This is a manufactured crisis. I get some parents' dissatisfaction with some public schools, but the takeover route is not at all advisable as you can read for yourself in this Texas Monthly post on the matter. Moreover, the research literature, in general, does not provide any solid evidence of consistent success when schools or districts are taken over (e.g., Morel, 2018).

Such decisions amount to "scorched earth" approaches with the communities getting objectified, treated like objects, that corporations like Third Futures Schools paternalistically think is best for the district's school children.

With appointed boards—as recently occurred in the Houston Independent School District, this taking over of previously-elected ones, a major outcome is a decrease of local control and an increase in corporate control that disempowers, rather than empowers our children and communities.

Higher test scores neither bring—nor will ever bring—comfort. They imply a sacrificing of teachers, books, culturally relevant curriculum, atop a hyper test focus and scripted curricula. This "reform" for HISD is punitive and lacks imagination and vision.

Oh yes, and all of this while lining the pockets of the education management charter companies like Third Future Schools, that voraciously seek to possess and control all formerly public schools. For more context and detail on this assertion, also read this in tandem with my earlier post, Support for Houston ISD’s Spanish speakers has dwindled under state-appointed leader, parents say.

HISD used to have one of the best bilingual and dual language education programs in the nation. An about-face on the matter is devastating.

This should both sadden and outrage all of us who like John Dewey, understood our nation's classrooms as laboratories for democracy. I do agree, as well, that this is an act of racial violence. It further reeks of colonial and capitalistic logics of violence and accumulation by dispossession.

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Morel, D. (2018). Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy. Oxford University Press.

Welcome to Houston’s No-Longer-Independent School District 

The Texas Education Agency just took over the state’s largest school system. Parents and teachers are furious. But some city leaders insist that, after decades of poor performance by HISD, disruption is necessary.  

By Michael Hardy

June 22, 2023

Mike Miles, the state-appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, might be the most hated person in Harris County. At last week’s school board meeting—the first since Miles was officially hired—residents crowded HISD headquarters, in northwest Houston, to oppose the state’s takeover of the school district. One speaker compared Miles, who is the son of a Black father and a Japanese mother, to a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Another described the state’s recent seizure of HISD, which serves a student population that is 62 percent Hispanic and 22 percent Black—as an “act of racial violence.” Larry McKinzie, an educator and former State Board of Education candidate, appeared to make a physical threat against Miles: “Realize this: you’re safe at forty-four-hundred West Eighteenth”—the location of the board meeting—“but you’ll have to go back [home].” Not one of the 33 attendees who gave public comments had anything good to say about their new superintendent.  

It was hard to gauge Miles’s reaction to the criticism, because he spent the entire public-comment period in a back room, watching the meeting on TV. Arrayed around his empty chair on the dais were the nine members of the new HISD board of managers, recently appointed by Texas Education Agency (TEA) commissioner Mike Morath to replace Houston’s elected school board. The first public meeting, on June 8, had been disrupted by angry hecklers. In an apparent effort to keep order, the board allowed only 35 members of the public into last week’s meeting room, which can accommodate more than 300. The remaining 100 or so attendees were relegated to an overflow room. Several attempted to force their way into the main room, only to be turned back by armed police officers. One teacher who had registered to speak at the meeting was arrested for criminal trespassing and spent the night in jail. 

“This is supposed to be a public meeting, and the public is not in here,” said state representative Jolanda Jones, a former HISD trustee who was among the few allowed into the main hall. “You’re not going to get the support of the community, including myself and others, until you meaningfully include the public.” From Mayor Sylvester Turner on down, nearly every Houston official opposes the HISD takeover. “This process has been flawed and anti-democratic from the very beginning,” Turner said in a statement earlier this month. “There has been minimal community engagement and very little transparency.” 

The state has previously ousted elected school boards in seven districts, including in El Paso ISD in 2012 after a cheating scandal and in Beaumont ISD in 2014 due to financial mismanagement. But it has never assumed control of a district as sprawling and complex as Houston’s, the largest in the state and the eighth-largest in the country. HISD serves nearly 200,000 students spread across 274 schools, has a budget of $2.3 billion, and employs more than 10,000 teachers. In 2015 Harold Dutton, an iconoclastic Democratic state representative who represents northeast Houston and is a longtime critic of HISD, amended an education bill to allow the TEA to take over any school district with a campus that fails to meet state accountability standards for five consecutive years. In 2019, after HISD’s Wheatley High School triggered that provision, the TEA announced that it would appoint a board of managers to temporarily oversee HISD, citing Wheatley’s poor performance and allegations of board misconduct. “This intervention is needed to prevent imminent and substantial harm to the welfare of the district’s students or to the public interest,” Morath said at the time. 

Houston leaders overwhelmingly opposed the takeover, citing HISD’s overall B rating from the state and strong financial position. In 2019 the district sued the state, delaying the takeover for four years. The legal battle ended in January, when the Texas Supreme Court—whose nine members are all Republicans—sided with the TEA. 

On June 1, the TEA formally seized control of HISD. Governor Greg Abbott, who appointed Morath (as well as five state Supreme Court justices), called the decision “unfortunate” but necessary. “There has been a longtime failure by HISD, and the victims of that failure are the students,” Abbott declared. HISD superintendent Millard House II, who had been on the job for two years, was replaced by Miles, a former Dallas ISD superintendent and the founder of Third Future Schools, a network of public charter schools. The elected trustees were replaced by a board of managers picked by the TEA. While racially diverse, the board members mostly live in affluent areas of Houston west of downtown, far from the schools in northeast Houston targeted by Miles’s reforms. 

Those reforms will be sweeping and immediate. For his first year, Miles will target the feeder systems of three chronically underperforming high schools: Kashmere, North Forest, and Wheatley. A total of 29 elementary, middle, and high schools—all serving low-income, predominantly minority student populations—will be reorganized according to Miles’s “New Education System,” a package of reforms he implemented at Dallas ISD and his Third Future schools. In coming years, Miles plans to expand this system to more campuses. (Miles’s tenure in Dallas was polarizing. Supporters claim he made extraordinary improvements, while critics say he alienated the community and that academic gains proved short-lived.)

In recent interviews with local media, Miles has described the key components of the New Education System: higher teacher pay ($85,000 starting salaries, compared to around $61,500 for the coming school year), bonuses for the best teachers, a curriculum focused on reading and math, and a strict disciplinary regime enforced by cameras in every classroom. Unruly students will be removed from class and placed in a separate room, where they can follow along by video. Miles has said that librarians will likely be eliminated—because, in his view, their job consists only of “checking out books,” as he told the Houston Chronicle editorial board. Magnet programs may be scaled back, although schools will retain extracurricular activities, including sports. Miles did not respond to an interview request for this story. 

To implement these reforms, the superintendent is requiring every teacher in the 29 schools to reapply for their job. (Employees who aren’t rehired can move elsewhere in HISD.) That hasn’t gone over well with teachers or parents, many of whom have protested the looming reorganization. At last week’s board meeting, parents pleaded with Miles not to fire their children’s favorite teachers. “We want to keep every single teacher and staff member at our school, along with the classes and programs that they teach,” said Melissa Yarborough, whose children attend Pugh Elementary, one of the 29 schools being overhauled. “We are not just data on your spreadsheets. We’re a community that you’re tearing apart.” 

Karina Quesada, a mother and former teacher, challenged board members to put their own children in a New Education System school. “If it’s good enough for other people’s kids, it’s good enough for your kids,” she said. Sarah Rivlin, who teaches at Northside High School, urged the board to keep librarians. “A librarian put the right books in my hands and turned me into a reader, setting me up for success,” she said. “That’s what you want for your own children, isn’t it?” 

Miles does have defenders in Houston. Cary Wright is the CEO of Good Reason Houston, a  nonprofit group supported by some prominent Houston business leaders that partners with HISD schools to improve student outcomes. Citing low scores on the state-required STAAR tests at some HISD campuses, the organization has lobbied for sweeping reforms. “We’ve been very impressed by the urgency that [Miles] has demonstrated so far,” Wright said. “He seems to be taking an approach that’s based on the idea of equity, the idea of finding the strongest educators in the entire district and moving them to the campuses that have the greatest number of students with unmet needs."

Anna Eastman, who served as an HISD trustee from 2010 to 2018, praised Miles’s proposals to replace librarians with more teachers and use cameras to help identify misbehaving students. “I did think it was pretty cool that if a kid has to leave the classroom for a disciplinary reason that they’ll get to continue watching what’s happening instructionally on Zoom,” she told me. “Because when you remove a kid from the classroom, they lose out on learning time.” 

To Wright and Eastman, the New Education System represents a much-needed disruption of the status quo. Less than half of current HISD second and third graders are reading at grade level, and just one of out five HISD graduates will go on to complete a two- or four-year college degree. For some veteran HISD educators, though, Miles’s plan is all too familiar. From 2010 to 2013, former superintendent Terry Grier spent more than $60 million to radically transform twenty of the district’s worst-performing schools. The program, known as Apollo 20, included performance-based teacher pay, extra testing, and intense discipline. Test scores temporarily improved at the targeted schools, but many students transferred to different campuses, reportedly because of the high-stress environment. 

The effect on teacher morale was devastating. Shilpa Sarang, who taught English and English as a second language at an Apollo 20 high school in southwest Houston, wept as she recalled the “dehumanization” she experienced from administrators. “I would get written up for everything, like if I had left a highlighter on the floor,” she said. One of her colleagues confessed to fantasizing about deliberately crashing her car so she’d have an excuse not to come to school. The New Education System  “is exactly the same program that happened under Apollo Twenty,” said Ruth Kravetz, a retired HISD teacher and cofounder of Community Voices for Public Education, which opposes the state takeover. “That led to plummeting enrollment at the Apollo schools, no reading gains, and no sustained math gains.” Among the 29 schools included on Miles’s list are several that previously went through Apollo 20. 

Erin Baumgartner, director of the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said that Miles’s reforms will have to take into consideration the harsh reality of life for many students. Nearly 80 percent of HISD students are eligible to participate in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program; 37 percent are English-language learners. “We expect education to fix everything,” Baumgartner said. “Some kids, unfortunately, show up at school hungry, or haven’t had a place to sleep, or clean clothes. We expect schools to manage all of that. But supporting students takes a whole community effort."

Following the heated public comments at last week’s board meeting, Miles finally emerged from his back room, wearing a checked sports jacket and a broad grin. He introduced his top staff, then presided over a two-hour budget workshop conducted around a set of massive conference tables that occupied half the room. The protesters slowly drifted away; by the time the meeting adjourned, virtually the only people left in the building were reporters and police officers. At a brief, late-night press conference, a reporter asked Miles why he didn’t show up for the public comments. “It’s the board’s meeting, and the focus should be on the board, and questions to the board,” he replied, explaining that he had already met with three thousand HISD teachers, parents, and employees in his first few weeks on the job. “I am answering lots of questions,” he said. “I will face any music.” 

Corrections, June 28, 2023: A previous version of this article reported that the state had ousted school boards in fifteen other districts. It has done so in seven others. The article also reported that every employee of a school in Houston ISD will have to reapply for their job, including janitors. Only academic staff will have to.

Must-See Movie on Education: "Radical" win this year's Festival Favorite Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival

Friends:

I highly recommend that you see the movie, "Radical," that is showing here in Austin at the Galaxy Theater through December 13th. The brilliant Mexican actor, Eugenio Derbez, won this year's Festival Favorite Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Congratulations to director and writer Christopher Zalla who—as you can hear in this interview, got approached by Derbez, who expressed an eagerness at wanting to be cast in the film. Check out the interview. The recounting, the narrative of the making of the movie itself sounds so magical and wondrous.

It's similar to a degree to other movies described by Goldstein in his November 3, 2023 review appearing in the Los Angeles Times, but also very different in that this is a film about Mexico, addressing what life and existence meant in 2011 with the drug cartels in power and the daily experiences of horror and violence, particularly on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border in Matamoros, Tamaulipas—and within view of Elon Musk's Space X located at the state's furthest, southern tip in Boca Chica in Brownsville, Texas.

Christopher Zalla

What may also distinguish it from other films in this genre is that the teacher, Sergio (played by Eugenio Derbez), expresses not knowing what he is doing. However, Sergio does know more than he realizes in that he knows what schools should not be when they fail to educate youth for liberation and opt instead—in the words of the late Brazilian educator, Paolo Friere—"to educate for domestication."

"Radical," is a word never used once in the film, sidestepping language and taking the viewer, along with his students, straight to the classroom floor. It speaks to the exquisitely combined powers of groundedness, the power of an exuberant teacher's authentic, expressive caring for his initially reluctant students.

Albeit circuitously, this birthed a de facto, curriculum and pedagogy that sparked the flame of inventiveness and curiosity by centering it in the youth themselves. His approach incited his students to learn and experience the joy of imagination and the ability to create, something often denied for both students and teachers embedded in patriarchal and paternalistic school "reform" models that are highly scripted and over-prescribed. 

Such approaches, in contrast, are fully about order and control. Staffed with over-burdened teachers for little pay and precious little respect, such schools "succeed" when they break our children's spirits with mind-numbing curricula, low expectations, and high-stakes tests.

"Death by PowerPoint," is an expression I recently heard from a teacher experiencing Mike Moses' and his charter company's, Third Futures Schools, curriculum, in what used to be the Houston Independent School District. The Third Futures curriculum is already being administered locally at Méndez Middle School in Austin, Texas. I heard from someone there who a week ago told me that "It's a total school-to-prison pipeline." 

Watch out, friends and community. The neoliberals took over the Houston Independent School District and are not just headed our way, but already here. Literally. 

The irony is that these agendas come almost exclusively from people who themselves benefitted from a public education! Texas Education Agency (TEA) Commissioner Mike Morath himself! You can listen to him yourself here. 

It's pathetic to hear Commissioner Morath absolve himself from the Houston Independent School District takeover. Feigning innocence, he is no better than the aloof, Mexican bureaucrats that Sergio confronted in the film when asking them to provide the school with computers. Spare me. Por favor!

How could we in Austin let this happen to Méndez...? Geez, what a deal for neoliberals. Our communities get disenfranchised and they profit mightily from our children's failures—as exhibited on high-stakes tests that are—and have been—handmaidens to charterization, corporatization, and privatization of public education, generally. 

Not unlike Governor Abbott's plot to dismantle public education through vouchers, this parallel agenda disenfranchises our communities and is thus politically helpful to those that neither believe in, nor want, democracy, and prioritize instead, the preservation of the incumbencies of those in power. 

I appreciate the film's critique of the kind of education that treats children and youth like objects as emblematic of close to 25 years of high-stakes testing, that are part of this very same system of organized failure and disempowerment. In the meantime, the private sector generates eye-popping profits. And this, with our precious public school tax dollars flowing out of the classroom into their pockets. This, despite students ultimately doing exceedingly well on the ENLACE test despite vast inequities that the film and context make clear. Cheers to Zalla for his unblinking look at life under crisis.

I found it to be gripping from beginning to end and super hard to hold back the tears at least a couple of times. I even found myself not wanting it to end because I wanted to know what happened to all the youth, as well as to engage the implicit question of educating youth toward improbable futures. I like to think that whereas there is an undeniable impact of underinvestment, that any intervention that maximizes students' potential for future achievement is worth undertaking, since learning is not just in the immediate, but life-long, as well.

I think that we should organize viewings of this film in our classrooms and communities everywhere to get us talking about the education we seek for our youth and ways to get us there.

A final comment. There really is so much joy and power in this film that I am confident that all of these youth and adult actors were profoundly impacted. Zalla, too! What a gift to the world! 

Kudos to Eugenio Derbéz, Christopher Zalla, and the entire team for helping us to envision the world anew. 🧡💚🧡

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

@radicalthemovie

Review: ‘Radical’ uses an old syllabus but still scores highly on the inspiration scale

Eugenio Derbez, standing, in the movie “Radical.”

 

(Pantelion Films)

By Gary Goldstein | Nov.3, 2023 | Los Angeles Times

One of the more reliable movie subgenres involves the idealistic teacher who turns around a group of underachieving, often unruly and disadvantaged students. From such earlier films as “The Blackboard Jungle,” “To Sir, With Love” and “Up the Down Staircase” to later entries including “Stand and Deliver,” “Dangerous Minds” and 2008’s Palme d’Or-winning “The Class,” who doesn’t love stories about inspiring educators who help young folks beat the odds?

The latest addition to this admirable bunch is “Radical,” a lovely and touching true-life portrait based on Joshua Davis’ 2013 Wired magazine article “A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses.” The movie, anchored by a wonderful turn by Mexican superstar Eugenio Derbez, kicked off this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Festival Favorite Award.

Derbez, seen on American screens in the Oscar-winning “CODA” (in which he also notably played a teacher), stars as the real-life Sergio Juárez Correa, who in 2011 joined the teaching staff of José Urbina López Primary School in the border city of Matamoros, Mexico. (The film was shot mainly in and around San Salvador Atenco, a town outside Mexico City.)

Matamoros is a dusty, impoverished place beset by crime, corruption and apathy, all of which contribute to the state of its struggling elementary school, nicknamed “the School of Punishment,” where funding, test scores and student engagement are consistently, perhaps irrevocably low. That is until Correa — all jaunty, rules-be-damned enthusiasm — sweeps in at the start of the fall semester to teach sixth grade. He’s expecting an assist from the school’s computers but soon discovers they were stolen four years ago and never replaced.

Neither his wide-eyed students nor the rundown facility’s portly principal, Chucho (a winning Daniel Haddad), know what to make of Correa, who immediately steamrolls past traditional teaching methods, reimagines his classroom’s desks as lifeboats and launches into a rousing lesson about staying afloat, a resonant theme here.

There’s a learning curve, of course, but the eager kids soon find themselves on Team Correa, invigorated by his “radical” classroom stylings, intrigued by his references to such advanced topics as physics and philosophy, and encouraged by how he lets them each learn at their own pace. This includes eschewing any preparation for the standardized national exams, which Correa abhors but the school system unequivocally embraces.

It’s affecting and heartening to see Correa’s students blossom before our eyes, gaining a confidence and curiosity long suppressed by their bleak environment and the school’s stale methodology. Chucho and Correa become good friends as well, as the principal is won over by the new teacher’s creativity, commitment and elan.

Typical of these films, the story zeroes in on a handful of students, offering vivid snapshots of their home and personal lives and the intrusive effects on their schooling. First, there’s the pretty, quiet Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), a nascent math and science prodigy, who helps her ailing father (Gilberto Barraza) mine salable scrap metal from the smelly garbage dump near their makeshift home. Though her suspicious dad initially thinks Correa is filling Paloma’s young head with overly big and unattainable ideas, the teacher helps him to realize — and support — the girl’s potential. (The real Paloma broke a national record that term for her standardized test scores and later made the cover of Wired, which unironically dubbed her “The Next Steve Jobs.”)

Eugenio Derbez in the movie “Radical.”

(Pantelion Films)

Then there’s Nico (Danilo Guardiola), who begins as the class clown but goes on to appreciate his studies and inch away from the criminal activity he’s been drawn into by his older brother (Victor Estrada) and a local gang leader (Manuel Cruz Vivas). But will education alone be enough to set him on the right path?

Finally, there’s Lupe (Mia Fernanda Solis), the eldest child in a growing family, whose new love of books and philosophy may have to take a back seat to her responsibilities at home. (She and Nico are amalgamations of Correa’s other real-life students.)

Despite the story’s upward trajectory, Kenyan-born writer-director Christopher Zalla (Sundance’s 2007 Grand Jury Prize winner, “Padre Nuestro,” a.k.a. “Sangre de Mi Sangre”) lays in enough credible obstacles, including an especially heartbreaking one, to add effective tension and pathos to Correa’s and the kids’ journey.

If the script can sometimes feel a tad pro forma, the film still proves an authentically moving and involving crowd-pleaser. (Though, at a bit more than two hours, it might have benefited from some judicious trimming.)

It should also be noted that, while the real Correa was 31 when the movie takes place, Derbez, also a producer here, turned 62 in September. Regardless, the buoyant, youthful actor convincingly embodies the role (his character does drop in a sly comment about being “a little too old” to be a new father again) and makes a warm, engaging and memorable lead.

'Radical'

In Spanish, with English subtitles

Rating: PG-13, for some strong violent content, thematic material and strong language

Running time: 2 hours, 6 minutes

Playing: In limited release

Texas Education Review. SPECIAL ISSUE: TEXAS 87TH LEGISLATURE on High-Stakes Testing

I am so very proud of our University of Texas College of Education doctoral and masters students for this important special issue of the Texas Education Review (TER) that just came out. Congrats, as well, to the TER editorial board members, Alex Armonda, Lebon James, and Will Davies for their hard work on this special issue (see TER editorial board) focused on important work done by the Texas Center for Education Policy that weighed in on high-stakes testing during the 2021 87th session of the Texas State Legislature (TSL).

I, too, have some bragging rights here because three of the four pieces highlighted below reflects work done in my doctoral-level Ethnography Course that I taught in Fall 2020 that resulted in policy briefs and portfolios, making them actionable during the regular session that commenced in January, 2021.

The assignment was on what we in the assessment world term, "authentic assessment." This means that instead of high-stakes, standardized tests, students take on real-world tasks that are of concern to them. Authentic assessment gets them to do research and apply what they have learned in real-world contexts where they can impact the direction that policy takes. 

Once the legislative session began in January, 2021, these, as well as other students taking my Spring, 2021, Policy Analysis Class, had varied opportunities like working in legislative offices, conducting bill analyses, drafting legislation, or assisting in the work of the Texas Education Legislative Equity Coalition. Several also got the chance to testify in legislative hearings. All of this fills my heart. 💗

Back to the Fall class. When I first asked them what problem we should take on as a class project, I suggested school re-opening policy as this was and continues to be a hot issue in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Several students who were working in the schools at the time expressed
their preference instead for us to focus on high-stakes testing, particularly for bilingual learners.

Given the Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath decision to go through with Spring testing despite the pandemic, the political-economy of this neoliberal agenda was also centered as a concern. Who profits from this testing system and to what end or ends?

"Okay," I said. "Let's do that," forcing me to change gears in the moment. In retrospect, I celebrate such beautiful alignment in focusing conceptually on high-stakes testing and its alternative, authentic assessment, in a class where this humanistic, social justice, intellectual approach could simultaneously get demonstrated, experienced in the flesh.

It was great observing all the students' work, from this semester and last, contributing in their own ways while generating the materials they needed for their policy briefs and portfolios on a range of policy topics in education. 

What you see below are only the published policy briefs generated from the Fall ethnography class. The ethnographic component consisted of what students observed throughout the semester together with the data that they collected, combined with in-depth readings and discussions of books on ethnographic methods. Students' observations and ethnographic memos (or thematic summaries) from the many public meetings they attended found their way into their portfolios that they submitted at the end of the semester. 

Paradoxically, because everything was remote due to the pandemic, our class concluded that we had significant access to policy discussions that in more normal times would have been more limited due to complicated schedules and travel costs associated with getting to and from places on time. Austin is not the easiest city to navigate and getting to San Antonio, Houston, or Dallas meetings can be a hike.

The students shared how working remotely expedited a sense of community and belonging that proved vital to their well-being, particularly for those living alone in their apartments throughout the pandemic. Zoom fatigue and the lack of human touch notwithstanding, there were clear benefits in this isolating context to working remotely. 

The Fall class defended their policy briefs toward the end of the semester before a statewide committee of advocates representing different organizations, including Texas AFT, Texas LULAC, Every Texan, Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment (TAMSA), and member-affiliates of the Texas Education Legislative Equity Coalition. 

I must confess that in the moment, it was a bit nerve-wracking as one cannot get more high-stakes than having to defend one's work before an expert audience. Of course, the students' performed excellently. From an authentic assessment perspective, they pretty much had to... I'm so proud of them.

And that is the point about authentic assessment. 

It's a process. It's formative. It's holistic. It's a relationship that a teacher has with their students.

We seriously need to hit the pause button on mental testing and re-think the idea of what high-stakes assessment (not "testing") can and should be. I hope I've convinced you on just how awesome it could be if this is what school were about, period. 

After all, it's what motivates our youth who, like ourselves, see a world spinning out of control. They become part of the solution in that very instance when they are called upon to put their own learning at the service of social justice. In fact, this motivates and inspires. Instead of racist, intimidating, high-stress, high-stakes standardized testing, let's give them meaningful, real-world tasks that they have to defend before a stakeholder audience. 

There's a growing body of literature on this that you yourself can learn about and read, beginning with the New York Performance Standards Consortium Schools.

Did we in this class make a difference? 

Absolutely. Bills were written, testimonies delivered, the work of a coalition was strengthened, a beautiful sense of community, both inside and outside of class, was established. Some students even secured meaningful jobs or internships in the process. 

Further, as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "The the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."  It's an honor and a privilege to be part of that bending of the arc such that standing up to injustice—with the full weight of our intellect and integrity as members of a righteous community—is triumphal in itself.

Thanks to my teaching assistant Lauren Shook, for her much-needed and highly valued assistance throughout. Thanks to all our students for their hard work, guts, and intellect. Your love, caring, and compassion for Texas' children and youth was palpable and restorative.

Finally, many thanks to the advocacy community for embracing our students. Experiences like these leave indelible marks on their psyches and souls that last a lifetime. These are indeed the hallmarks of a just and virtuous education.  

As William Butler Yeats once said, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

Do read their well-conceived and well-written pieces.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

*Thanks to the Texas Education Review for publishing my comments in this special issue, as well! 😊

SPRING 2021: VOLUME 9, ISSUE 2

FULL ISSUE

ARTICLES

Out of the Classroom and Less Likely to Graduate: The Relationship Between Exclusionary Discipline and Four-Year Graduation Rates in Texas

KRISTIAN LENDERMAN, University of Houston

JACQUELINE HAWKINS, University of Houston

SPECIAL ISSUE: TEXAS 87TH LEGISLATURE

Establishing Equity: Aligning Dual Language Bilingual Education to HB3 Sec. 11.185 Texas Early Childhood Literacy & Mathematics Proficiency Plans

PATRICIA NÚÑEZ PORRAS, The University of Texas at Austin

JULIA HERNÁNDEZ , The University of Texas at Austin

The Testing Industrial Complex: Texas and Beyond

MARÍA DEL CARMEN UNDA, The University of Texas at Austin

LIZETH LIZÁRRAGA-DUEÑAS, The University of Texas at Austin

Shooting for the STAAR: An Authentic Assessment Pilot Proposal to Replace Inequitable High-Stakes Accountability

ALEJANDRO MADRIGAL III, The University of Texas at Austin

ELIZA EPSTEIN, The University of Texas at Austin

Despite a school year turned upside down by the coronavirus, standardized testing in Texas will go on.

Disappointing, but not surprising. We need to stop testing kids so that we can actually educate them.

You can hear Commissioner Morath defend his position here.

It should matter what teachers and parents say on the matter as they are the ones closest to the classroom and are most aware of how this testing culture is so detrimental to classroom instruction.

Please Texas, let's cancel these tests this spring. 

We must all challenge this madness.

-Angela Valenzuela

Despite a school year turned upside down by the coronavirus, standardized testing in Texas will go on.

Sarah Asch | Austin American-Statesman

February 3, 2021

A few things will be different for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, however. Grade promotion requirements have been waived for students in grades five and eight, but high school seniors still must pass the exams to graduate. And the Texas Education Agency will not grade districts based on the results.

Many other things will be the same, including a requirement that students take the test in person, even if they have been learning remotely during the pandemic.

The testing plan has its critics. Democrats in the Texas House renewed calls Wednesday to cancel the test this year, saying that the STAAR test does not provide an accurate picture of how students and schools are performing. 

 “We cannot ask our schools to take on the burden of scheduling in-person STAARs for all the students across the state," state Rep. Alma Allen, D-Houston, said during a news conference. "We’re in the middle of a life-threatening pandemic. We also cannot ask our teachers or our school personnel, students and families to put themselves at risk for an unnecessary test.”

The state's largest teacher union also has urged state officials to suspend testing this year.

Supporters of the test say it will be crucial in measuring how much students have learned during the pandemic.

The test provides information about student achievement that can be used to inform changes and target resources to schools and students that need the greatest support, a Texas Education Agency spokesperson said. 

State Rep. Dan Huberty, R-Houston, who has served as the chairman of the House Education Committee, said standardized testing is the best way to get a clear picture of where students stand compared to statewide learning goals. Standardized testing also is required by the national Every Student Succeeds Act in order for states to receive federal education funding, he said. 

“We want to figure out how far behind kids are,” he told the American-Statesman. “We need to get a baseline because we didn’t take the test last year. We need to figure out where kids stand.” 

More flexibility

State education officials say they are offering more flexibility for when districts can schedule the tests, typically administered in the spring, which include not only the STAAR but also the STAAR Alternate 2 for special education, and the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System and its alternate. 

As in years past, districts can test students online or on paper, although all testing will occur in an in-person setting.

Heather Sheffield, board president for Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessments, does not think the state should conduct the STAAR this year. She said the test results do not give teachers information fast enough to help students.

“It’s really autopsy data, teachers aren’t getting the results quickly,” she said. “Why are we spending money on a test that doesn’t really help our teachers and shuts down our schools for days or really weeks at a time?” 

Sheffield wants the state to move away from the STAAR and toward a test that provides meaningful data and is not high stakes. She is glad that TEA is not giving districts A-F grades this year and would like to see the state transition to a rating system that does not rely only on standardized tests.

She's also pushing to eliminate tying the exam with graduation for high school seniors.

Huberty said that high school students who fail end-of-course assessments but meet certain requirements still have a path to graduate by receiving approval from an individual graduation committee.

'Unnecessary spending'

Clay Robison, spokesperson for the Texas State Teachers Association, which represents about 68,000 state teachers, said the group believes standardized testing and testing-based accountability should end. Robison said the test discriminates against students of color, low income students and students whose first language isn't English. If state education officials want to understand how students are performing, they should sit down with teachers, he said.

Robison said that money spent on the STAAR test could be better spent on other, more pressing things.

“It’s unnecessary spending,” he said. “It’s not a fair or effective way to measure student progress, nor is it an effective or fair way to measure teacher evaluations.”

Robison also questioned the state's commitment to spend $338 million to transitioning the test online, which was announced last month. This includes a three-year $262 million contract with the Washington, D.C.-based Cambium Assessment to manage the administration, scoring and reporting on an online testing platform.

London-based Pearson, which has been involved in Texas testing for four decades, was awarded $126 million over the same three years to develop the assessments. Pearson also has an existing testing contract that ends in August.

These two companies will take over from Educational Testing Service, which has a contract that ends on Aug. 31. 

This is excellent news. Now we need a longer-term approach that replaces this system with a research-based alternative that is also not about shaming and blaming kids, teachers, or schools, but that is fully about providing a comprehensive, developmental, asset-based perspective on student performance so that children—in their full humanity—cannot solely achieve, but thrive.

Accordingly, my UT doctoral students under the auspices of the Texas Center for Education Policy together with members of the Texas Legislative Education Equity Coalition (TLEEC), Texas LULAC, and Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment (TAMSA), are working on policy proposals that will help us to move in these precise directions as a state. 

This is, of course, very exciting, long overdue, and trending. I blogged on this nearly a year ago in this post, "The testing craze is fading in U.S. schools. Good. Here's what's next."

Please stay tuned. More to come soon.

Thanks to Rep. Diego Bernal and our educator organizations, including Texas State Teachers Association President Ovidia Molina, as well as other members of the legislature for voicing their concerns.

-Angela Valenzuela

@vlnzl @TxLatino #txlege #UTTCEP @NEA #ChildWelfare #MoreThanATest #SPED  #TxEd @FairTestOffice #standardizedtests #testing @NACCSTejasfoco @DisRightsTx #disabilities #specialneeds @IDRAedu @EdAustin_TX @utexascoe @LULAC @TxLULAC @SaveTXschools

Bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers call on state to move toward canceling next year’s STAAR tests

“I think there’s still a lot of question as to how we might pursue this,” Morath said. “We’ve got 10 or so different options, as it were, to consider. No final decision has been made as we gather feedback from folks.”

If Texas education officials move forward with STAAR in the spring, the group of 68 state representatives wants the TEA to set aside its traditional campus and district accountability framework.

“At most, any administration of the STAAR exam during the 2020-2021 school year should only serve as a diagnostic instrument to see where our students stand academically, as opposed to an assessment instrument to determine district and campus sanctions under the current A-F accountability system,” the legislators wrote.

The letter echoes some of the arguments made in recent months by educator organizations and unions, which lobbied against high-stakes standardized testing before the pandemic. Texas State Teachers Association President Ovidia Molina said STAAR testing “should be the last priority” in schools.

“Our students, educators and their families can’t afford the distraction of STAAR as they struggle to stay safe and continue to adjust to new methods of teaching and learning,” Molina said in a statement Wednesday.

While education testing issues traditionally break largely along party lines, with Democrats more likely to oppose high-stakes exams, the bipartisan letter signaled broad concerns about STAAR and accountability in 2021. The Texas House has 150 members.

Fourteen Houston-area legislators signed the letter. The Democratic representatives were Alma Allen, Gina Calanni, Garnet Coleman, Ana Hernandez, Christina Morales, Mary Ann Perez, Ron Reynolds, Jon Rosenthal, Shawn Thierry, Senfronia Thompson and Gene Wu. The Republican representatives were Ernest Bailes, Briscoe Cain and Ed Thompson.

State Rep. Diego Bernal, a San Antonio Democrat and vice chair of the House Public Education Committee, organized and authored the message. The absence of legislators’ names on the letter does not necessarily mean they oppose the group’s position on STAAR.

jacob.carpenter@chron.com

Are Texas Kids Failing? Or Are the Tests Rigged? by Mimi Swartz

Thanks to the Texas Monthly for keeping the issue of testing and test validity alive.  The consequences of any high-stakes test are so severe that they merit careful review as other state leadership indicate herein:

“Ratliff, the former state board of education member, estimates that 25 to 30 percent of Texas school kids are misidentified as reading below grade level—1.25 million or so children. “Think about its effect on the economic engine of Texas,” he said. “The concentric circles of damage ranges from mental and psychological damage to schoolchildren to falling real estate values to our ability to recruit businesses. I’ve tried to get my arms around the damage and I can’t.”

Added Chambers: “Every reading and literacy expert who has studied our concerns can’t be wrong on this. This is not anti-testing, this is not anti-accountability. We just want the truth.”

Read on.

-Angela

Are Texas Kids Failing? Or Are the Tests Rigged?

Leading educators and testing experts have studied the exams and find that they are asking kids to understand passages aimed two or more years above their grade level.

By MIMI SWARTZ | New York Times | Feb. 20, 2019

Over the last few years, something strange has been happening in Texas classrooms. Accomplished teachers who knew their kids were reading on grade level by virtually all other measures were seeing those same kids fail the STAAR, the infamous State of Texas Assessments Readiness test.

The effect on students was predictable: kids who were diligently doing their homework and making good grades in class were suddenly told they were failing in the eyes of the state, which wasn’t so great for their motivation. Parents were desperate to find out why their once high-performing kids were suddenly seen as stumbling. Teachers felt like failures, too, but had no idea what they were doing wrong, after years of striving to adopt practices proven in successful schools across the country. What’s more, the test results were quickly weaponized by critics of Texas public schools, many of whom advocate state-funded vouchers that would allow parents to send their kids to religious and other private schools.

The stakes of such exams are perilously high. The STAAR test, developed by the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., had replaced one provided by the British firm Pearson, which Texas officials considered too easy. The STAAR test is used to evaluate students, teachers, individual schools and principals, school districts, and, by extension, the entire enterprise of public education in Texas. Fifth and eighth graders who fail the test can be forced to repeat a grade; high school students may not graduate if they don’t pass three of the five STAAR year-end exams.

On its face, this approach makes sense. This is, after all, the Age of Accountability, and, according to Governor Greg Abbott and other prominent state leaders, only 40 percent of Texas third graders are reading at grade level. The STAAR numbers are cited as positive proof of that. Texas has to get its kids and its public schools up to the highest standards if we want to have the educated workers and informed citizens we need. There isn’t a minute to lose.

This reasoning may explain why a report issued in 2012 by two associate professors at Texas A&M was overlooked. Called “STAAR Reading Passages: The Readability is Too High,” by Susan Szabo and Becky Sinclair, the report suggested that questions on the STAAR test were too hard to accurately measure whether students were reading at their grade level.

 The researchers’ examination of five different “readability tests”—commonly used academic measures that rate the appropriateness of written passages for various grade levels—showed, for instance, that in order to comprehend various passages, a third grader would have to read on a fifth-grade level. A fifth grader would have to read on a seventh-grade level, and so on. Generally, the testing showed a gap of about two years. Szabo and Sinclair’s paper made no waves. The STAAR test was new, and if there was a warning included in the research, no one in power thought to consider it. An organization called Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment lodged protests, but they were rebuffed.

Years passed. The STAAR reading test reported more failures and stirred more concerns. Teachers and administrators continued to see that the STAAR scores didn’t “align” with other indicators of reading levels. Specifically, the numbers didn’t match those of the Lexile scale, which is regarded nationally as the standard gauge of any publication’s degree of difficulty. (Libraries use the Lexile scale to direct kids to age-appropriate books.)

In 2016, another study was released, this time by Michael Lopez and Jodi Pilgrim, two professors at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, in Belton, Texas. They, too, found that readability formulas showed that the STAAR test contained too many difficult passages for the targeted age groups—“materials may be problematic for teaching and learning”—which confirmed what many teachers were seeing in their classrooms. That same year, a group of fifty Texas school superintendents lodged their protests with the Texas Education Agency (TEA), which administers the STAAR test.

It’s easy, especially in Texas, to explain away some of the complaints as just so much whining. According to recent Education Week studies, our state ranks 40th in education quality. The blame for our sad showing has been placed on allegedly unqualified and unaccountable teachers, uninvolved parents, and corrupt administrators and school boards.

But what if that showing isn’t as sad as we’ve been told? What if the STAAR test isn’t measuring what it says it’s measuring: i.e., that a third grader is reading at a third-grade level, rather than a fifth-grade level?

H.D. Chambers thinks that’s exactly what’s happening. He’s the superintendent of the Alief school district southwest of Houston and also the president of the Texas School Alliance (TSA), an organization that represents the largest school districts in the state. A circumspect man with pale blue eyes and a very dry wit, he leads one of the poorest and most diverse school districts in Texas. He knows from low scores. But before the STAAR test, he was seeing that reading scores at Alief were slowly rising. Afterward? Scores flatlined. He was skeptical. Chambers knew that his teachers and students were working harder and smarter. “Based on the many reading and literacy experts who have spent years addressing the issue of literacy, far more children are reading at or above grade level than the number the state is publishing,” he said. “No one, including me, is saying it’s 100 percent, but it’s a lot higher than the 40 percent some claim.”

The TSA, along with testing experts with whom it consulted, pushed for a meeting with Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath, to show him their latest findings on the misrepresentation of student achievement by the STAAR reading test. “I want to be clear and emphasize that this issue is not an attempt to lower standards or expectations. We are trying to align the standards and what teachers are told to teach with what is tested and how those results are applied to accountability,” Chambers said. The STAAR test is supposed to measure what kids learn during a given school year, not their overall knowledge. Schools need to be accountable,  certainly, said Chambers, but “it’s vital that we have test questions that accurately measure what they say they are measuring at any given grade level.”

Morath agreed to a meeting on February 11 with Chambers and several state and national testing experts, including Dee Carney of Moak, Casey & Associates, an Austin firm that consults on school finance and assessment issues. Chambers and his group urged Morath and his deputies to take a fresh look at the accuracy of the STAAR test. The group met in a conference room at the monolithic TEA headquarters, three blocks north of the Capitol. The TSA group argued that the reading test was “misaligned”—that it was not grade-level appropriate. It was out of sync with the basic Lexile findings in particular, they said, and the results were hurting schools, teachers, parents, and kids.

Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath meets with administrators of the South Texas Independent School District on Wednesday, May 25, 2016, at the Medical Academy near Olmito, Texas.

Jason Hoekema/The Brownsville Herald via AP

Morath, who is 41, is a slight, balding technology entrepreneur who proved himself in the school board trenches of the Dallas Independent School District. He was appointed commissioner of education by Governor Abbott in 2015. Morath is considered to be smart, sensitive to the plight of underprivileged students, and also quite stubborn. “I think he cares about the kids and he’s trying to do what’s right,” said Chambers. Morath did not, however, give the group the open-minded hearing they had hoped for—or at least that’s how his audience perceived it. They felt politely dissed, complaining that Morath responded with a lot of jargon and refused to reevaluate the way the reading test is being administered. He claimed that the state had its own indicators that showed the results were correct, but he declined to share that information. The agency had looked into this issue before, Morath said. He wasn’t going to do it again. “They have a study that they claim justifies” how the STAAR test is being administered, said Thomas Ratliff, a former member of the state board of education. “We have requested that study and we have not seen it.”

Morath did not respond to our request for an interview, but we were able to speak with Jeff Cottrill, TEA’s deputy commissioner of standards and engagement. He explained that TEA’s research on the STAAR reading test included early reviews by Texas teachers and students. “The test is rooted in Texas standards and reviewed by Texas teachers and field tested by Texas students,” Cottrill said. “I have to tell you the process by which TEA determines what goes in this test is solid.” Critics dismiss that method as nothing more than “a gut check,” as none of the test passages were run through standard readability measurements such as the Lexile. Cottrill confirmed that the test was not sent through a Lexile analysis. “TEA relies much more on people to assess the quality of the test than computer based algorithms… Some Dr. Seuss books are actually written at a higher Lexile than The Grapes of Wrath,” he said.

The Lexile scale was not the only readability test by which researchers outside the TEA have evaluated the STAAR reading test. Dee Carney, the Austin testing expert, pointed out that the A&M research used five readability studies and the Mary Hardin-Baylor research used six. Chambers says new research conducted at A&M is to be released in the next few months and shows even more misalignment, or failing kids, today than in 2012. “If the decision was made to test kids in reading passages that are above their grade level, everyone needs to know that,” Chambers said. “If a third grade reading test is meant to determine if a student is reading at the third grade level, then the test questions should be based solely on what was taught in [and before] third grade, not what might be taught in the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh grade.”

The consequences, Chambers said, can be severe. “To me, here is the bottom line: if Texas expects every third grader to read like a fifth grader or every fourth grader to read like a sixth grader, then we all need to be prepared to see lower performance. Based on all the expert information that has been provided, these unrealistic standards have the potential to destroy learning.”

One step toward addressing issues with the STAAR test would be to hold public hearings. Two Republican state legislators from the Houston area say they want to do so, says Ratliff, but so far none are scheduled. One of those lawmakers is Larry Taylor, who chairs the Senate committee on education. The other is Dan Huberty, who chairs the House committee on public education.

As usual with education conflicts, while adult officials argue, it’s the schoolchildren who suffer most. But they’re not the only ones. Ratliff, the former state board of education member, estimates that 25 to 30 percent of Texas school kids are misidentified as reading below grade level—1.25 million or so children. “Think about its effect on the economic engine of Texas,” he said. “The concentric circles of damage ranges from mental and psychological damage to schoolchildren to falling real estate values to our ability to recruit businesses. I’ve tried to get my arms around the damage and I can’t.”

Added Chambers: “Every reading and literacy expert who has studied our concerns can’t be wrong on this. This is not anti-testing, this is not anti-accountability. We just want the truth.”

This article has been updated to correct Commissioner Morath’s age (he is 41, not 43), and to correct a quote from TEA deputy commissioner Jeff Cottrill.