Grading Texas

TSTA lawsuit: students aren’t formulas, and teachers aren’t robots

Educators and parents get it. There are too many, high-stakes standardized tests in our classrooms. They steal time from the real work of teaching and learning and cause many children so much stress they destroy the joy of learning — and that is shameful.

Even the U.S. Congress gets it. That mostly dysfunctional group of Republicans and Democrats who don’t even like to agree on what day it is sensed so much public, bipartisan aversion to excessive testing that it junked the main test-generator, the No Child Left Behind Act, late last year, repealing the federal requirement that school accountability ratings be tied to test scores. In its place, they enacted the Every Student Succeeds Act, which encourages states to design accountability and teacher evaluation systems that more accurately and fairly reflect what educators actually do in the classroom.

But Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath still doesn’t get it. In one of his first major official acts, he approved a teacher evaluation system that would require school districts to base at least 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation on so-called student growth measures, essentially the test scores that we waste too much time on now.

Texas teachers could be left trying to figure out an incomprehensible formula that allegedly compares their students’ test scores to the scores their students should be making, based on who knows how many factors that Einstein may or may not have been able to figure out.

TSTA opposes several features of Morath’s evaluation plan, and we told him so, to no avail. So, now TSTA is suing him, specifically because we believe his student-growth requirement exceeds the commissioner’s authority under state law.

If Morath doesn’t understand the growing professional and public opposition to excessive, high-stakes testing, then maybe the man who appointed him, Gov. Greg Abbott, doesn’t understand it either.

But the truth is this. Students are not faceless or mindless numbers to crunch into meaningless formulas. And teachers aren’t robots to be rated on what those formulas spit out.

Some things are more important than a STAAR test

Sometimes, it seems as if our state government – a majority of our leaders, anyway — cares more about the score a kid makes on the STAAR test than whether that child had anything to eat before coming to campus that morning, had a safe place to sleep the night before or was even healthy enough to be in school.

Am I exaggerating? Well, consider the fact that, beginning with the third grade, Texas school children and their teachers are hammered not only with several versions of the STAAR but also with hours of benchmark tests and other forms of preparation because government blindly equates passing STAAR scores with success. With school accountability ratings and, in some cases, teachers’ jobs at stake, government has made a big deal about how well childen do or don’t do on STAAR.

But does our government make as big a deal about issues of far more critical importance to millions of Texas children and their families than a test score – issues like, say, poverty, health care or child abuse? You be the judge.

One of every four Texas children lives in poverty, with even higher percentages among two minority groups – 33 percent of Hispanic kids and 32 percent for African Americans. Many of these kids are coming to school hungry, and it’s been this way for years. It also has been years – if ever – since state leaders made a concerted effort to really do something about it.

(In all these cases, I am talking about the majority of legislators and other state leaders because a minority of lawmakers are really trying to do the right thing but are consistently outvoted.)

Some 11 percent of Texas children – several hundred thousand — don’t have health insurance, which means many kids are coming to school sick and many more aren’t coming to school at all, or not very regularly. This is an old, recurring problem that recent governors and the legislative majority have stubbornly refused to address, even to the point of rejecting hundreds of millions of dollars in available Medicaid funds under the Affordable Care Act. And the legislative majority worsened the problem last year by cutting $350 million from the existing Medicaid program, cuts affecting an estimated 60,000 disabled children, including many in foster care.

Meanwhile, foster care in Texas remains a mess, as it has been for years, with several top level administrators recently resigning and many Texas children either being subjected to abuse or in danger of abuse from caregivers with woefully inadequate state supervision.

Dogged by a federal judge and some embarrassing publicity, the Legislature appropriated some extra money for Child Protective Services last year and talked tough about the need to crack down on abuse of foster children. But the Legislature spent much more – almost $4 billion – on tax cuts, and it left several billion dollars in the bank, while caseworkers remained overwhelmed and children remained imperiled.

The tough talk is continuing, following the widely publicized death of a 4-year-old Grand Prairie girl, who died of abuse earlier this year, and the arrest of a 17-year-old, abused runaway from foster care, who is accused of murdering a University of Texas coed on the Austin campus a couple of weeks ago.

Most foster parents, I am sure, are doing a great job taking care of vulnerable children with difficult issues to address. But the problem is that state regulators aren’t finding all the abusers and potential abusers. Two of the main reasons they aren’t is because there aren’t enough caseworkers and turnover among caseworkers is high. The Grand Prairie girl who died was one of 70 cases her caseworker was trying to juggle. Ideally, that caseworker should have been responsible for no more than 12 kids.

Gov. Abbott and legislative leaders have ordered reforms. But reforms — without significant, additional funding – can’t do much to help caseworkers keep up with staggering caseloads and perform more than a cursory job of supervision and intervention to protect children’s lives.

Year in and year out, STAAR scores are a big deal with state government. The most vulnerable children in Texas, however, seem to be a big deal with state leaders only when tragedy strikes

Trying to deny that money is important to education

An article about Austin’s Eanes ISD, posted yesterday on TSTA’s Facebook page, made a strong point for the fact that money is critically important for public schools. But some people – and not just our elected state leaders – will continue to deny reality, or at least try to spin themselves into denial. Don’t let them spin you.

The story from the Houston Chronicle noted that Eanes, home to Westlake High School in a wealthy suburban area of West Austin, is the best school district in the state and the second best in the nation, according to Niche, a school rating website. The article also notes that the district spends more than $18,000 per student each school year, about double the state average and several thousand dollars more than the national average as well.

This pays for a lot of good teachers, computers, the best instructional aids, reasonable class sizes – all the ingredients for a quality learning environment. This level of expenditure certainly is not representative of Texas public schools as a whole. Nor is the Eanes demographic mix. Eanes’ students are mostly while, while most Texas public school students are minority and low-income.

Deliberately or not, however, one Facebook respondent missed the point of the story, and I am noting his comment because it so clearly mirrors the attitude of the state leadership, which continues to under-fund public schools in general and denies money is an issue.

This reader wrote that the article “implies that if we throw more money at a school that students will magically begin to learn.” He admitted that money can “help make things easier,” but added, “To insinuate that others can’t reach the same level because of economic status is the kind of ‘entitlement society’ thinking that leads to false hope.”

In the first place, the state of Texas has never “thrown” money at public schools. The last time I checked, average spending per pupil in Texas, based on average daily attendance, was about half what Eanes spends and about $2,000 less than the national average. Some school districts are spending less now per student than they did before the legislative majority cut $5.4 billion from public education five years ago.

The “entitlement society” remark is a tired old relic that also misses the point. Many low-income children in property poor school districts do very well academically, thanks to their hard work and the hard work of dedicated, underpaid teachers. But we will never know how many more students from those same schools also could prosper if their teachers had more help and more resources.

Entitlement? Yes, under the Texas Constitution, every child in a Texas public school is entitled to a quality education and an equal chance at success. It is a basic constitutional right that the governor and the legislative majority are failing to fulfill and, in the process, dashing the hopes of thousands of Texas children.

Another bad voucher idea: letting the “market” determine school funding

Many bad ideas in the political arena never really go away. They get resurrected, often under different names. Private school voucher proponents have resorted to a number of euphemisms, including “school choice,” “tax credit scholarships,” and “education savings accounts,” a term that the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is now trying to peddle.

In case you are not familiar with this libertarian-leaning group, TPPF wants to underfund most of state government, including education, and then privatize what’s left. Let the free market work for those Texans who are fortunate enough or wealthy enough to profit from the ride, and the heck with just about everyone else. That is not their public message, of course, but that would be the net effect, including as it would apply to educational opportunities for Texas children.

According to the Texas Observer article by Patrick Michels, linked below, TPPF has published a new report concluding that it is “fruitless” for the Legislature to continue debating how much more money it may cost to provide an adequate education for all students, now 5.2 million and growing. One of the co-authors is Kent Grusendorf, a long-time voucher advocate and former chairman of the House Public Education Committee.

In the current school finance lawsuit, a state district judge has ruled the state should spend a lot more money to create an adequate, equitable and constitutional school finance system, but that ruling is being reviewed by the Texas Supreme Court.

Instead of spending more money on schools, TPPF is proposing that parents be given tax-paid “education savings accounts” (vouchers) to improve their choice of schools for their children.

In TPPF’s view, Michels writes, “The only way to know what education should cost…is to privatize it and see what people are willing to pay. Kids could pick the schools that rise to the challenge, and the schools with no students would close.”

He adds, “Things might get a little messy for the last kids left at those failing neighborhood schools, but they’d realize their mistake soon enough.”

Michels correctly points out a number of problems with TPPF’s alleged “parent empowerment” theory. Some parents may be poor judges of what makes a good school, they may let community loyalty adversely affect their judgment and “market forces don’t always address things like shared social values, evidence-based science and history theory, or even career readiness skills.”

I also would point out that many low-income parents, even with vouchers, would be unable to afford the entire tuition or the transportation necessary to send their children to good private schools.

This “free market” theory of funding public education is baloney. Regardless of what the Texas Supreme Court rules, the Legislature needs to trash all voucher proposals and adequately and fairly fund every public school in every neighborhood in Texas. They can make the effort to figure out how much they need to budget.

https://www.texasobserver.org/tppf-school-finance-report/

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