Standardized tests with high stakes are bad for learning, studies show

"We spent nearly a decade reviewing the evidence as it accumulated...Our conclusion in our report to Congress and the public was sobering: There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance."

This exemplifies the politics of whose knowledge counts. It wasn't enough for researchers to publish peer-reviewed articles on the harms of testing for the past decade, we needed to be pump money into an analysis of this literature to confirm that it is happening.

What we can expect from STAAR should NOT be termed "unintended" effects. We have known for years what these systems do to children and youth.

STAAR and its projected harms are not just about the 15% rule. This component just happens to be one that now impacts non-traditional communities, many of whom did not bat an eye when these systems were disproportionately impacting poor, minority, and ELL students.

-Patricia

By Carolyn J. Heinrich | SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, March 10, 2012

Standardized achievement tests have long been a routine part of our efforts to measure the educational progress of students. In the distant past, testing days came and went with little notice or fanfare for students, parents and teachers alike. And in those days and times, the tests probably provided fairly accurate assessments of students' progress in learning from one year to the next.

But those days of relatively relaxed test-taking for students and limited stakes for school districts and teachers are long gone. Test-based accountability systems that attach weighty consequences to student test results for school district staff, teachers, students and public officials are becoming increasingly institutionalized in the education system. There are probably few other places where the stakes attached to these tests are as high as they are in Texas.

There is a clear rationale for tying incentives for educational improvement to student achievement tests. We know from a variety of economic, psychological and management studies that people are highly responsive to incentives, even those that do not necessarily have individual rewards or sanctions linked to them or that may merely accord some form of public recognition (or shame) based on the results. Unfortunately, what the research has also definitively shown is that people will respond to these incentives in both intended and unintended ways, and the less control they feel they have over the measured outcomes and the more stringent the targets or performance tests, the more likely they are to respond perversely.

We have observed these patterns of unconstructive responses to performance incentives across a number of domains — health, workforce training, public assistance programs and more — but the evidence of serious problems has piled up faster in public education than in any other policy arena.

I was part of a National Academies of Science committee that was asked to carefully review the nature and implications of America's test-based accountability systems, including school improvement programs under the No Child Left Behind Act, high school exit exams, test-based teacher incentive-pay systems, pay-for-scores initiatives and other uses of test scores to evaluate student and school performance and determine policy based on them. We spent nearly a decade reviewing the evidence as it accumulated, focusing on the most rigorous and credible studies of incentives in educational testing and sifting through the results to uncover the key lessons for education policymakers and the public.

Our conclusion in our report to Congress and the public was sobering: There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance.

Before high stakes are attached to a particular performance measure, such as math scores, it may very well correlate well with positive student outcomes that we are trying to encourage and build up. Indeed, the National Assessment of Educational Progress test is often used as a gauge for actual student performance specifically because it is a low-stakes test. But once a measure of performance is activated in a system that attaches significant consequences to its attainment, individuals are motivated to pursue all possible ways to raise measured performance, including those that do not contribute to the genuine goals of the system — goals such as increasing student knowledge and learning capabilities.

Studies published in the best economics and education journals have shown unequivocal evidence of excessive teaching to the test and drilling that produces inflated measures of students' growth in learning; cheating on tests that includes erasing incorrect answers or filling in missing responses; shifting of students out of classrooms or other efforts to exclude anticipated poor performers from testing, or alternatively, concentrating classroom teaching efforts on those students most likely to increase their test scores above a particular target, and other even more subtle strategies for increasing testing averages.

This type of behavior, which narrows the focus of classroom education and frequently diverts time and resources from more innovative and interactive approaches to teaching, has been characterized in academic literature and policy circles alike as "hitting the target and missing the point."

What we have come to understand to date about test-based accountability does not bode well for the new policy introduced by the Texas Legislature that will make the new STAAR student achievement tests count toward 15 percent of a student's course grade. After a wave of objections, state Education Commissioner Robert Scott announced last month that school districts may wait until a year from now to begin applying the 15 percent rule. If and when it kicks in, these are very high stakes to attach to a test, and this will undoubtedly have implications for how teachers and students spend their time in the classroom.

I am a parent of a freshman in an Austin public high school who is already fretting about what she understands to be very serious and formidable consequences of this new policy for her future. She found the questions on a practice exam to be largely unrelated to what she was learning in the classroom, and this was reflected in the scores she attained. How can she continue to spend five to six hours a night working on her regular schoolwork and preparing for exams created by her teachers and also find time to prepare for taking a separate set of tests that will count toward 15 percent of her course grade?

The empirical research again speaks to the unintended effects this policy is likely to generate: fear, reduced student motivation, increased withdrawals and lower graduation rates are examples of well-documented negative effects that this type of high-stakes testing induces.

In an assembly of parents, teachers, school staff and district officials, a presentation was made showing how the district will be working to improve the students' test-taking skills. The example suggested that if students do not know the meaning of a particular word in a test item, they would be taught to replace it with an "X" and focus instead on grasping the logic of the question phrasing that will give them a better chance of selecting the correct answer. In other words, if you do not understand the content, you can still improve your "guessing" skills through these efforts to help you become a better test-taker. Is this the way we want our children to spend their time in the classroom?

Maybe we should shift to the model widely used in some Asian countries where, in addition to classroom time spent on test-taking, the students spend 10-hour days on the weekends and their holiday breaks in test preparation classes that drill them in precisely this way. As a university professor, I have seen the results of this extreme focus on test-taking: These students score at the highest levels on tests that are reported in their admissions applications, but they score considerably lower on writing assessments, and most importantly, their performance in the classroom does not measure up to the test scores.

Incentivizing this type of intensive focus on improving test-taking capabilities is not going to help produce the better educated, more highly skilled and innovative workforce that business leaders and other employers assert is essential to competing effectively in the global economy.

Texas should be applauded for its tireless efforts to develop new policies that will increase educational effectiveness and to set high achievement goals for its students. But the latest rendition to incentivize better student performance in the form of a policy that ties 15 percent of a student's course grade to these tests is a step backward, not forward. It ignores a now broad base of evidence that these policies produce minimal or no positive effects on student learning and are likely to induce costly, negative responses in and beyond the classroom. I hope that the deferral of its requirement will give the state the time needed to revisit and retract this step in the wrong direction.

Texas Schools Chief: Testing Has Gone Too Far

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
1/31/2012

Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott said today that the state testing system has become a "perversion of its original intent" and that he was looking forward to "reeling it back in."

Addressing 4,000 school officials at the Texas Association of School Administrators' annual midwinter conference, Scott said that he believed testing was "good for some things," but that in Texas it has gone too far. He said that he was frustrated with what he saw as his "complicitness" in the bureaucracy that testing and accountability systems have thrust on schools.

The remarks, which mirrored those he made at a State Board of Education meeting last week, have been his most forceful on the topic since the last legislative session, when lawmakers slashed state funding to public education by $4 billion. The budget cuts have spurred at least four different lawsuits against the state from school districts arguing they have not received adequate funding to meet increasingly high state accountability standards. The cuts come as the state is rolling out a rigorous new state student assessment system in the spring.

Uncertainty around the implementation of STAAR — and whether students and teachers will be able to meet the new requirements with reduced resources — has caused deep anxiety around the state. With the new system, high school students' scores on exams will count 15 percent toward their final grades in the corresponding course for the first time.

Halfway through the school year, many districts are still determining how they will apply that rule to their grading policies, and the variations from district to district were the subject of a recent House Public Education Committee meeting. At the hearing, parents and school leaders expressed concern that the differing policies would hurt students, and questioned the need to apply the new rules in the first year of the test.

Scott said today that if he had the authority — which he said he doesn't — he would waive the 15-percent requirement in the first year as students adjusted to the test.

Scott, who received a standing ovation at the end of his address, also predicted that there would be a "backlash" against standardized testing during the next legislative session. But he said that the new tests, which are course-based rather than subject-based, would be better for students in the long run and that the transition provided a chance to create a new accountability system that accounts for "what happens on every single day in the life of a school besides testing day."

"We have a huge opportunity to move kids farther and better than we ever thought possible," Scott said. "And I do not want to blow that opportunity."

Texas Schools Chief's Remarks on Testing Draw Backlash

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
2/1/2012

Some high-profile members of the education community aren't pleased with Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott's speech on Tuesday criticizing the role of testing in Texas public schools.

Speaking to 4,000 school officials at the Texas Association of School Administrators' annual midwinter conference, Scott received a standing ovation when he called for an accountability system that measured "what happens on every single day in the life of a school besides testing day." He also said that he would not certify a ban on social promotion next year unless schools received more money from the state to offer remedial classes to students.

Uncertainty about student performance on the rigorous new state STAAR exams has caused concern across the state as schools also grapple with a $5 billion-plus reduction in state funding that lawmakers enacted during the last legislative session.

"I think he owes all of the legislators an explanation of his comments," said state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, a chief architect of the legislation that created STAAR. Shapiro, the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, said she was "blown away" by the commissioner's remarks in light of his repeated testimony during the legislative session that schools would have enough money to move forward with STAAR.

"That's a direction I've never heard him take," she said, adding, "He's been the one that's been talking about school accountability over the years. We've all been a part of this. School accountability is something we started many, many years ago, and we believe in it."

During a House Public Education Committee hearing last week on the STAAR implementation, parents and school leaders expressed concern about a lack of clarity surrounding the exams' various requirements, with some going so far as to ask for a delay in tests' consequences for students.

But that will not happen without a fight. The Texas Association of Business, the state's largest business group, plans to take out a full-page ad in tomorrow's Austin American-Statesman urging lawmakers not to postpone the rollout of the exams. In an interview, Bill Hammond, the group's president and a fierce accountability advocate, blasted Scott, who also said the state's testing system had become a "perversion of its original intent."

Calling Scott a "cheerleader for mediocrity," Hammond said that the fact that the state was forced to reduce funding to education was not a reason to retreat on accountability standards for schools.

"Every time we've gone through this, the standard has been met, and it has resulted in a better educated work force," Hammond said. "I do not understand Commissioner Scott's making excuses for the educators."

The Tribune has made a call to Scott for comment.

Texas Teachers Say Classes Growing, Layoffs Widespread

Check out the findings from Texas AFT's study on "Destructive Budget Cuts Hitting Students and Teachers Hard"

-Patricia

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
November 17, 2011

Since the Legislature's intention to cut $5.4 billion from public education became a reality, one question has dominated the conversation: just how bad will it be?

Not everyone comes up with the same answer. But the Texas American Federation of Teachers, the state branch of the nationwide teachers' association, has released the results of a web survey that reports extensive teacher layoffs, increasing class sizes and deteriorating work environments.

Here's a quick run through their results, which included 3,549 respondents, about 82 percent of whom identified as educators. (And remember, this is a web survey, not a scientific poll.)

· 92 percent said their district had eliminated positions — most reported between 10 to 50.

· 85 percent said the positions eliminated included teachers.
· 79 percent reported cuts to student programs including pre-K, special education, electives, and athletics.

· Tutoring was the program respondents most frequently reported as cut

· 87 percent said that class sizes had increased at both the elementary and secondary level.

The survey also asked respondents about their schools' climate for students, teachers, and staff — and how that compared to the year before. 81 percent said it was "worse" or "much worse," and 72 percent described it as "stressful and taxing."

The survey confirms the impact that the budget is having an impact on classroom instruction, Texas AFT president Linda Bridges said, adding that its results show that Gov. Rick Perry has been "spinning a tale" about balancing the budget without harming public education. She said that her organization planned a follow up survey in the spring, and noted that because of the way school districts have structured their budgets, most of the worst cuts are still to come.

As the new school year progresses, expect many more attempts at quantifying the effects of the budget cuts in public education.

SBOE Could Give Schools More Control Over New Exams

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
10/20/2011

In early February, Texas Education Agency chief Robert Scottstood before 6,000 school administrators who had just seen an initial budget from the Legislature that cut $10 billion in state funding from public education.

One question drew cheers from the otherwise grim crowd: If there was no money, would the state still have to roll out STAAR, the new, more rigorous student assessment system?

The answer, it turns out, was yes. Now, eight months later, the State Board of Education may try to modify the system in a way that allays school districts’ concerns.

The first Texas ninth graders to take the new end-of-course exams will do so this spring. To graduate, they will have to receive a passing cumulative score on 12 exams in four subject areas over their high school years — and the exams will count 15 percent toward their final grades.

Educators raised concerns about the demands of this system in the last legislative session, leading House Public Education Committee chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, to author a bill doing away with the cumulative score requirement, and allowing districts to set their own policies on how much an exam weighed on a student’s final grade. But the measure stalled in the upper chamber, where Eissler’s counterpart, Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, made clear her opposition to straying from the original plan. And with all the emphasis on limiting cuts to public education, which ended up totaling $4 billion, there was little bandwidth for much else.

Now, on the State Board of Education, there is a push to alter the system in a way the Legislature could not. Thomas Ratliff, R-Mount Pleasant, has proposed an amendment that would use the board’s authority to set standards for course credit to offer more flexibility to school districts. Currently, students must achieve a 70 or above in order to pass a course. Ratliff’s amendment would tweak the law to allow districts to decide to pass students if the only reason they end up failing the course is because of their score on the state exam.

Ratliff said he came up with the idea after hearing concerns from superintendents about the effect on local grading policies.

“For the first time in our history the Legislature has codified ‘We don’t trust you to have a local grading policy,’” he said, “I just think that it is another example of the fact that local control is a myth.”

To take effect this spring, Ratliff’s proposal would have to be on the agenda for the November board meeting. He said he is working to garner support from his fellow board members. George Clayton, who chairs the board’s committee on instruction which would initially consider the measure, said in an email that he was inclined to support it and thinks that the board should take it up as a whole in November. He said that he would be taking a poll of the superintendents in his district for their input, and that his colleagues on the state board should do the same.

In an interview, Shapiro said she "completely disagreed" with Ratliff's plan, saying that it could harm students who heightened accountability standards aim to help — those at-risk for failing.

'If you say to those student you can take this exam but it doesn't really count, why would they even try?" she said.

And while Shapiro said she "wholeheartedly" supports local control, she said that "in this set of circumstances we do have to put some state guidelines."

She said that she would welcome more direction for districts on how the 15 percent factors into final grade, which she said was still "up in the air."

TEA spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman said currently districts can count the exams in any number of ways, since the law doesn’t define “final grade."

Scott hasn’t provided this guidance, Marchman said, because of past lawsuits school districts have brought against the agency for determining grading policies.

"If you take that 15 percent of the total of the first two semesters, that can be a very different number than taking 15 percent of the last six weeks or last nine weeks of the semester," she said.

Eissler also expressed skepticism that Ratliff’s proposal would do much to address the struggles schools face with the new system. “I understand the complications it’s trying to address, but I don’t know if it will solve them,” he said.

He said Ratliff’s plan could end up undermining the goals of moving to a statewide assessment in the first place.

“What it does is deemphasize the end-of-course exam as a statewide assessment and puts more credence on local curriculum application, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a statewide assessment,” he said.

For his part, Ratliff disputes that the change would loosen any standards. “They will still have the same 70 on a 100 point scale to pass, but as determined by the school board, not by Austin,” he said. “'We’ll take your test and we’ll report to the state how we’re doing, but leave the local grading policy, the class rank and local GPA, leave that to us just like you have forever.’”

[Editor's note: This story has been updated to include a comment from Clayton and a clarification from Shapiro.]

How private companies are profiting from Texas public schools.

Nice piece by Rapoport. Good work putting in a snippet on HB 500.
-Patricia

by Abby Rapoport
Published on: Tuesday, September 06, 2011

It’s not hard to imagine Pearson’s vision of utopia.

Pearson is a London-based mega-corporation that owns everything from the Financial Times to Penguin Books, and also dominates the business of educating American children. The company promotes its many education-related products on a website that features an idyllic, make-believe town. It’s called Pearsonville, and it looks like the international conglomerate version of SimCity. In this virtual town, school buses whizz through tree-lined streets, and the city center features skyscrapers and a tram. Tabs pop up to show you just how many Pearson products are available. A red schoolhouse features young kids using Pearson products to learn math (with Pearson’s enVision Math) and take standardized tests online. Nearby, at the Pearsonville high school, students use the company’s online instructional materials to study science. The high school also features online testing. Pearson online courses are available at the town library. At the model home, parents can use Pearson’s student information system to track their children’s grades. The “test centre,” not shockingly, provides even more testing options. It’s a beautiful little town. A Las Vegas-style sign welcomes you, while a biplane flies through the sky trailing a Pearson banner behind it.

It’s a computer-generated reality. But when it comes to Texas education, it’s not far from the truth.

Pearson, one of the giants of the for-profit industry that looms over public education, produces just about every product a student, teacher or school administrator in Texas might need. From textbooks to data management, professional development programs to testing systems, Pearson has it all—and all of it has a price. For statewide testing in Texas alone, the company holds a five-year contract worth nearly $500 million to create and administer exams. If students should fail those tests, Pearson offers a series of remedial-learning products to help them pass. Meanwhile, kids are likely to use textbooks from Pearson-owned publishing houses like Prentice Hall and Pearson Longman. Students who want to take virtual classes may well find themselves in a course subcontracted to Pearson. And if the student drops out, Pearson partners with the American Council on Education to offer the GED exam for a profit.

“Pearson basically becomes a complete service provider to the education system,” says David Anderson, an Austin education lobbyist whose clients include some of Pearson’s competitors.

With the prevalence of companies like Pearson operating in Texas and many other states, the U.S. education system has become increasingly privatized. In some cases, the only part of education that remains public is the school itself. Nearly every other aspect of educating children—exams, textbooks, online classes, even teacher certification—is now provided by for-profit companies.

Public education has always offered big contracts to for-profit companies in areas like construction and textbooks. But in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom—most of it supplied by private companies. The movement has been supported by business communities and non-profits like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and often takes a free market approach to public education. Reformers litter their arguments about education policy with corporate rhetoric and business-school buzzwords. They talk of the need for “efficiency,” “innovation” and “assessment” in the classroom.

The mingling of business and education blurs the line between learning and profit-making. Some education reformers advocating for increased reliance on testing also lobby for the large testing companies. It’s often difficult to tell if lawmakers stick with education policies because they’re effective, or because they’re attached to high-dollar contracts.

Take Anderson, who works for HillCo Partners, the high-powered Austin lobbying firm, and who represents many of the industry’s heavy hitters, like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. After a career in teaching and another at the Texas Education Agency, Anderson has been a part of the industry for years. One of his clients, Educational Testing Services, administers the test Texas teachers must take to get certified—which amounts to a coveted $70 million contract from the state. Anderson explains that the privatization of education has developed organically. As lawmakers demand more from school districts—more testing, more data management, more data analysis—the districts have often turned to corporations to handle these complex components. Those relationships quickly become inextricable.

“You have companies that have grown up either by expanding business or adding new business to sort of fill that void,” Anderson says. “Well, once something is established, if a program has a set life, the company that is now doing that work wants to figure out a way to extend that beyond the life of that project. And as a result you get this burgeoning business-education complex that includes companies that once upon a time might have been textbook companies, or test companies, that now do so many more things.”

Educating kids has become big business—an immensely profitable industry. As governments cut funding for schools and seek more “efficiencies,” the privatization of education is growing more ubiquitous. Think Pearsonville.



In 1998, Pearson hired a new CEO from Texas, Marjorie Scardino. She joined a company with a diverse and haphazard set of interests; in addition to the Financial Times and Penguin Books, the mega-company owned everything from Madame Tussauds wax museums to a stake in investment bank Lazard. Scardino sought to focus the company on one broad industry—education. Soon after Scardino’s arrival, Pearson bought Simon & Schuster’s education businesses and opened a new, overarching company—Pearson Education. Two years later, in a controversial move, Pearson acquired the Minnesota-based testing company National Computer Systems for $2.5 billion and began expanding into assessments. By 2004, Scardino ranked 59th on Forbes’ list of the “100 Most Powerful Women in the World.” By 2009, she was 19th.

Her timing was excellent. The education field was facing new and vehement demand for more testing and accountability in schools. Texas had been leading the way in state-mandated standardized testing, and by the time Pearson acquired National Computer Systems in 2000, the company had already signed a $233 million contract with the Lone Star State. With the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, all states were required to use a standard test to determine how students were learning. Pearson continued buying testing companies, including the testing services division of Harcourt. Last year, Pearson signed yet another contract with Texas to create the latest iterations of the state’s testing system, the new and more rigorous “end-of-course” and State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exams.

Pearson now creates the tools to grade the tests and the software to analyze student performance. That’s in addition to textbooks, remedial learning resources, GED courses and online classes. (Pearson officials refused comment for this story.)

But despite Pearson’s prevalence in nearly every sector of public education, state officials say they maintain oversight. The Texas Education Agency monitors Pearson’s test development and often works side-by-side with the company. Gloria Zyskowski, the deputy associate commissioner, says the agency communicates with Pearson almost daily. She says that TEA uses a transparent bidding process to contract the work and follows a strict series of steps to build and score the tests. In creating test questions, the agency recruits teachers and former teachers to sit on an advisory committee. Pearson employees facilitate advisory committees, but the company isn’t writing the test questions by itself.

But when the company—like many for-profits—wants to get its way in education policy, Pearson isn’t shy about deploying high-powered lobbyists. Pearson pays six lobbyists to advocate for the company’s legislative agenda at the Texas Capitol—often successfully. This legislative session, lawmakers cut an unprecedented $5 billion from public education, including funding for a variety of programs to help struggling students improve their performance on state tests. Despite the cuts, Pearson’s funding streams remain largely intact. Bills that would have reduced the state’s reliance on tests didn’t pass. The Texas Senate refused to pass any bills that would have diminished the role of testing, a stance some Capitol sources attribute to Pearson’s lobbying, while others give the credit to pressure from reform advocates.

Who’s responsible may not matter. The interests of corporate lobbyists and reform advocates are often the same. It’s difficult to separate the businessmen from the believers.

In a narrow sense, Pearson’s lobbying efforts simply reflect a company protecting its profits. But in a wider view, Pearson is part of a larger education-reform effort that seeks to improve public education through free-market principles. Often that means non-traditional educational approaches like charter schools and online learning. The movement includes a lot of earnest folks, eager to improve public schools and do what’s best for kids. But their efforts have earned a fortune for companies like Pearson. It’s become difficult to determine where the educating ends and the profit-making begins.



“I’m going to stick my neck out, and don’t take it personally.” So began Houston state Rep. Scott Hochberg. It was close to midnight, and Hochberg was presiding over the ninth hour of a House Public Education Committee hearing late in the session. Hochberg, a Democrat, is widely seen as the Legislature’s education policy guru. One of the final witnesses of the night was about to testify—Sandy Kress, another well-known name in Texas education circles. But before Kress spoke, Hochberg went on the offensive. “Dr. Kress, a question was asked of me last time you testified here,” Hochberg said. “And that was whether you currently have any interests or any connections with any companies involved in the testing process.”

It was an awkward moment. Kress is a giant of the education reform movement. As board president of the Dallas Independent School District in the early 1990s, Kress became a vocal and controversial advocate for testing. He’s pushed for more standards and more assessment for decades and was a key architect of No Child Left Behind. He believes testing helps schools do a better job educating students. But he also lobbies professionally for the biggest testing company in Texas. Normally, he identifies himself as a representative of advocacy groups. This time, however, Hochberg wasn’t going to let him off easy. Kress was there to criticize House Bill 500, which would have significantly decreased the stakes on new tests the state will roll out this year.

“We do have a relationship with one company,” Kress said, “and you know, I’m not testifying on their behalf.”

“But just for full disclosure, who is that?” Hochberg pushed.

“Pearson.”

“So you, in your occupation as a lobbyist, represent Pearson Publishing, which, among other things, sells us these tests?”

“That’s correct,” Kress said.

“But you’re not testifying on behalf of Pearson tonight?”

“That’s correct,” Kress said again—before beginning his lengthy argument against the bill.

In a sense, it was a debate over wording. The interests of testing advocates and testing companies like Pearson are often one and the same. Kress is the most prominent example of how big business and education policy have intertwined.

Kress is part of the large and very powerful education reform movement. The movement began in the early 1980s, when some parents and businesses grew concerned about how American students compared to global competition. Many became concerned that public schools weren’t sufficiently educating poor and minority children. Kress, among many others, called for more standardized testing and pushed districts to show how children in different racial and economic categories were performing. The movement eventually yielded the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, requiring that schools not only test students every year, but that schools show progress in closing achievement gaps. The federal law required states to use standardized tests, but allowed states to decide which test to use—leaving testing companies to battle it out for state contracts. The testing hasn’t yet done much to close the achievement gaps, but it has given schools a tremendous amount of assessment data on each student.

“The bottom line is we have a heck of a lot more transparency than we did before,” Kress says. “It’s worth all the gold in the world to know how your child is doing year by year.”

The broad movement goes beyond testing. Many reform advocates see themselves as pushing against the educational status quo, and contrast their “innovations” with traditional public schools. Challenges to the old system are necessary, many reformers argue, because school districts aren’t going to change of their own accord—and many schools have been failing to educate too many kids.

The movement advocates for charter schools and letting parents pick which schools their children attend. But most of these new directions stem from testing and student data. The data is generally required to prove both problems and solutions. Philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation give out multi-million-dollar grants to help school districts gather and track information about students. The tests, reformers say, are key to understanding what works and what doesn’t.

The emphasis on testing opened the door to more for-profit companies. In addition to the big testing contracts, No Child Left Behind requires schools that fail to meet requirements three years in a row to offer free tutoring. Companies soon rushed in to fill the need. By 2008, according to a PBS documentary, tutoring for standardized tests amounted to a $4 billion industry. Charter schools can subcontract their entire operations to for-profit companies.

Kress doesn’t understand why people are so worried about the role of for-profit companies in areas like testing. “School districts have for a long, long time relied in a good substantial part on the private sector,” he points out. “The private sector has always made things for the school and sold them to them, whether it’s school desks or built their schools.” In the education world, whether it’s testing or other products, Kress says, “the companies are there to serve their customers. And their customers are a combination of the agency and school districts out there.”

Andrew Erben, who serves as president of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, says the more private companies take an active role in public education, the better. “I think it’s a great idea for businesses to get involved in the advocacy and maybe in the delivery of some of the education products,” he says.

Without pressure from outside advocates, Erben worries, school districts wouldn’t do nearly as much to improve. “I think the education establishment wants to protect the structure and function of the current system,” he says. “Any innovation or deregulation is met with some resistance.”

This market-based approach to education has become increasingly controversial. Teachers groups never liked the reliance on high-stakes testing. But recent opposition to testing and other “innovations” has come from all quarters, including advocates who once were reformers but who now wonder what the changes have accomplished.

“We may have kicked over the canoe when it came to testing,” says former state Commissioner of Education Mike Moses. He is hardly anti-test—as commissioner in the late 1990s, he sought to gradually expand testing to every grade between third and 11th, and he still believes testing is an important tool for evaluating and diagnosing schools. But he also concedes that the emphasis on testing may have gone too far. “I used to be called a reformer,” he says. “I don’t know that I’m called a reformer anymore.” Moses, now an advocate at the education advocacy group Raise Your Hand Texas, worries that the increasingly high stakes of the tests has made them too powerful. “I think that the testing programs have grown to a level that they get their own momentum,” he says. “They kind of perpetuate themselves.”

Others are more strident in their criticism of testing. The problem, opponents say, is that from testing to charter schools, the reform movement has begun to pick apart public schools as we know them in favor of the private sector. “The current movement distrusts educators,” says Ed Fuller, an education researcher and vocal critic of standardized tests who just left the University of Texas for the University of Pennsylvania. “They’re trying to create a system that’s educator-proof. The way you do that is to have testing and accountability, more and more and more of it. Because we don’t trust educators to do what’s right, to make good judgments about what kids know and what they can do.”

Fuller points to the book Measuring Up by Harvard professor Daniel Koretz, which argues that students learn test-taking strategies that pollute testers’ ability to see what the students actually know. “The whole issue is that any test at the kind of level that it’s at, especially with it being multiple choice—you can sit down and teach a kid how to pass it without them understanding the concepts behind the test,” Fuller argues. He’s particularly critical of the number of multiple-choice questions that Texas state assessments feature, but says few in the Legislature want to hear about the drawbacks of such exams. The combination of Pearson’s power and reformers’ influence, he says, makes it difficult for legislators to assess testing’s efficacy.

But as Texas prepares to phase in an entirely new testing regime, designed by Pearson, many in the reform camp argue that the new tests will address some of Fuller’s concerns. Unlike the old tests, called the TAKS, the new tests will align with specific courses in high school and put a heavy emphasis on testing kids to determine if they’re ready for pursuits in the work force or higher education. TEA official Zyskowski says the new tests will include several essays and written responses and fewer multiple-choice answers, especially in math. “We’ll also look at data about how students at varying levels of performance on those tests do in their first year in college,” she says. The agency is also going to compare students’ performances on the state tests to performances on the ACT, SAT and AP tests.

For Kress, the new tests are a victory. “That didn’t come from Pearson. That didn’t come from Harcourt,” he says. “That came because colleges and businesses and parents are saying we want our children to get good-paying jobs.”

Kress argues that despite budget cuts, testing shouldn’t be reduced because it’s the best way to tell where the problems are. “The assessment is what gives you the knowledge, the tools,” he says, comparing the process to diagnostic medical work like blood testing. That sounds convincing, but what do we make of the fact that Kress is also paid to further the financial interests of the nation’s leading testing company? Pearson doesn’t think testing should be cut either, but for less high-minded, more bottom-line reasons.

Testing has given communities an inside look at what is and isn’t working in schools. Efforts to erase achievement gaps between races have drawn attention to those gaps, while pressure to perform ensures that schools don’t ignore struggling students.

But after more than a decade of high-stakes testing and billions in testing contracts nationwide, it’s not clear if kids are learning more or just learning how to take tests. The achievement gaps are still with us.

Some reformers are now turning their focus to a more radical approach: virtual schools.

The idea of learning on the computer seems modern and high-tech. But it also removes students from the last vestige of truly public education—the school building itself. With no school building and no state-employed teachers, some of these new virtual schools redefine the very idea of public education.



In August, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank, sponsored a panel discussion on the future of virtual learning. The room was packed with staffers for state lawmakers and company representatives. The idea of learning outside a traditional classroom has potentially widespread appeal for home schoolers, and high achievers and rural students whose high schools don’t offer AP statistics or Chinese classes, part-time students juggling jobs and coursework, and even, as Republican state Rep. Jerry Madden suggested, for kids locked up in prison who could spend their days earning credits.

There are currently two ways that Texas students can access virtual courses. In 2009, the Legislature created the Texas Virtual School Network, a catalog of online classes available to high school students throughout the state. The network was a favorite talking point for Gov. Rick Perry on the campaign trail in the 2010 governor’s race, and presumably will be again as he runs for president. The state allows high-performing school districts and state-run educational service centers to offer online high school classes on any state-recognized subject. 
When a student enrolls in an online course, the student’s home district pays for the course. For example, a student in the small Muleshoe ISD in West Texas could take a virtual class offered by the larger Spring Branch ISD near Houston, and Muleshoe would pay for it. Though the virtual classes are offered and paid for by public school districts, many of the classes themselves are contracted out to private companies.

The other way students can take virtual classes is through one of three full-time virtual schools in Texas. These schools offer all-day online education as early as third grade. These virtual schools may appear to be part of a publicly funded school system, but they are allowed to subcontract their operations to for-profit companies specializing in virtual learning. For instance, the Texas Virtual Academy was, until recently, technically part of a charter school called Southwest Schools. (Texas Virtual Academy is now operating out of a different charter school.) But Texas Virtual Academy is more private than public. Its curriculum is handled by the company K12 Inc. Even the teachers are employees of K12 Inc. Students take online courses offered and taught by employees of for-profit companies.

Yet David Fuller, the head of Texas Virtual Academy and a K12 employee, refers to his school as “public.” “The wonderful thing is that because we are a public school, we’re going to receive the same make up as any other public, bricks-and-mortar school,” he says. In fact, the only thing public about Texas Virtual Academy is its funding.

Texas Virtual Academy was also rated “unacceptable” by state standards for last school year, and some advocates have concerns about virtual schools’ effectiveness, particularly for young students. School testing expert Ed Fuller argues that virtual schools and courses have serious limitations, particularly for at-risk kids. He cites a recent study by Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which studied virtual schools in Pennsylvania and found they underperformed traditional schools.

While the verdict on virtual schools is still out, reformers like Erben, an advocate with Texas Institute for Education Reform, hope to see virtual education expanded. It’s much cheaper, by and large, than traditional classroom instruction and, according to proponents, offers more innovative ways for students to learn. As the state struggles with long-term budget challenges, virtual learning will likely become an increasingly appealing option for lawmakers looking to save money—or increase “efficiencies”—as the number of students continues to rise.

Lobbyist David Anderson remains worried. “Ultimately in public education,” he says, “when you have something as significant as the education of the child or of a generation of children, you want to make sure that, to the greatest extent possible, decisions are being made based on reliable and valid information, and decisions are being made for the right reasons.” He says students and parents must now contend with a business-education complex in which industries perpetuate ideologies, and ideologies keep industries afloat.

Anderson compares it to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned of. Which makes sense, since Pearsonville does have a 1950s feel.

In Texas' Schools, Perry Shuns Federal Influence

by Morgan Smith
9/4/2011

In May, during the waning days of the 82nd Legislature, Gov. Rick Perry made a rare trip to the Senate chamber to broker a deal.

Negotiators from the House and the Senate were struggling to cobble together a school finance plan that would slash state financing, integral to closing a multibillion-dollar shortfall in the state’s 2012-13 budget. After about 90 minutes, Perry emerged from the closed-door meeting to tell reporters he felt “very optimistic” that lawmakers would reach an agreement.

Shortly, they did, agreeing to a change in the way the state allocates money to its schools that, in practical terms, meant a historic reduction of $4 billion in financing and an additional $1.4 billion cut in discretionary grants for public education.

How the budget will affect the state’s public schools will be a cornerstone of Perry’s legacy and could influence his fate as a presidential candidate. But he is likely to be remembered most for a far more public battle: staving off the federal government’s influence — and sometimes its dollars — from invading Texas classrooms.

When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan jabbed Perry on public schools in mid-August, it was only the latest skirmish between the governor and the Obama administration since late 2009, when Perry announced that the state would not sign on to common core-curriculum standards. Those criteria, though endorsed by the Obama administration, were developed by a consortium of 48 states and the National Governors Association.

The announcement was quickly followed by news that Texas would not participate in the administration’s signature education program, a competition among states for $4.35 billion in grants, because of its emphasis on the adoption of the common curriculum. Texas public schools were eligible for $700 million through the grants.

“I am not prepared to sell control of our state’s education system for any price,” Perry said in January 2010. The common curriculum, he said, could lead to the “dumbing down” of the state’s standards.

Perry’s disdain for the federal government’s role in public education, along with legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency and the federal heath care overhaul, fit neatly into his anti-Washington primary campaign against U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who challenged him for the 2010 Republican nomination for governor. It can now also be seen as a preamble to his presidential run.

But unlike his positions on health care and environmental regulations, widely shared among conservatives, Perry’s early opposition to the administration’s education policies — whose bipartisan backers include former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — make him something of an ideological outlier among Republicans.

Of his fellow presidential contenders, Perry “probably has the most fully formed vision of what he would like the federal role to be” in education, said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization.

If Perry wins the nomination, Hess said, it could make public education more important in the general election. Proposals like the common core standards could suddenly become politically charged.

“What’s going to happen is that prominent Republicans broadly supportive of Obama in education may be forced to choose a side,” he said. “Rather than remaining as reforms that both Republicans and Democrats can embrace, these things could be poisoned by association.”

Though federal issues have lately dominated Perry’s discourse on education, in earlier years he actively backed education proposals popular among conservatives, like incentive pay for teachers and private school vouchers, with mixed success.

Vouchers failed several times to make it through the Legislature — proving politically lethal for Kent Grusendorf, chairman of the House Public Education Committee, who strongly supported them — and eventually lost momentum. The “last grasp” at passing a voucher program, said Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat who opposed it, was in the 2007 legislative session.

When incentive pay also struggled for passage in the Legislature, Perry set up the state’s first statewide program with an executive order in 2005. It earmarked $10 million in federal money for teachers who had shown progress with students in economically disadvantaged school districts over three years. Lawmakers expanded it in 2006 only to discontinue it 2009 after a three-year study commissioned by the Texas Education Agency found it had little effect on student achievement.

The problem, said Lori Taylor, a researcher at Texas A&M University, who was a co-author of the studies, was not with the concept of incentive pay but in the way the program implemented it, with every school choosing its own design. That meant that districts could, if they wanted, use the money to give every teacher an across-the-board raise regardless of student achievement — and that is what many of them did.

The state’s current incentive pay program fared better in its evaluation, but because the gains were so small among schools, it wasn’t “wholly persuasive,” said Taylor. It’s unlikely there will be a follow-up, Taylor said, because very little financing for the program survived the Legislative session.

Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Perry, said in an email that while the teacher incentive program was affected by the budget, it “remains a priority.”

“The governor understands that we faced considerable budget challenges this last session,” Frazier said. “No agency was spared from reductions in spending, but ultimately he is proud of lawmakers’ tough decisions to keep Texas living within its means without raising taxes.”

The governor has exerted influence through his appointments to the Texas Education Agency and the State Board of Education, where he has consistently picked from the board’s faction of evangelical conservatives.

Perry has also not been afraid to use — or let lawmakers know he was inclined to use, should they push him — his veto pen. In 2009, he killed bipartisan legislation that would have required limits on class size and offered full-day programs in state kindergarten. In his veto statement, he said the money was better used to serve more children under the state’s current half-day program than to create an additional program.

During the last legislative session, the governor opposed a bill that would have changed how end-of-course exams were factored into graduation requirements under the state’s new accountability system. His office made it clear that if the measure passed, it would be subject to a veto, said Andrew C. Erben, of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, a business-oriented education advocacy group.

“While he and his staff weren’t out front saying it’s a horrible bill, they let it be known they did not support it,” Erben said.

Perry was more publicly adamant in his promise that he would not sign a budget that used the state’s Rainy Day Fund, a tactic that many called for to help ease deep cuts to public education. Lawmakers took him seriously, as was apparent during discussion between two House Republicans on an amendment that became one of the last efforts to use the money to help public schools.

“Is it possible,” Rep. Van Taylor of Plano said, “if the amendment stayed in that the governor might veto the bill?”

Rep. Phil King of Weatherford replied, “Well, my impression of Governor Perry is that he usually does what he says that he’s going to do.”

Texas Students Switch to STAAR Testing

by Morgan Smith and Thanh Tan | Texas Tribune
8/8/2011

Day 8: Armed with fewer resources, teachers prepare students for rigorous new STAAR test.

In the fall, educators will begin to prepare students for a new series of test known as STAAR, the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. STAAR will replace TAKS, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Lawmakers passed the mandate to begin STAAR testing back in 2009. They will finally be implemented during the next school year despite a $4 billion cut to public education.

KUT News' Kelsey Sheridan recently filed a report on how educators are feeling anxious about the rollout. Listen to her story.

With STAAR, high school students will have to perform better on harder tests and take more of them. Under the current system, standardized tests do not count toward final grades, and students must pass four exit-level exams to graduate. Now, for the first time, students will have to achieve a cumulative score across 12 end-of-course exams to graduate. And their scores on the exams will count toward 15 percent of their final grade, with the option to retake the exam three times if they do not pass. (They are required to retake it if they do not achieve a certain minimum score.) Educators say that could result in more days spent testing students; they also worry that it could have students playing a game of risk with their scores — opting not to retake one test with the hope of scoring higher on a future one.

Districts are approaching the new test in different ways. Predicting reduced state aid, some have already eliminated many non-classroom positions for the coming school year. That means remaining employees will have far more responsibilities, a particular concern for school counselors, who have long worked to define their role as separate from that of testing coordinators.

Other districts, including Round Rock Independent School District, were able to re-hire teachers after anticipated cuts didn't pan out. Lora Darden, RRISD's director of curriculum and professional development, said teachers are undergoing training and should have "ample" time to prepare students for STAAR.

"In terms of curriculum it’s just a greater emphasis on rigor," Darden told the Tribune, adding that teachers are transitioning from TAKS to STAAR within a short period. "You have to live under the reality you’re in until you switch to the new system, so teachers will work really hard."

Darden says she views STAAR as a positive change because "people will have an opportunity to re-examine their practices, to refocus their teaching efforts, to pay close attention to the standard that Texas has set before us. We’ve had so much renewed interest, so I think in a sense it’s a fresh beginning."

Watch an overview of how the testing works in this video by Region XIII Education Service Center.


Resources for teachers and parents:

Texas Education Agency's STAAR resource page

Region XIII Education Service Center's STAAR resource page

Morgan Smith and Kelsey Sheridan contributed to this article.

With Change in Formula, Texas School Ratings Drop

By Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
7/29/2011

The new accountability ratings released Friday for public school campuses in the state's 1,228 districts and charter schools present a "far more accurate look" at academic performance, Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott said.

They are also markedly lower — with far fewer schools achieving the highest ratings than last year. Instead, most schools fall in the middle "acceptable" category.

Many districts find themselves with lower ratings even though their student achievement has remained the same. That's because the formula used to calculate the ratings, based primarily on students' standardized test scores, no longer includes a mechanism called the Texas Projection Measure. The TPM gauged students’ future test scores based on a campus-wide average instead of using their actual test scores and had the effect of giving schools credit for students passing when they hadn't.

In April, Scott announced he would discontinue the measure after state lawmakers took a unanimous vote against it during debate on a testing bill.

Here are the changes in ratings from 2010 to 2011:

* "Exemplary" schools dropped from 19.5 percent of all districts to 5 percent
* "Recognized" schools dropped from 49.1 percent of all districts to 34.4 percent
* "Acceptable" schools rose from 27.6 percent of all districts to 53.3 percent
* "Unacceptable" schools rose from 3 percent of all districts to 7.2 percent.

(Find a detailed description of what the ratings mean on the Texas Education Agency's website.)

At a press conference today in which he released the ratings, Scott said that despite the fact that fewer schools achieved the highest categories, the "school system as a whole is strong" and that parents should feel confident that the ratings are "absolutely real and valid."

These ratings will stay in place for the next two years to give schools a chance to adjust to STAAR, the state's new, more rigorous standardized testing system, which will be rolled out next spring.

Scott also said that two districts would lose their accreditation. One of those is Houston's North Forest ISD. He declined to name the second district because it had yet to be notified.

We're putting together a searchable database of all campus ratings that will be available later this afternoon. Check this space for updates.

STAAR Rollout May Bring More Duties for Counselors

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
July 11, 2011

In the fall, the anticipated consequences of a $4 billion reduction in state financing to school districts will begin to become apparent to Texas students and their parents: fewer teachers, bigger classes and sparse extracurricular programs.

For some, though, the most drastic change will come in the spring, when the state’s approximately 350,000 new ninth graders will be the first to take the end-of-course exams that are part of the new standardized testing system known as STARR, the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness.

The new assessment program, which is so complex that the superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt school district nicknamed it the Franken-STAAR, was established during the 2009 legislative session. Some educators welcome the program, a significant overhaul of the current system, but others view it with trepidation.

Outside the classroom, the burden of rolling out the new exams will fall primarily on counselors, who help students meet graduation requirements, and on curriculum specialists, who make sure what students are being taught matches with what they are being tested on. Some districts also employ testing coordinators, who handle scheduling and the actual administration of the exams.

But predicting reduced state aid, many districts have already eliminated many nonclassroom positions for the coming school year. That means remaining employees will have far more responsibilities, a particular concern for school counselors, who have long worked to define their role as separate from that of testing coordinators.

“With finances like they are, there’s not going to be extra people to help,” said Sherry Sunderman, the coordinator of guidance and counseling at Conroe Independent School District in Montgomery County, north of Houston.

Many counselors worry they will be given more duties on the testing side and that instead of advising students, their jobs will become “more clerical,” said Sylvia Lopez, the director of Dallas ISD’s counseling services. Resources traditionally devoted to counseling students on career and college plans may now be used to explain and administer the new testing system, which includes complicated new graduation requirements.

Counselors “are going to have to be really monitoring students’ graduation programs to make sure they are taking the right courses and passing the right exams,” said Casey McCreary, an assistant executive director at the Texas Association of School Administrators who advises districts on accountability issues.

Students adjusting to the new exams face a “triple jeopardy,” McCreary said. With STAAR, high school students will have to perform better on harder tests and take more of them. Under the current system, standardized tests do not count toward final grades, and students must pass four exit-level exams to graduate. Now, for the first time, students will have to achieve a cumulative score across 12 end-of-course exams to graduate. And their scores on the exams will count toward 15 percent of their final grade, with the option to retake the exam three times if they do not pass. (They are required to retake it if they do not achieve a certain minimum score.)

That could have students playing a game of risk with their scores — opting not to retake one test with the hope of scoring higher on a future one. Setting up a process to guide students through these decisions, one that involves parents and a “team effort” between curriculum specialists and counselors, is crucial in preparing for the new tests, said Sara McAndrew, the executive director of curriculum and instruction at Northside ISD, the state’s fourth-largest district, in San Antonio.

As the new school year draws closer, McAndrew said, schools are still missing details about how the rollout will work. Though the Texas Education Agency will unveil sample questions in August, it will not publicly release full-length primary test forms until 2014. “We are still a little in the dark about exactly what these tests are going to look like,” she said.

Lopez said she also has questions about the new system, like “who is going to keep track of the kids and where they are and how many exams they’ve taken.”

But she said that she expected growing pains. “Anytime there is a change like this, there is going to be a struggle,” Lopez said. “There is always a transitional period. STAAR is going to be a lot more rigorous, but hopefully this will help our kids.”

Will Common Core Standards Make Students College-Ready?

Huffington Post
04/27/11

UPDATE: Since this story was first published, it has been clarified that 44 states and U.S. territories, not 48, have stated an intention to adopt the standards. The article has been updated to reflect the change.

--------------

Storytime isn't what it used to be. In classrooms across the country, kindergartners aren't just having books read to them -- they're comparing and contrasting characters. And second-graders aren't reciting rhymes -- they're analyzing poetry.

These examples are the Common Core Standards in action. From kindergarten to 12th grade, 15 districts nationwide are currently participating in trial runs of the standards, which urge critical thinking in students and also provide uniform benchmarks for all states to follow.

But the standards also allow schools some flexibility. In Florida, district officals are meeting now to discuss exactly what their standards will look like. Melissa Erickson, president of the Hillsborough County Council of PTA/PTSA, tells Tampa Bay Online she thinks common standards will benefits the entire education community:

This is the biggest thing right now in education.

Forty-four states and U.S. territories have stated an intention to adopt the standards, introduced last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The measure was endorsed by the Obama administration, and most states quickly jumped on board last year in an attempt to get federal funding through Race to the Top. States that agreed to adopt the standards won points for a share of the $3.4 billion.

The new standards give specific goals -- from kindergarten to 12th grade -- that prepare students for college. The New York Times cites examples of English and history students who are required to go beyond summarizing information by reading media such as long-form magazine articles and synthesizing them with other sources. Students aren't just exposed to different viewpoints, but are also required to analyze the beliefs and biases present in a piece of reading, according to the Times.

But Shael Polakow-Suransky, New York's chief academic officer, says big changes within students won't happen overnight.

"This isn't one of those things where you flip the switch and tomorrow, everything is going to be different," he said.

And some are simply not pleased with the new standards.

Texas, which has resisted the new standards completely, has now written its own. The standards are founded upon Massachusetts' former benchmarks, according to Boston.com.

Though Massachusetts is one of the states that adopted the standards last year, the Tantasqua Regional school board has petitioned the legislature to now opt out, Education Week reports.

The state's initial adoption of the standards came amid controversy, as Massachusetts leads the country in education scores and was hesitant to forgo its own standards:

We have some of the most exacting standards in the United States," said James A. Cooke, the Tantasqua Regional school board say member who initiated discussion of the issue. "Why should we use someone else's standards?

As an example, the national standards make little room for the state's strong commitment to literature, Boston.com reports. The Common Core Standards require that by 12th grade, 30 percent of students' readings should be literary and 70 percent should be informational.

The Tantasqua Regional board says the state was too quick to embrace the new standards, excited by the idea of potentially winning Race to the Top dollars. But a state education department spokesman released a statement last year saying Massachusetts believes in a nationwide unified front:

That said, in today's economy, it makes little sense for 50 states to have 50 separate set [sic] of standards, and for students to be tested using 50 separate assessments. In addition, while we have strong standards now, we would be naïve to assume they cannot be improved, and that we have nothing left to learn from others.

House votes to ease up on new testing and graduation requirements

Hmm... So Berman's argument, “Why spend almost half a billion dollars for tests that won’t count for anything?” should raise some concerns for the simple fact that it highlight just how much money (in direct costs) are being put into the pockets of testing companies.

-Patricia

By TERRENCE STUTZ | Dallas Morning News
April 2011

AUSTIN — The Texas House, responding to pleas from worried school districts, voted Wednesday to ease up on tough new testing and graduation requirements for high school students.

Although critics said the House bill was a major retreat from strengthening academic expectations, most members voted to pass the legislation, which would allow students to fail as many as eight of 12 new end-of-course exams and still earn a diploma. Tentative approval came on a voice vote, with final action scheduled for Thursday.

The measure, which faces a hostile reception in the Senate, also would scrap a requirement that the end-of-course exams count as 15 percent of a student’s final grade in each of the 12 courses. Instead, school districts would be allowed to decide whether to count the test scores in grades.

Incoming high school freshmen this fall will be the first group of students subject to the new tests.

House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, author of the bill, rejected complaints that it represents a step back on school improvement efforts, insisting it “does not lower standards” in Texas schools. He also said there is strong public support for reducing the amount of testing in schools.

“We all hear from parents and teachers that schools are more focused on testing than learning. Time and again we hear complaints about drill and kill [on test preparation] in Texas classrooms,” he said.

Eissler said the measure “creates a clear, easily understandable path to graduation in Texas” unlike the current law. The rules now require students to get passing averages on the three exams in each subject area — English, math, science and social studies.

But Rep. Todd Smith. R-Euless, said the bill is a “huge step back” on getting Texas high school students ready for college, as evidenced by the fact that they could “miserably fail eight of the 12 tests and still meet the state’s graduation requirements.”

Smith said Texas has been recognized nationally for setting such high standards for schools, including the new end-of-course exams for high school students.

“Now we’re raising the white flag before we even see there’s a problem,” he told House members. “This is a major sea change, the first time this body will have passed a bill that dramatically lowers standards in our schools.”

Smith also said while school districts are worried about large numbers of their students failing the new exams, the commissioner of education will have authority, as he has had in the past, to adjust passing scores if the exams prove too difficult for most students.

Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, who also opposed the bill, said end-of-course tests that have cost the state millions of dollars to develop would become almost meaningless under the legislation.

“Why spend almost half a billion dollars for tests that won’t count for anything?” he asked, noting money spent on the high number of tests that could be failed without consequences.

Eissler said students would still have to pass their courses to graduate and that school districts would have authority to include scores on the tests in final grades.

“It’s a matter of letting local school districts make these decisions. We’re trying to get the state out of micromanaging school districts,” he said.

While Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, and other Senate leaders have voiced opposition to backing off on the new testing program — originally approved in 2007 — Eissler said times have changed and many school districts are looking at sizable funding reductions next year.

Under the 2007 testing law, high school students will have to take three exams each in English, math, science and social studies — a total of 12 tests. The law calls on students to achieve a passing average on the three tests in each subject to earn a high school diploma. Field testing of the new exams has found large numbers of students lacking the skills to pass.

Under the House bill approved Wednesday, students would have to pass only the English III and Algebra II exams, and one test each in science and social studies.

In addition, the measure sets up a new two-year transition that would allow students for the next two years to take the outgoing and much easier TAKS exam in lieu of the end-of-course tests.

The House bill has drawn fire from the Governor’s Business Council, Texas Association of Business, Texas Institute for Education Reform and former President George W. Bush’s education adviser, Sandy Kress. All said the House bill would undermine recent academic improvements in the state.

Final House approval is expected Thursday or Friday, before the bill is sent to the Senate, where leaders have said they don’t want to retreat on the new testing and graduation requirements.

House advances bill easing path to diploma

By Gary Scharrer | My San Antonio
Thursday, April 7, 2011

AUSTIN — The Texas House tentatively approved a bill Wednesday to make it easier for high school students to pass end-of-course exams — a move critics called “a substantial retreat” from school accountability.

“This bill creates a clear, understandable path to graduation,” House Public Education Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said of his legislation, HB 500.

Business and education reform groups complained the bill would weaken efforts to ensure all high school graduates are college- or career-ready.

Some legislators also used the debate to blast the entire testing issue and reliance on standardized tests to measure student achievement.

The House will take a final vote on the bill today before it moves to the Senate, where it is unlikely to get a friendly reception. Senate Public Education Chair Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, has repeatedly expressed opposition to diluting end-of-course testing.

Two years ago, lawmakers approved HB 3, replacing the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills with end-of-course exams for high school students.

Under that bill, starting in the 2011-12 school year, students are to take 12 end-of-course exams in math, science, social studies and English language arts. They must earn a minimum score to be determined by the state commissioner of education.

Under Eissler's bill, students would have to pass only four end-of-course exams — in English, algebra, science and social studies — to earn a diploma.

He called the changes an “appropriate balance between teaching, learning and accountability.”

With more than 120 co-sponsors for the bill, Rep. Todd Smith, R-Bedford, knew it would pass but told colleagues he felt “morally obligated to sound a loud alarm.”

He said the changes would dilute the state's incremental upgrading of accountability standards, designed to produce high school graduates who are college-ready.

“We are raising the white flag without any evidence that there is a problem” with HB 3, Smith said. “This is not about improving our accountability system; it's a significant step toward dismantling it.”

HB 500 also directs the Texas Education Agency not to use projected improvement in school accountability ratings, which cast doubt on last year's ratings.

Projections are appropriate to set expectations but not for measuring actual student improvement, Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, said before getting unanimous support for his amendment.

Hochberg also won easy approval for an amendment creating a pilot program to exempt students from a standardized test if they passed it the previous year.

“If we know they're going to pass that test, why give it to them?” he asked. It would be better for schools to concentrate time and effort on struggling students, Hochberg said.

Lawmakers also unanimously approved HB 6, which would replace the system of funding textbooks and instructional materials with a new “instructional materials allotment,” including books, computer software, magnetic media, DVDs, CD-ROMs and computer courseware.

House to vote on loosening graduation testing requirements

This piece needs to be clear when it say's "education reform groups," and acknowledge (as was done during the hearing) that members of these "reform groups" are also closely tied to the testing companies that benefit from our testing obsession. Changing the use of high-stakes testing does not mean that students will still be required to complete the curriculum. In fact, there is no research that supports the ways in which Texas place high-stakes testing requirements on students. Rather, experts would argue that it's a misuse of the tests, which are developed for diagnostic purposes only. This is such an old debate that is kept alive by the interests that benefit.


-Patricia

Measure would allow students to pass fewer end-of-course exams to graduate.

By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Texas high school students would have to pass fewer new state exams to graduate under a bill to be considered today by the Texas House.

Pushed by state Rep. Rob Eissler, chairman of the Public Education Committee, the bill aims to ease the transition to tougher end-of-course exams. But business and education reform groups say it is a step backward, and they blame school districts for using the state's budget crisis to justify undoing a law they don't like.

Current law sets as a graduation requirement that students take a total of 12 end-of-course exams — in English, math, science and social studies — and earn an average passing score within each subject.

Incoming freshmen would be the first students to face the more stringent requirement, which was passed in 2009.

House Bill 500 would loosen those requirements and allow a student to graduate by passing four exams: algebra and English III as well as one from each of the other two subject areas.

Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said the bill would give students more time to ease into the tougher new exams and simplifies the requirements.

"We're not letting up. I think we're being more direct and more fair," Eissler said.

Business leaders and education reform groups have said the proposed looser requirements would weaken the expectations for graduation, making a high school diploma little more than a piece of paper.

Drew Scheberle, vice president for education at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, said HB 500 takes the state in the wrong direction.

"It reduces the amount of information you need to demonstrate knowledge on to earn a diploma. This isn't a transition; it's an absolute lowering," Scheberle said.

And the people who will suffer from the lowering of those standards will be the students, he said .

"If HB 500 passes, there are no repercussions until the kid hits college or the real world academically unprepared," Scheberle added.

More than 125 other House members have signed on to the measure, so chances are good that HB 500 will clear the House.

But its fate is murkier in the Senate.

Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano , has said that she does not want to backslide on education reforms that have been years in the making.

Consequently, Shapiro pushed to include almost $400 million in the Senate version of the budget to pay for textbooks and other instructional materials needed to prepare students for the exams.

The House budget, however, does not have money for those materials and reduces school aid by almost $8 billion in the next two years.

School districts have seized on the state's budget crisis to justify this change, said Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business.

But he said the districts' real worry is that student performance on the field tests of the end-of-course exams has been troubling.

"They want to take advantage of the financial situation and delay the onslaught of reality," Hammond said.

Eissler denies that this change is related to the state's budget situation.

But state Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin, said the budget crisis has put in jeopardy money for programs and materials that schools need to prepare their students for the exams.

"Their request for getting the Legislature's foot off their necks in the accountability system has some resonance with me," said Strama, a member of the Public Education Committee.

What has been lost in this debate, Strama said, is that the exams are supposed to be used to identify students who are struggling and get them the help to pass the tests.

"The accountability system shouldn't be a Damoclean sword hanging over the heads of schools," Strama said.

Budget crisis poses threat to educational standards

Of course individuals with strong ties to the very testing company that benefits from schools and districts' over-consumption of high-stakes testing would put this out. They belong to the small number (count them on one hand) of individuals that are opposed to HB 500.

-Patricia

Let's keep commitment to accountability in schools

By JIM WINDHAM, TEXAS INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATION REFORM | Houston Chronicle
April 26, 2011

The current Texas legislative session is largely about the budget crisis, and the media reports have particularly sensationalized the potential cuts in public education funding. But if one looks more closely, there is a larger threat in public education policy, one that would undermine much of the progress we have made in standards and accountability.

Let's retrace why the recent Texas public education reforms were necessary and why the Legislature spent so much time and effort crafting them.

Prior to the adoption of the landmark House Bill 3 in 2009, we needed a more rigorous high school curriculum with serious and focused assessment and accountability. Among other provisions, these reforms called for the end of the dreaded TAKS exit exam in high school, to be replaced with end-of-course exams in the 12 core high school subjects.

This was a big step forward because these exams could be used as finals, total testing time would be reduced and instruction could be devoted entirely to the curriculum instead of teaching to an unrelated test. Educators, parents and students would take these courses and exams seriously because the exams would count as 15 percent of course grades.

This means that for the first time, after HB 3 is fully implemented, postsecondary readiness, defined as college and workplace readiness without the need for remediation, will be the organizing principle of the Texas school accountability system. In addition, it means that we have adopted a postsecondary ramp, with benchmarks for achievement at every grade level and vertically aligned assessments that tell us where every child is on that ramp leading to the postsecondary readiness standard as the exit.

We have been on a journey leading to this standard and these expectations for our students and our educators for more than a decade. With the adoption of HB 3 in 2009, we are there.

These reforms increased focus on quality instruction, eliminated time spent teaching to an unrelated test and the assessments mattered in students' grades, providing great hope to getting students more prepared for college or a meaningful career. This was a very big deal, a stop-the-presses moment in reform. In fact, Achieve Inc., a national consortium of business and education leaders, named Texas as the only state that met all of its criteria for college- and career-readiness graduation standards.

Now a series of proposals in the current session, primarily House Bill 500 recently passed by the House, threaten to roll back much of that progress, to revisit the old HB 3 debates, to refight the last war.

If these proposals become law:

•  End-of-course high school exams will not count as part of the student's grade in the course.

 • Graduation standards will be lowered so that students will be able to fail as many as eight of the 12 end-of-course exams and still receive a high school diploma. This means a student would have no motivation whatsoever to take seriously English I or II, geometry, two of the science exams and two of the social studies exams.

Many would like to do away with state testing in the interest of local control or delay implementing end-of-course exams on a hollow argument about costs. But if reliability of funding for instructional and curriculum materials is the issue here, we should have that discussion. You will find that our coalition fully supports the necessary funding for the implementation of HB 3 on schedule, including the end-of-course exams, and I cannot conceive of legislators leaving town without fully funding the instructional materials our students need to begin the next school year. And we support the principle of local control as it pertains to the concept of full operational authority commensurate with responsibility, but accountability standards should be a matter of state policy.

We also support the maintenance of funding that provides intervention to support remedial initiatives in the schools for those students who need it. But we shouldn't allow the budget crunch to be a red herring in delaying the full implementation of these enhanced standards and altering the ultimate mission of public education. And we shouldn't allow the mantra of local control to undermine the most rigorous high school graduation standards in the nation that have put Texas back at the top in our expectations for our educators and our kids.

Windham is chairman of the Texas Institute for Education Reform.

House Bill on Student Testing Reopens a Familiar Debate

This Texas discussion on college ready standards, the use of high-stakes, end-of-course exams, and budget constraints is important on a national level, especially among those states (and districts) that signed on to national common core standards. The Texas case study once again leads the nation on educational policy in practice.

-Patricia

By MORGAN SMITH | NY Times
April 16, 2011

When Representative Rob Eissler, Republican of The Woodlands, brought House Bill 500 to the Texas House floor on April 6, he emphasized what it did not do.

It did not, he said, lower testing standards. Nor did it delay the planned 2011-12 rollout of the state’s more rigorous Staar exams.

Mr. Eissler was setting out to correct what he called the “misrepresentations” and “false claims” surrounding the bill, which, despite its overwhelming support in the House — more than two-thirds of his colleagues signed on to it, and only five voted against it — has generated vocal opposition from some within education circles who view it as a dramatic retreat from hard-won reforms.

The bill also reveals a divergence between the Legislature’s two public education chiefs — Mr. Eissler, who heads the House Public Education Committee, and his counterpart in the upper chamber, Senator Florence Shapiro, Republican of Plano — on how the state should hold students and educators accountable.

Ms. Shapiro staunchly supports moving forward with the testing standards in H.B. 3, the 2009 legislation that set up the transition to the new Staar exams from the state’s current TAKS subject area tests .

“It’s a shame that it’s happened at the very same time that we are having problems with the budget,” Ms. Shapiro said, “but that doesn’t change the idea that this is the direction we should be going.”

Worried about how operating with fewer teachers will affect classroom instruction and whether they will be able to afford updated textbooks, districts have pushed to delay the new exams.

H.B. 500 makes significant modifications to H.B. 3, with the goals of reducing costs and easing districts’ concerns that the new testing regimen could lead to large numbers of students failing to graduate. Instead of the end-of-course Staar exams counting 15 percent of a student’s final grade, H.B. 500 permits school districts to set their own policies. It also would allow districts to suspend a new requirement that students receive a cumulative score on 12 exams in four subject areas to graduate; instead, students would have to pass a total of four exams, one in each subject.

Business groups — including the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Coalition for a Competitive Workforce and the Austin Chamber of Commerce — oppose the measure because they believe it represents a step back for student accountability.

Drew Scheberle, a senior vice president at the Austin Chamber, said H.B. 500 “represents the first time in 25 years that we would actually reduce the expectations for graduation.”

To some extent, the divide between Mr. Eissler and Ms. Shapiro is a rehashing of an old battle between the House and Senate on student testing.

“This is basically a fight we had two years ago in conference committee, when the Senate wanted the standards as they are on the books today, and the House wanted relaxed graduation standards,” said Andrew C. Erben, president of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, which opposes Mr. Eissler’s bill.

The House more than the Senate has traditionally aligned with school districts on student accountability, Mr. Scheberle said. “The House has not always been the strongest on this issue,” he said. “It has usually been the Senate.”

Now, lawmakers in the House are looking for ways to soften the blow of their stark budget, which allocates about $4 billion less to public education than the Senate. “The House is dealing in a very different arena than the Senate is dealing,” Ms. Shapiro said. “If I was in their shoes and didn’t have money for textbooks, I didn’t have any money to keep our teachers or to keep our schools whole, I would be looking for ways to lessen the pressure, too.”

Mr. Eissler told his colleagues that his bill represented the “middle ground” between those who want a delay of the Staar tests and those who want to hold firm. On Friday, he acknowledged he had “some missionary work” to do in the Senate.

“It’s not like there’s a difference in philosophy,” he said. “It’s a difference in application. Florence Shapiro and I agree that we need to have rigor, relevance, and responsibility or strong accountability, but how that translates to day-to-day operation in the school district is what made H.B. 500.”

I am Educator, Hear Me Roar! An Interview with John Kuhn

This is powerful!

-Patricia

By Anthony Cody
March 23, 2011

A week ago, a friend shared a video with me of a school superintendent giving a fiery speech at a Save Texas Schools rally. That is how I met the superintendent of Perrin-Whitt School District, John Kuhn.



After watching this video, I felt I had to get to know this man. He responds to my questions below.

Question: You have become widely known due to your Letter from Alamo. Can you explain the circumstances that led you to write this?

A Texas state senator spoke to a group of administrators in Austin back in February. It just so happens that this senator is the chair of a couple of very important education-related committees and is a former school teacher. As a result, she is kind of seen as an "education expert" among our legislators. This particular senator, however, has been at the forefront of drafting policies that I see as counterproductive for our public schools: she has pushed for more and more high stakes testing, and less and less funding. She also has advocated for maintaining the Target Revenue System, which is a school funding scheme in Texas that gives certain schools more funding than others, seemingly at random. In Texas, the luckiest schools have a Target Revenue of $12,000 per student and the unluckiest schools have a Target Revenue of $4,000--but all schools are held to the same hard-and-fast standards when it comes to state and federal accountability measures. It's unjust on the face of it.

So, going into this meeting, I was already angry about the moral underpinnings of our whole system. It just all seems like a parody of bad government to me, like something you'd read in a dystopian novel like 1984 or A Brave New World--except that it's real.

So this senator spoke to us and, after letting us know that there will be severe funding cuts due to the economic downturn--and never once mentioning the 2006 school funding tax swap that she and her colleagues adopted which capped property tax rates and slashed 1/3 of schools' revenue, replacing it with a business tax that generated billions less than what was cut (and which was labeled at that time by our state comptroller as "the biggest hot check in state history")--she then began to talk about a pet project of hers: the new State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR test. She spoke about it with a gleam in her eyes, as though it were her new grandbaby. And then she said a word that pushed me over the edge. After having spoken at length about making hard decisions and sacrificing and cutting local budgets, she bragged that spending on STAAR was "non-negotiable." Teachers' jobs are on the line, but not the precious test. I had trouble getting on board with her priorities.

She took questions at the end of her presentation, and I let her know my concerns. I pointed out to her that I had given myself a 10% pay cut and would be cutting positions soon, and I asked if anyone at Pearson (the firm that makes the test) would be taking a pay cut. I told her she was "saving the test but not the teachers."

Her responses to my (probably impertinent) questions left me even more concerned and frustrated than I had already been. Anyway, this particular senator has been a steadfast critic of public schools, calling us inefficient and creating layer upon layer of bureaucracy to watch over us and micromanage everything we do. This session she has often repeated a dubious statistic about the "1-to-1 ratio" of teachers to non-teachers in Texas schools, and how that ratio was 4-to-1 back in the 1970s--never mind the fact that a.) the state's statistics in the 1970s didn't include lunch ladies, bus drivers, and other non-teachers, creating a false comparison, and b.) the amount of bureaucratic nonsense and inflexible accountability measures piled on Texas schools beginning in the 1980s has created countless man hours of reporting and testing paperwork and has led schools to hire testing coordinators, math coaches, parent involvement coordinators, etc. When this senator implies that the state of Texas is broke because superintendents like me just go wild hiring unnecessary non-teachers, it feels very much like I'm being slapped for doing what the senators forced me to do. I feel like public school officials are the Official Scapegoat of Texas.

So, in short, I got my belly full. I went back to my hotel room that night and wrote the Alamo letter. I have written a million rants about government insanity in guiding educational policy over the course of my career, but I have always deleted them after venting. But not this time--I typed that bad boy out and sent it to my hometown paper and to Diane Ravitch, to heck with it. And it ended up on Valerie Strauss's blog at the Washington Post website. Then I spent about three nights not sleeping and asking myself, "What have I done?" But, even as I was pretty sure I was going to die from a heart attack over the near-certainty I would lose my job, I was kind of glad I had taken the things we school people gripe to each other about and put it out there for everyone to read. A wise superintendent friend once told me that teachers who complain to each other in the teachers' lounge don't really want things to change, they just want to gripe; but those who want things to be better will actually voice their concerns to the people who have the ability to fix them. So that's why I wrote the letter--I'm begging our legislators to quit driving us down what I believe is the fundamentally wrong trail.

Question: What has been the effect of NCLB on children in your district?

Well, they get to take plenty of bubble tests, and if they do poorly they get lots of remediation in the core areas that get tested. I guess NCLB has ensured that our teachers and administrators feel lots of pressure to perform on these tests. Like everyone else, we do diagnostic benchmarking and use released tests in the classroom to get ready. Like someone (I think it was Matt Damon, actually) recently said, we are doing less teaching of kids and more training of them, with an eye toward that test. I'm not blaming our teachers, though, for "teaching to the test," as I have often heard parents and citizens bash the schools for doing. Our leaders have created this creepy environment where standardized test scores are the great false god. If I raised my kids at home according to the prevailing philosophies, we would have a simplistic scoring device for how effectively my kids did their chores--ignoring every other, less measurable way they show me that they love me--and I would then meter out hugs accordingly. If I were to establish such a dazzlingly, nauseatingly wrong system at home, I couldn't very well then turn around and criticize my kids for adopting certain mechanical approaches to getting the results I wanted, could I?

So of course teachers are going to teach to the test, and even more so when those scores are tied to them personally (coming soon to a Texas public school near you!) As we move forward, I see the electives withering on the vine and the classroom increasingly becoming a place where kids work on "fundamentals" like they do on the football practice field--after all, that high-stakes test IS the big game, and the consequences of losing are very real.

Question: What do you see as the positives and negatives of current education reform efforts in your state and across the country?

First, I am not against accountability, just the incredibly convoluted, inefficient, and mean-spirited kind of accountability we have right now. In my mind, we should treat teachers the way we want them to treat students. But we don't. We ask them to encourage and remediate and support kids while we whip, label and threaten them. So the positives would have to be that teachers work hard (which they always did anyway in the rural school I grew up in), and that the top-down pressure has led schools to align their curriculum and really look at what they are teaching. The negatives are huge, however.

First, accountability has narrowed our focus down to--in Texas--just four subjects. It doesn't matter to Texas if kids learn anything in any subject but math, science, social studies, and language arts. Therefore, the only saving grace in the arts and foreign languages and vocational classes and athletics is that we have passionate people teaching those subjects who really care about their students and their subjects. And that is the core of my disdain for this ugly baby called accountability--if the test-and-label philosophy really worked, then you would think there would be far worse teaching going on outside the core classes, but there isn't generally. Why? Because good teachers are motivated by passion and a moral sense of mission, not by the threats of absent bureaucrats.

We are putting the wrong fuel in our car--it runs best on support, and we are gassing up with intimidation and blame. We are going to burn up this engine by making education a place where only hyper-competitive type-A individuals can feel comfortable, while all of those wonderfully kind and dedicated, supportive people who were born to teach abandon the classroom in search of a kinder profession where their skill sets are valued.

The other major gripe I have is this: if we really believed that accountability works, wouldn't we have accountability for all public servants? Why do we not require our legislators to make "Adequate Yearly Progress"? We have the data from their congressional districts, do we not? There is crime data, health care data, poverty figures, and drug use statistics for every state and federal legislative district. Why, exactly, do we not establish annual targets for our legislators to meet? We could eliminate 100% of poverty, crime, drug abuse, and preventable illness by 2014!

If accountability is the answer, we must move from the selective accountability that merely targets schools to a universal accountability that targets all players. We know that poverty, illness, crime, and addiction in the home all have a direct impact on the educability of our students--when legislators fail, schools fail. But we only blame the second domino to fall--it seems very cynical to me. It appears that accountability is currently more about finding a convenient scapegoat for our national failings than about really solving problems. I will believe this as long as we hold teachers accountable and not legislators. (I know that a legislator would instinctively say he or she is held accountable at election time, but an election is not remotely like an education-style accountability measure--when superintendents get their contracts renewed, we have a state-assigned label stamped on our foreheads. When politicians go out for re-election, they get to define themselves for voters, sans a state-issued label as to their fitness to serve. This happened recently in Texas, when our governor ran ads touting Texas' huge budget surpluses, which we discovered shortly after his re-election were actually huge shortfalls. Educators can't participate in those kind of games when their contracts are up--we have a label that we can't explain away. If this kind of system truly works to create positive outcomes, why do we not apply it to other public servants?)

Question: You seem unusually outspoken for an administrator. Have you experienced any repercussions?

My community and school board have supported me, and educators around Texas--as well as nationally--have emailed, called and written letters of support. It's been inspirational. I have received one letter expressing disappointment that I spoke at the Texas Rally to Save Public schools. There have been a few vicious comments posted in the comments sections of articles about the Alamo letter, but I don't take anonymous commenters very seriously. One superintendent indicated in an interview that he felt my letter was inappropriate--he's probably right, but appropriate behavior is what got us here. My contention is that quiet meetings in legislators' offices with frustrated school people asking for support has gotten us the current Rube Goldberg systems. I personally want the general public to be aware of these machinations and the back room legislative wheeler-dealing that gives rise to clearly immoral and self-defeating policies such as the Target Revenue System. I can't bring myself to believe that the average person wants a standardized-test-centric, blame-the-teachers-for-all-social-ills education for their kids. I am tired of educators' silence allowing the public to blindly criticize teachers and local schools for the effects of elected officials' foolish decisions. If elected officials want to play the blame game--and boy do they!--then I'm going to play it with them. There is enough blame to go around.

Question: How do you weigh the decision to speak out in this way?

I say what I believe to be true. And I'm willing to live with the consequences.


Question: Feel free to extemporize if there is something more you would like to share that I have not asked.

I have always believed that if a person has the audacity to accept the mantle of leadership, they'd better have the courage to lead. Unfortunately, many of my state elected officials play games and issue half-true sound bites rather than exhibiting true leadership. The greater good is dying on the floor while they preen and play to their fan clubs. (They use the word "constituents" because it sounds more grown up than "fan clubs.") It's all very sad to me, because historically we did education right, and now American education is writhing in hideous deformity on the experimenters' table while other countries do it right. And it's a vicious cycle: the more they mess things up, the more eagerly they then come at us with more clumsy surgeries to "fix" us.

I would like to note an incident that gave rise to my speech in Austin. Following the publication of the Alamo letter, I was invited to speak at a college here, and I spoke just before a nationally-known school reformer who is a high school principal. So he spoke about how he got miraculous results in his school, and how 100% of his students went on to four-year colleges, etc. It was all very inspirational. And then, in the middle of his speech, he felt the need to say, "I don't work at a charter school, either. I work at a public high school."

The implication was clear--he plays be the same rules as public school principals, he just gets better results. We all play the same game, he's just a better coach.

So I was troubled when I got home. I was a public school principal for several years, and I couldn't get 100% of my students to graduate, much less go to college. And I worked hard! What was he doing that I didn't do?

So I went to his school's website and I saw an interesting button on the home page. "Apply now!" it said. Weird, I thought. Nobody "applies" at my school. So I clicked on it and discovered that his "public" school is actually a "public magnet" school.

He strategically left out that important detail in his speech.

You have to apply and be accepted to get into his school; you only have to breathe and live in the district to go to my school. If you don't toe the line at his school, this golden child principal will--wait for it--send you back to the public school! He drafts his players and I play with the Bad News Bears over here, and then he sticks his chest out and tells us all what a skilled coach he is.

In short, he deliberately, calculatingly lied by omission to an unsuspecting audience.

And that's when I realized that the school reform movement is populated by self-promoting snake oil salesmen, and our elected officials are buying their tonic by the truckload. It's hard for me to watch this train wreck slowly unfold.

The narrative of the school reformer is a simple formula: kids are victims, teachers are the villains, and some administrator is the messianic hero. A dynamic personality comes into a bad school and doesn't accept mediocrity. He or she cleans up the discipline and fires all the bad teachers, confronting the wicked teachers' union along the way. The hero is this lone special individual and the administrative mechanisms the he or she put in place. It is, basically, the Heroic Ballad of the Bureaucrat. It sells books and dupes legislators. It makes people rich. It only requires a certain amount of arrogance and duplicity to pull it off. It relies on the same dangerous logic that tyrants use to justify lording over peasants and restricting their liberties. In this case, the benign dictator is a self-promoting principal or superintendent with all the answers, and the poor clueless peasants in dire need of a paternalistic leader are the teachers.

The narrative I cling to is also simple, but it doesn't make anyone rich. It would also make for a remarkably boring book. In my ballad, kids are still the victims, but bureaucracy is the enemy. Legislators too afraid to accept responsibility for the persistence of poverty, crime, poor health care, and methamphetamine addiction are the villains, eager only to place blame and not willing or able to actually fix things. And the passionate, beleaguered teachers picking up the pieces in their classrooms day after day are the heroes. My story plays out over years, with a million tiny acts of heroism, each one too small on its own to matter much--but when all of them are put together, how they speak powerfully of a life well-spent! These are the teachers I am sticking up for. And my story doesn't have a Hollywood ending. 100% of my kids don't go to a four-year college. Some of them become house framers or work for our local oilfield companies. But they grow up and raise families and go to church and serve on the school board. They are successes in every sense of the word. And there are others who aren't. Some of my students have gone to prison. Some struggle with addiction. My ballad isn't tidy.

But, the nice thing is, I don't have to leave out inconvenient details when I sing my ballad. The assumption that the school reform movement doesn't permit negative outcomes requires you to believe that they fix kids when the hard, unmentionable truth is that they cull them. And I take the culled ones and do the best I can with them. And I'm good with this arrangement because you can't spin the story when you stand before God. God sees through the omissions and knows that the reformer above runs a magnet school and that I take all comers. He can convince the politicians and his readers if he wants to. I'm good with that. I'll soldier on.