We're failing: Texas is losing teachers and students with its high-stakes tests

Texas gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell offers a critical statement on high-stakes testing. -Angela

by Chris Bell

Friday, October 21, 2005 /Dallas Morning News

The Texas Supreme Court is expected anytime now to hand down its ruling in the all-important school finance lawsuit, and, as a parent of two public-school students, I hope and pray that opinion prods our governor and state lawmakers into finding a way to put more money into public education.

But even if we fund our public schools at much higher levels, we will fail to get the results we seek because of a broken accountability system that looks at one test score as the sole measure of a student's and a school's success.

Dr. Linda McNeil, a Rice University professor, calls this "Enron-style accountability" because it clearly shows how a well-intentioned effort to raise education standards for all schoolchildren has instead corrupted the curriculum, created a school-to-prison pipeline, left fraud unchecked and driven teachers out of the classroom. She likens the corruption of accountability to the singular emphasis that Ken Lay placed upon the stock price of Enron to the exclusion of other factors, such as debt and whether the production matched the propaganda.

George W. Bush was at his best when he spoke out against the "soft bigotry of low expectations," but the promise of the Texas Miracle has gone unfulfilled under Rick Perry. Texas students continue to lose ground to their peers on the SAT; students who do graduate are faring worse and worse each year on the state's college readiness test.

Mr. Perry thinks he can use tests to make our kids smarter. A test won't make you smarter, just like a ruler won't make you taller. Tests aren't the answer; they're the best way to ask the question.

I want our state to answer Bill Gates' call for a fundamental redesign of the high school curriculum to adequately prepare children for the 21st century economy. Education is the best economic development program ever created, which is why we should commit to making Texas public schools the best in the country within 10 years.

Education trumps the economic development benefit of a toll road or a tax break for yet another big-box superstore.

But Mr. Perry continues to back an Enron-style accountability system that holds kids back to keep them out of the test pool. This "ninth-grade bulge," which education researchers say is a result of high-stakes testing, has pushed the state's effective dropout rate to nearly 40 percent, tops in the country.

The sad fact is that most residents of our prison system lack high school degrees. The perverse incentive to encourage kids to drop out of school has created a school-to-prison pipeline that is a silent moral crisis in Texas. Incredibly, Mr. Perry was one of only three governors not to sign a national agreement by the National Governors Association to accurately track dropouts. We can't keep using the prison system to hide our failures like Enron used offshore dummy corporations to hide its debt.

Another unfortunate, if avoidable, byproduct of Enron-style accountability is the silent crisis of teacher dropouts. We have a shortage of qualified, certified teachers because 60 percent of all teachers quit within their first five years.

Texas pays its teachers $6,100 less than the national average, but it costs more than $13,000 to replace each teacher. This is perhaps the best example of Enron-style accounting. Consequently, we have more certified teachers not teaching in Texas than are working in the classrooms. We need to bring their salaries up to the national average and then empower them to teach our kids something more important than how to take yet another standardized test.

A broad consensus of Texans is agitating for well-funded public schools. Standardized testing is an important tool for making sure this money is well spent, but it can't be the only tool. We need to make sure this investment is better placed than the retirement accounts of so many Enron employees.

Attorney Chris Bell, a Democratic candidate for governor, is a former at-large City Council member and congressman from Houston. Readers may contact him through his Web site at www.chrisbell.com

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