Grading Texas

Think about STAAR the next time you vote

Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to win dismissal of a lawsuit brought by parents over STAAR testing is disappointing, but not really surprising. It’s part of Paxton’s pattern of opposing school kids, their parents and educators.

As a legislator in 2011, Paxton voted for $5.4 billion in school budget cuts. More recently, as attorney general, he defended in court the state’s inadequate school finance system, which the Texas Supreme Court recently upheld. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t bet money against the Supreme Court eventually throwing out the STAAR suit as well.

Educators, parents and students are continuing to feel the consequences of recent elections. In Paxton’s case, that’s the 2014 election, in which he was a poorly qualified candidate swept into office by heavy, straight-ticket Republican voting. Now, is a poorly qualified attorney general, continuing to under-cut public education.

Paxton also is under indictment and awaiting trial on securities fraud charges. Whatever happens to his criminal case, he needs to go away but isn’t in a big hurry to do so. For the record, TSTA supported attorney Sam Houston, Paxton’s opponent, in the 2014 general election because we knew Paxton was bad news and Houston valued the importance of public schools.

State Education Commissioner Mike Morath also is trying to get the STAAR lawsuit dismissed. He was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, who also prefers testing to adequate school funding and was promoted to higher office by the same voters and on the same day that Paxton was.

Parents have a right to sue over bad policy decisions and to get angry when the Texas Supreme Court says it’s OK for state leaders to continue to shortchange their children’s classrooms. But the best way to protect against bad educational policy is on Election Day, and parents, as well as educators, have missed many recent opportunities.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/TEA-Parents-have-no-standing-in-STAAR-lawsuit-8319513.php

Wasting money on discrimination instead of investing in education

You may recall that Gov. Greg Abbott suggested not too long ago that Texas may be “wasting money” if it started spending more on education. The governor has his head in the sand about the needs of school kids, but he isn’t against really wasting taxpayers’ money to keep the “wrong” people from voting.

In a legal effort that began when Abbott was attorney general, the state has spent more than $3.5 million defending Texas’ voter identification law in court, according to a recent Texas Tribune article. This is the law, enacted by the Republican majority in 2011, which requires voters to produce specific forms of photo identification before being allowed to cast election ballots. It is the strictest voter identification law in the country, with severe limits on what kind of photo ID can be used. A federal judge determined that 600,000 Texas voters lack the required photo ID and noted that the cost and difficulty involved in obtaining the documentation needed to get an ID was unconstitutionally burdensome.

But Abbott and other supporters of the law continue the legal fight. They contend the law is necessary to prevent voter fraud, an argument that is a lie. In truth, cases of voters trying to fraudulently impersonate someone else at polling places are virtually non-existent in Texas.

The real reason for the law is to discourage minority, low-income and elderly people from voting. These are the groups of Texans who are least able to obtain the accepted forms of identification and would be most likely to vote for candidates who support more funding for education and other important services. They would be likely to vote against candidates such as Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and many members of the legislative majority, who persist in under-funding state programs, and the voter ID law was passed to keep them from voting.

There are thousands of better, more productive ways to spend that $3.5 million. That much money, for example, would pay for educating 366 Texas kids for one school year, based on Texas’ current per-pupil expenditures.

The $3.5 million figure will grow as Texas officials continue to defend a discriminatory law. It is a wasteful and shameful expenditure of taxpayer dollars.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/17/texas-tab-voter-id-lawsuits-more-35-million/

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.

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