with the testing vendor, Morath still supports the tests and would raise the stress level associated with them.

Remember, he has adopted a new teacher evaluation system tied to test scores, and, in a recent media interview, he claimed STAAR tests weren’t “overly burdensome.”

A study committee created by the Legislature – the Texas Commission on Next Generation Assessments and Accountability – has been studying STAAR and doesn’t appear ready to junk it yet either.

All of this makes it that much more important that educators, parents and others who have had it up to here with high-stakes testing accept the State Board of Education’s invitation to say what you think about it. Take the board’s survey at the link below.

Changing state laws – even unpopular ones – can be a long and frustrating process. But if you have a chance to tell elected state officials what you think, take it!

http://tea.texas.gov/About_TEA/News_and_Multimedia/Press_Releases/2016/State_Board_of_Education_seeks_public_input_about_assessments_and_accountability/

Time for educators to begin uniting against Trump

As I wrote in a recent blog post, elections have consequences for educators, their students and their families, even though educators don’t always vote in the best interests of their professions. If they did, Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick wouldn’t be governor and lieutenant governor of Texas. Well, the same observation – call it a warning, if you prefer — can be made about the current presidential race.

Although Hillary Clinton has finally clinched the Democratic nomination for president, the reality is still hard to accept for many dedicated Bernie Sanders supporters, including Marion Fox, a public school teacher from Maryland who told The Washington Post she was not giving up on Bernie and was inclined to write him in on her November ballot rather than vote for either Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.

“There is still a big margin that will write him in, and that is what we are hoping on. Bernie is the person that we want for president,” she said.

I don’t doubt that Marion Fox expresses the sentiments of perhaps millions of Bernie Sanders supporters, including many Texas educators who also may consider writing in Sanders as a protest vote against both Clinton and Trump in the general election. It would be a strong political statement – and a dangerous gesture.

The reality is this. The next president of the United States will be one of two people.

It will be Donald Trump, an ill-prepared, race-baiting bully who already has declared war on the majority of Texas public school students – Hispanics – and who hasn’t the faintest clue about the realities of public service, much less the responsibilities of holding the highest office in the free world, which he demonstrated again after the tragedy in Orlando over the weekend.

Or it will be Hillary Clinton, one of the most prepared presidential candidates in recent history and a woman who has dedicated much of her career to the needs of children – from her days advocating for low-income and disabled kids with the Children’s Defense Fund to the present, when she promises real educators will have a seat at the table when education policy is being drafted.

Aided and abetted by endorsements from Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick, Trump may very well cash in on Texas’ Republican electoral tradition, but there isn’t any point in making it easy for him. And every Texan who casts a write-in vote for Bernie Sanders or simply stays home in “protest” on Election Day will be siding with Trump – and all the political garbage and potentially devastating consequences that come with him.

Elections have consequences for education

Elections have consequences, and if we don’t keep reminding ourselves of this fact, someone else will – sometimes not very pleasantly.

On a postive note, the defeat of Mary Lou Bruner in the Republican runoff for the District 9 seat on the State Board of Education will have the kind of consequences most of us like. Ms. Bruner will have to confine her outrageous, ill-informed prejudices to Facebook and won’t have the chance to insert them into Texas’ public school curriculum and textbooks.

Educators played a significant role in defeating Mary Lou and giving the Republican nomination to TSTA-backed candidate Keven Ellis, the Lufkin ISD board president.

Because of their large numbers – there are more than 600,000 public school employees in Texas – educators and their families play important roles in elections. And, from the perspective of what’s in the best interest of their profession, they sometimes make the right choice, as in the case of Ellis, and sometimes they don’t.

Many educators were angered by Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent suggestion that spending more on education may be a “waste” of money. Many are angered by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s persistent attempts to privatize public education. And many have expressed outrage over the unanimous ruling by the Texas Supreme Court that it is OK for Abbott, Patrick and the legislative majority to continue to under-fund public schools.

Yet, only two years ago, many educators voted to elect Abbott, Patrick and four of the Supreme Court justices who issued the school finance ruling. Each won with 58 percent or more of the general election vote, and candidates don’t win that large a margin without the votes of many teachers, superintendents, other school employees and school board members.

Moreover, educators who choose to vote a straight Republican ticket this fall will vote to re-elect three more of the Supreme Court justices who opted to let the legislative majority continue to shortchange schools, students and educators’ jobs.

TSTA endorses candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, based on their stands on one issue and one issue alone – public education.

Individual educators, of course, have the right to vote for whomever they want, and I respect that right. As do most people, educators base their votes on a variety of issues that are important to them personally. But they may not always be in the best interest of their profession — or their students.

And the consequences keep piling up.

Governor doesn’t want to “waste” more money on education

Far from being a champion for more education funding, Gov. Greg Abbott has made remarks suggesting he thinks Texas and other states are “wasting money” on educators and school kids.

On a stop in Midland to promote his new book, the governor again defended the Texas Supreme Court decision that upheld Texas’ inadequate and unfair school finance system. And, according to the Midland Reporter-Telegram, he indicated he will not make improvements in education funding a priority during next year’s legislative session. Quite the contrary.

Despite new National Education Association rankings that show Texas spends about $2,700 less than the national average in per student funding, Abbott implied that spending more would “waste more money.”

Without offering any evidence, he said: “We have found from the states that spend more money – that waste more money – that they have a far inferior product. Money is not always the answer. You have to be smart. The focus is on educating children, not writing checks.”

What’s so “smart” about educating children in overcrowded classrooms, with outdated instructional materials and outdated technology? What’s so “smart” about over-testing and under-funding? What’s so “smart” about treating students like widgets?

Get your head out of the sand, governor.

http://www.mrt.com/news/top_stories/article_67a197a8-2225-11e6-b8f4-2b736bf346f8.html

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