House Bill 1605...the death of K-12 education by a thousand cuts. Talk about disempowering and de-professionalizing teachers while centralizing power in the State Board of Education! Geez, what a boondoggle! This bodes horribly for public education in Texas. State leaders so want to micromanage the k-12 classroom. The college classroom, too! Read on.
-Angela Valenzuela
Texas teachers would get less control of classroom lessons under bills approved by state lawmakers
Bills approved in Texas House and Senate seek to fundamentally transform how classrooms are run, giving more power to the Texas Education Agency.
A proposal on the verge of passage by both the Texas House and Senate has the potential to fundamentally transform the way Texas classrooms are run, pulling power away from teachers and local school districts, and giving more to the Texas Education Agency.
PUBLIC EDUCATION CLASH: Gov. Abbott threatens special session if Texas lawmakers don't deliver on school vouchersTraditionally, the state has offered curriculum standards that are basically a list of things students are expected to know for standardized tests. Districts are free to decide what they will teach from that list, and how they will do it.
House Bill 1605 would authorize the state to approve electronic K-12 curricula that cover the state standards, and devote several hundred million dollars annually to pay school districts to use them. In other words, the state would offer ready-made lesson plans, and districts could require their teachers to use them, sacrificing much of the teacher's autonomy in exchange for extra money and a guarantee that the materials cover the state requirements.
School districts wouldn't be mandated to use the new materials, but the extra money is certain to be a powerful incentive for districts around the state struggling with tight budgets and a teacher shortage.
Concerns about the bill don't break down along neat political lines. Some Democrats and teachers unions have complained it ties the hands of teachers, stripping the job of creativity.
Proponents argue that the current lesson plans of many schools don’t sufficiently cover the state standards, leading to worse test scores. They also say ready-made lesson plans could make overworked teachers' lives easier, as they wouldn’t have to both craft a curriculum and then teach it.
The measure is said to be a top priority of Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath, and it's been pushed in the Legislature by the leading education policymakers in the House and Senate.
The bill already passed the House by a 105 to 39 margin, while it passed the Senate 22 to 8. The two chambers each tweaked the policy slightly, so they’ll need to iron-out differences before they can send it to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk for final approval.
Critics say the hundreds of millions of dollars for the curricula would be better spent in other ways, such as payraises for teachers. Others have attacked the measure as a corporate handout, particularly to the curriculum-development company Amplify, which received a $19 million no-bid state contract during COVID.
For this reason, inside the Capitol the measure has become known as “the Amplify bill," and some oppose this effect of making the education system more technocratic and concentrating more power in the state education agency.
A filter for 'woke' educators?
While the bill is being pitched to some conservatives as a way to stamp out liberal influences on campus, others say the lesson plans actually open a back door to exactly that.
“As a whole, the Republican Party likes the idea that this would eliminate those woke teachers with purple hair and the ones who are trying to indoctrinate our kids because it would give them a canned, scripted lesson and it would keep them on the rails,” said Lynn Davenport, a conservative education advocate from Dallas who opposes the bill.
Davenport is concerned about the online curricula because anything that lives online can be modified or changed, which she feels makes it non transparent.
“You have no idea what they're going to be putting in these canned lessons,” she said. “They said, ‘we’re going to give parents access so they can see if there’s that woke stuff in the curriculum.’ That’s total nonsense, this is the opposite of that. They can change it at any time.”
Some conservatives also say the legislation would also represent a movement away from an old-school, pencil-and-paper approach to schooling, pointing to test scores that dropped during the pandemic when children attended class online from home.
‘We’re trying to get kids away from the technology and off the technology which failed us during the pandemic. So why would we then push these bills which amplify, no pun intended, the need for technology devices?” Davenport said.
“The irony is that people on the left created it, but people on the right are pushing it.”
In the classroom
At a kindergarten classroom in Mirabeau B. Lamar Elementary School in San Antonio, the teacher flashed a grainy image of a skinny, older man wearing a black top hat on a smart board.
“Who is this?” she asked the class.
“That’s Abraham Lincoln,” a student answered, a little hesitantly. “And what do we know about Abraham Lincoln?” said Michaela Zapata, the teacher.
“He ended people telling people what to do,” the student said confidently, pausing before adding, a little less confidently, “slavery.”
“That’s right,” Zapata said. “And what’s slavery?”
“Like, people in jail?” the student responded.
Close, Zapata said. Slavery is people being bought and sold, like things. "And is that right?"
“No,” was the response, this time from the class in unison.
The lesson, from Amplify, covered "Presidents and American Symbols."
The school is part of a pilot program using the Amplify curriculum for reading and one called Eureka for math. Zapata's lesson, as well as several others observed by a reporter, made it clear that teachers are not expected to recite the Amplify lessons like robots. There is room for improvisation and discussion.
San Antonio ISD, which governs Lamar Elementary, currently pays Amplify for the curriculum. But under House Bill 1605, San Antonio ISD and other districts across the state would instead be paid an extra $40 per student by the state to pay for the lesson plans from companies like Amplify and Eureka.
Before Lamar Elementary adopted the Eureka and Amplify curricula, teachers had been asking for more support with lesson planning, said Brian Sparks, a network director at Lamar Elementary. Teachers would go on Facebook or Pinterest or look through what books and materials were available already at school, trying to patch together a lesson plan that covered the state standards.
With Amplify, the goal was to “position them more as modifiers or adapters of curriculum, rather than creators,” Sparks said.
“It’s hard to get them sometimes at the beginning,” Sparks said of convincing teachers initially to use the pre-made lesson plans.
A former teacher himself, Sparks said that he himself “would have bucked it at first,” feeling “my superpower is to source curriculum for my kids.”
Traditionally, teachers have had more freedom to source material from wherever they like, be it through the districts or finding it online, and then patching them together to create lesson plans that cover the standards.
Teachers can access the electronic curricula online, and they can distribute them to students electronically or print them out. Basically, the lesson plans outline the “what” and “when,” while teachers are left to fill in the “how.”
Some significant benefits of this approach have become clear, Sparks said: When an outside firm does all the planning, they’re able to coordinate the reading lessons with social studies or science so that complementary things are being taught at once, covering more ground. There’s also no concern whether the school’s curriculum covers all the state standards, and it saves teachers a lot of time.
Now, “Our best teachers are saying this is where we want to go as a system,” Sparks said.
In one classroom, 5th grade teacher Emily Gonzalez taught a lesson on the Renaissance. To kickoff class, she showed her students a musical number called “Welcome to the Renaissance” from the stage comedy “Something Rotten.”
The song was set to a slideshow that included historical information on culture, art, science, the feudal system and the crusades. Gonzalez, who is passionate about theater and studied it in college, said she found the video on a teaching Facebook group and realized it fit with the pre-made Amplify lesson.
“I think some people have this misconception that it’s a script and it’s not,” she said.
But the rollout hasn’t been smooth for all Texas teachers who have taught the Amplify curriculum.
'Teaching to the test' concerns
Kristen Harris is a 7th grade English teacher in the Dallas area. She’s in her 12th year of teaching, and her campus began using Amplify for its curriculum last spring. A mantra at the district was to be “tier one from day one,” she said, meaning to closely follow the proscribed curriculum. The bill before the Legislature currently calls for schools to follow the lessons “with fidelity” to qualify for the extra funds.
As required by the Amplify curriculum, Harris assigned “A Raisin in the Sun” to her class, a 1959 play by Lorraine Hansberry about a Black family that experiences racism while attempting to buy a home in a white neighborhood.
Another teacher complained, saying this book was “inappropriate for grade level and potentially CRT-related.” A controversial 2021 Texas law restricted teachers from discussing systemic racism in classrooms. The measure is popularly known as as a ban of Critical Race Theory, a college-level legal theory used to analyze historical racism that has become a buzzword in conservative circles.
Harris said she didn’t agree with that complaint because “our students are experiencing a lot of the things that are discussed in that play” and “we shouldn't not teach something because it makes us uncomfortable,” but she felt it was problematic that the curriculum the school had paid Amplify for inspired any controversy in the first place.
“You buy a curriculum, you spend millions of dollars on it, shouldn't it be safe for our kids? Shouldn't it be something that we all agree is good for them, aligned to our standards and everything?”
Besides those concerns, Harris said she felt her hands were tied by the Amplify curriculum, or at least by her district’s insistence that it be followed so closely. The language of the bill could cause this problem to be multiplied through a statewide rollout, she said, and she also feels the policy doubles-down on a “teaching to the test” approach that is not healthy for students.
Ultimately, she feels it made her into a worse teacher.
“Teachers know their students. And teachers know the cultures of their students and what they need and what they're dealing with and facing, how to best reach them,” Harris said. “I’ve never felt so ineffective as I felt this year. My students had so many needs that I could not fulfill because of the way this was done.”
She is planning on leaving her current job and teaching at another district in the area where the Amplify curriculum is not taught.
“It steals my joy and makes me feel like I’m just a robot or a facilitator. I have a master’s degree in the humanities and I want to bring that to my students and make them love learning,” she said. “I can’t make them love learning if I’m facilitating an online curriculum that everyone else in the state of Texas is doing that’s not making them richer, but preparing them for a test.”
edward.mckinley@houstonchronicle.com
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