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Grading Texas

Another attempt to rewrite Texas history

 

Cynthia Dunbar did the school children of Texas a huge favor when she voluntarily retired from the State Board of Education several years ago. But she hasn’t retired her viewpoint that the only aspects of Texas and American history worth recording were coated in white – skin color, not snow.

She also had a fundamentalist, theocratic view of government, but that’s another issue.

Now, as misfortune would have it, Dunbar is back as a contributor to the first and only, so far, textbook on Mexican American history submitted for State Board of Education approval this year. And, to no great surprise, it mostly ignores Mexican American contributions to Texas’ history and distorts what it does present.

It’s a disservice to all of Texas’ school children and a slap in the face to an ethnic group that is a majority of Texas’ public school enrollment and rapidly becoming a majority of the state’s population.

My thanks to Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network and Patrick Michels of the Texas Observer for raising flags. Michels’ story is linked below. Fortunately, school districts can select different books if they choose to schedule a Mexican American studies elective, and some publishers may provide them, bypassing the State Board of Education.

“What’s most notable about the text, on first glance, is how little attention is given to the history of Mexican-American people,” Michels writes. A passage on Latin American literature, for example, features well-known writers from Colombia, Chile and Brazil.

In one passage of the book, the authors write, “Chicanos, on the other hand, adopted a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.”

Bunk. Almost sounds as if Donald Trump were a ghost-writer.

Chicanos have spent much of their history in Texas demanding fair working conditions, livable wages and the right to vote. In fact, they still are fighting for the right to vote in the wake of the legislative majority’s enactment of a voter identification law that was designed specifically to prohibit low-income Hispanics and African Americans from voting.

As the Texas Observer points out, this book probably isn’t what State Board of Education Member Ruben Cortez and other supporters had in mind when they won approval of a Mexican American studies elective.

But it is exactly what you would expect from people who continue to deny Texas’ history and jeopardize its future.

https://www.texasobserver.org/mexican-american-studies-textbook-dunbar/

 

 

 

Dan Patrick: schoolyard bully

 

My recollection is that Texas voters in 2014 elected Dan Patrick lieutenant governor, not bully-in-chief. But the super-charged ideologue with an ego to match can’t help himself.

A couple of weeks ago Patrick was publicly bullying a county judge who wanted to temporarily raise property taxes to keep his community safe. Now, this week, he tried to bully a school superintendent for adopting a restroom policy to accommodate the preferences of transgender children.

I applaud the superintendent, Kent Scribner of Fort Worth ISD, for refusing to back down in the face of the lieutenant governor’s demogoguery and politically driven hysteria. Patrick claims such transgender accommodations endanger public safety. They don’t.

The school children of Texas have nothing to fear from their transgender classmates. But all school children and their parents do have something to fear from Texas’ biggest schoolyard bully, Dan Patrick. He picks on kids as well as adults, and not just on transgender kids.

Here is a sample of what the schoolyard bully has done, and it amounts to a lot more than strong-arming a classmate’s lunch money. We are talking about strong-arming a generation’s future:

# Patrick’s vote in 2011 to cut $5.4 billion from school budgets forced thousands of kids into overcrowded classrooms, laid off some of their best teachers and put who knows how many children behind the learning curve.

# His vote in 2013 against the entire state budget — against all funds for education, health care, transportation, public safety and everything else state government pays for — would have worsened the plight of millions of children, had not Patrick’s more-responsible colleagues in Austin voted for the necessary spending.

# He continues to short-change school children while demanding that the same kids, including eight-year-olds in the third grade, stress out over STAAR testing.

# To make it even worse for these same kids, the bully will continue to try to take money they need for teachers, books and computers and give it to private schools.

# Thousands of children are coming to school sick – or not coming to school at all – because Patrick and his accomplices in the legislative majority insist on under-funding health care for low-income kids, who account for 60 percent of Texas’ public school enrollment.

Now, the bully is trying to barge into school bathrooms – figuratively anyway, but nevertheless in a very obnoxious way.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/10/superintendent-wont-resign-over-transgender-bathro/

 

 

 

More problems with education “reform”

 

Here’s another reason against being too eager to contract education “reform” fever – high school graduation rates.

In a new report released this week by a consortium of groups promoting the goal of graduating more high school students on time – that is, within four years – two darlings of the “reform” movement – charter and virtual schools – came up short.

Nationally, according to the “Building a Grad Nation” report, charter schools, which accounted for only 8 percent of all U.S. high schools, accounted for 30 percent of high schools that failed to graduate more than 67 percent of their students on time at the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Virtual schools were even worse. Virtual schools accounted for only 1 percent of high schools in the country but accounted for 87 percent of the high schools with failing graduation rates. We all should be grateful that a legislative proposal last year to dump millions of tax dollars into virtual charters failed, following intense lobbying against it by TSTA and other public education advocates.

Some virtual operators would have made off like bandits, while thousands of Texas kids would have been victimized. The same operators, however, will be back before the Legislature next session, holding their hands out again, so the fight will continue.

Charters, virtual and alternative high schools combined accounted for 52 percent of the high schools with graduation rates of 67 percent or less, although collectively they accounted for only 14 percent of the country’s high schools.

Alternative schools and some charters have high proportions of low-income, at-risk students. But so do traditional public schools. About 60 percent of Texas’ public school enrollment, for example, is low-income. But the legislative majority continues to under-fund them at a rate about $2,700 below the per-student national average.

Traditional public high schools accounted for 84 percent of all U.S. high schools and only 7 percent of high schools with graduation rates of 67 percent or less in 2013-14.

http://www.gradnation.org/report/2016-building-grad-nation-report

Kicking the kids down the road

 

When postponing the correct budgetary choice – which they often do – Texas legislators sometimes talk about “kicking the can down the road,” or putting off for another 10 or 20 years what they should do now. This past session, a more-accurate characterization of what the legislative majority did would be “kicking the kids down the road.”

Under-funded public schools and an under-funded foster care system are among numerous examples of this attitude that can be found in the current state budget. And the lengthy Texas Tribune story linked below describes another example, harmful cuts – worth about $350 million in state and federal funds — to the state’s Early Childhood Intervention Program.

This program provides essential services to children with significant health and development problems, and their number is growing. But these kids’ and their families’ cries were drowned out last year by the business community’s demands for tax reductions and the tea party’s demands for spending cuts.

The children and their needs, however, aren’t going away. Pretty soon, many of them will be in public school classrooms, and they will continue to need special attention, maybe even more attention as they grow older.

“As ECI (Early Childhood Intervention) services take a hit, our elementary schools should plan on providing expensive special education to more students,” said Stephanie Rubin, the chief executive of Texans Care for Children, an advocacy group.

Schools and educators, although under-funded, will be ready. But there is something inherently wrong with a state policy that would rather “kick kids down the road” than address their needs now.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/03/advocates-warn-cuts-early-childhood-intervention-p/

 

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