Op Ed-"Taming of the Shrewd"

Taming of the Shrewd
The Tea Party and other right-wing Republicans in the Texas legislature, including the governor, have organized a shrewd, subtle siege on women under the auspices of fiscal responsibility and it's time for this insidious bombardment to be exposed to the light of day by clearly stating the consequences their actions. Even if they can claim that they do not intend to do anything hurtful to women, the true measure of any group's integrity and compassion are the results of their actions especially when measured against the probable outcomes of alternative choices. A sober reckoning of the consequences of their short-sighted, outrageous policies will serve as a clarion call to real Texans who believe that we are "The Friendly State" rather than "The Fiendish State" to stand up and tame or put to an end their shrewdly cloaked "fiscal responsibility" mantra that, in reality, results in a disproportionate burden on women and children.
Even before the current largely legislative induced fiscal fiasco, Texas displays a level of disdain for social services that is among the most extreme in the nation. Texas is close to first in worst at providing social services. For example, consider the following statistics (50th=lowest, 1st=highest) compiled by the Texas Legislative Study Group: Birth rate-1st; Percent of uninsured children-1st; Percent of children living in poverty-4th; Teenage birth rate-7th; Percent of non-elderly women with health insurance-50th; Percent of women living in poverty-6th; Per capita state spending on Medicare-50th; Public school enrollment-2nd; Current expenditures per student-38th; State and local expenditures per pupil in public schools-44th; Percent of elementary/secondary school funding from state revenue-37th; Average salary of public school teachers-33rd. These are the numbers prior to the current budget crisis. Under the "leadership" of the current administration, Texas has strived to be first in all the worst categories. The state bird should be the vulture rather than the mockingbird.
The current budget crisis was largely created by legislative shenanigans, misplaced priorities, and ignorance of basic economic principles. The state legislature changed the funding formula for education a few years ago with a promise (now broken) to make up the difference if the funding for education fell short compared to the previous formula. The state comptroller at that time, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, stated in a May 1, 2006 letter to Governor Perry, “At worst, it will relegate Texans to Draconian cuts in critical areas like education and health care for at least a generation. This is not a victory for taxpayers. It is a sham, and Texans will see it for what it is.” The state legislature took advantage of federal stimulus money to get by for a couple of year but now they face a shortfall which is partially due to the downturn of the economy but is more due to ideologically driven, tunnel-vision focus on cutting taxes in a state that has one of the lowest tax burdens in the nation combined with a flippant, uncaring attitude of the consequences. The consequences are even greater hardships for poor families and especially women and children in Texas.
In addition to the limited concern with social services and the impact this has on poor families, the state legislature is also leading a march against professional women. With an expected increase of 80,000 new students in Texas public schools next year, the legislature is reducing spending on education for the first time in 60 years. Previously, public schools could rely on funding at least equal to previous levels but now the legislature is cutting funding in an extreme manner which can cost as many as 300,000 teacher jobs plus the jobs of other school personnel. Over 75% of school teachers are women. Women-whether poor or professional-are bearing a disproportionate burden of the legislature's visionless and brutish plans. The governor's stance on refusing to use the Rainy Day fund in the midst of a thunderstorm is ludicrous. His calloused approach is supported by many equally calloused members of the legislature. Governor Perry chooses to ignore the consequences of this destructive approach to funding education.
In an April 26th article in the Texas Tribune, Perry states that he doesn't believe the Legislative Budget Board's projections that the Rainy Day Fund will gain $3 billion by the end of 2013 and, therefore, some reasonable people in the legislature-Republicans and Democrats-believe it would be a responsible move to use a portion of the Rainy Day Fund which Perry and the right-wing oppose. In the same article, Perry states that Texans have been making hard decisions about reductions in their personal lives and the state should do the same. The analogy is disingenuous. Perry has previously stated that there are no sacred cows when it comes to balancing the budget. But the most sacred of all cows to Perry is no new taxes and ignoring the use of the Rainy Day Fund. Families in difficult economic times not only reduce their spending but also look for ways to increase revenue which is why 40% of Texas teacher have second or third jobs (compare this to only 5% of the general population that maintain second jobs). School budgets have been stripped to the bone. Now the state legislature wants to suck out the marrow. The state legislature should fund public schools at least at the same level as the previous budget allowing for the increase in student population. This will require using the Rainy Day Fund and finding ways of increasing revenue which should include the possibility of raising taxes. After all, there are no sacred cows when it comes to providing for our children and laying the foundation for our future.

Interview with John Kuhn who wrote the Alamo Letter

The following is from an interview with Superintendent John Kuhn who has gained attention for writing the "Alamo Letter" in regards to the attack on public school by Texas legislators...teachers in Texas have always been dependent on the kindness of strangers but now the strangers (the governor and state legislators) are really strange and cruel...this interview (I haven't found the source yet) explains a lot... Question: You have become widely known due to your Letter from Alamo. Can you explain the circumstances that led you to write this? (Link to Alamo Letter) http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/educational-leadership/texas-superintendent-issues-pl.htmlA 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.

More on the attempt to kill the Advanced Placement program in Texas...

Assistant athletic trainer stipend: $5500
Assistant coach stipend: $6300
Head coach stipend: $9500

Advanced Placement teacher stipend: $0

Educon "News" A Possibily Satirical Look at Education in Texas

Educon news continues our interview with the royal governor of Texas

Educon News: A recent article indicated that the AP Program in Texas is very successful-more so than any other testing program and the state doesn't have to spend $78 million to have someone else develop it. Yet the legislature is stopping the small incentive program that subsidizes the AP exams. Do you think that's a wise thing to do?
RG: Absolutely, we need to not spend money an AP tests. This successful program is contrary to our goal. This helps student go to college and encourages all students to think they can be successful in college. Then a lot of just normal kids go to college and are successful. We don't want that! We only want the select few who can already afford to go to college. We don't want regular students to get any high-minded ideas. They might think to vote intelligently and then where would we be?

Educon News: So, the goal is not to lift everybody up but to keep most people down?
RG:Has that not been clear? We've spent a decade working towards that goal and we're closer than ever now...thank God for the downturn in the economy which gave us the excuse to push our agenda without being too obvious as to what we wanted.

Educon News: So what is your message to AP students specifically?
RG: Don't get such a big head. You just think you can handle college. Leave college to those who can afford it and have the right connections.

Educon News: Moving to a different subject...the state requires four years of all four core subjects-math, science, social studies, and English-which Educon News thinks is a good idea. But that requires more teachers and more books yet the state is not only not funding this but is cutting funding. Isn't that the type of thing that you complain about in regards to the federal government? Does this seem right to you?

RG: Of course. That along with harder and harder tests which we pay tens of millions of dollars to develop will undermine the public schools. Demand more and more and provide less and less. If we can keep this up, we'll demoralize teachers and students, we'll discourage talented young people to go into education, the wealthy will pull their kids out of the public schools and then we can have more private schools for my class of people. What's wrong with that?
Plus, we now are expecting them to do it without up-to- date textbooks. There's no way they can be successful and then we can complain about funding or, more precisely, underfunding public schools and then we can basically shut them down and save all those tax dollars for tax cuts for my friends. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Student testing incentives on the chopping block

Student testing incentives on the chopping block

What do you say to the Texas high school students who took more than 325,000 AP exams last year, but won't get to take another if these schmucks have their way?

"Sorry kids. It's not like we were going to cut football. Giddyup, pardner!"

Educon "News" A Possibly Satirical Look at Education in Texas

Educon "News"was able to get an exclusive interview with the Royal Governor (RG) of Texas. The transcript is below.
Educon: What are your plans to make up the budget shortage for education funding in Texas?
RG: What shortage? We have plenty of money to fund education.
Educon: How can you say there isn't a shortage. It's been in the news for months. Several billion dollars, teachers losing jobs, larger classes.
RG: A shortage implies that this was unexpected. This is just following our plan to create a country club state of two classes-the haves and have nots. First, we change the funding formula so that there is less money even when the economy is doing well and then we use the downturn in the economy to blame the fact that we simply don't want to pay for education. It cost a lot of money to educate everyone and that requires taxes which we should always be reduced until they are eliminated.
Educon: So you are not concerned about the lack of funds for schools or the broken promises to school children and teachers? We can end up with the worst school system in the nation.
RG: No, not the worst school system, just the cheapest public school system. Our model is kinda a mix of California and Mississippi...we'll underfund public schools, people with money will send their chidren to private schools and then not want to pay the taxes to support public schools, and we'll keep the poor off the streets until they are old enough to work for the rest of us at minimum wage. We'll make out like bandits.
Educon: Texas already rates 47th in state aid per pupil in ADA, 38th in current expenditures per pupil, 33rd in average salary of public school teachers, 43rd in high school graduation rates, and 50th in the percent of the population 25 and older with a high school diploma.Does any of this bother you?
RG: Yes, we should be 50th in all of those categories or, as we prefer to state it, 1st in the lowest state aid and 1st in the lowest tax rates. That has been our goal for the last decade and we're getting there.

More of our interview in a later post.

I found a way to save some money.

From the Statesman:

The high cost of TAKS
By Eric Dexheimer | Thursday, March 19, 2009, 09:40 AM

Texas students have their TAKS week and we have ours. On Tuesday, I wrote how some school districts were rewarding their students with extravagant prizes for passing the standardized tests, including expense-paid trips to Hawaii and days off from school. The high stakes pay-offs demonstrate once again how important the exams have become to administrators, whose very jobs can depend on the outcome.

Another way to gauge how important standardized tests have become is dollars and cents. Not surprisingly, according to that measure, too, the assessments have become extremely important in recent years. Here are the numbers:

The Texas Education Agency outsources the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills to NCS Pearson Inc., which helps develop the tests. In 2000, the agency signed Pearson to a five-year contract worth $47.45 million — about $9.5 million a year to administer tests to the state’s students.

When that contract expired, TEA and Pearson inked a new five-year deal. This time, though, it was worth $160 million, which, at $32 million a year, represented nearly a fourfold increase.

Since 2005, however, the contract has been modified several times. The result: This year alone the state will pay Pearson $88 million to test Texas children.

Why the big jump? “The predominant reason is the increase in the number of assessments,” says Gloria Zyskowski, TEA’s deputy associate commissioner of student assessments. Thanks to the Legislature’s fondness for standardized testing, as well as the growing requirements from the federal No Child Left Behind laws, Texas students are being tested more and more.

The original TAKS was implemented in 2003. Today, thanks largely to No Child Left Behind demands, the exam has multiplied to four different TAKS (“modified,” “alternative,” and “linguistically accommodated” versions, in addition to the standard exam). A new “End of Course” assessment is being added. During the 2002-03 school year, the TEA administered 60 separate standardized tests. This year, Zyskowski says, the number will be 138.

Testing-related materials add more to the bill. In 2004, TEA signed a four-year, $17.7 million contract with Grow Network for study guides designed for high school students who don’t pass TAKS. A 2006 contract pays Pearson another $8.8 million through 2011 for summer remediation study guides.

When added up, taxpayers will pay about $93 million this year to administer standardized tests to Texas students, Zyskowski says, or nearly ten times the cost of just nine years earlier.

Educon "News" A Possibly Satirical Look at Education in Texas

The associate superintendent of Training Instruction and Curriculum at Wayward ISD announced the adoption of a new acronym training which will revolution teaching at Wayward High School. Dr. Noe Itall said that the new approach to planning and teaching was a brand new effort backed by years of research-based data that would ensure that all students at WHS would be successful on TAKS, the ultimate measure of college & career readiness and all things important to life and administration bonuses. The new training modules are designed to implement lesson plans which are Creative, Relevant, Attention-getting, and Positive. According to Dr. Itall, the new training is the key to improving teacher planning. Lessons will be reformed to fit a new template so that all plans will look exactly alike and anyone could step into a classroom and teach the lesson. This would require re-doing all of the curriculum writing that was done the previous year that was last year's brand new approach supported by decades of research. Dr. Itall said that last year's lesson plan format which created plans that are Credible, Rigorous, Unexpected, and Diverse will be replaced.
Neither Dr. Itall nor any of his staff have any experience in teaching in high school but he doesn't consider that a drawback. He learned of this approach during a session at a conference last year where he also learned of the CRUD lesson plan structure. "We used to think that CRUD was the key to great teaching and student learning, but know we know that it's CRAP." Several high school teachers noted that there was nothing new or "improved" about either of these methods but that the re-writing of the curriculum would take hundreds of uncompensated and unnecessary worker hours. When asked if he had consulted with any high school teachers, Dr. Itall, looking perplexed by the suggestion, said, "No, why would I?"

Educon "News" A Possibly Satirical Look at Education

From the Dallas Morning News:

The preliminary House budget plan underfunds public schools by about $5 billion a year — the difference between what the plan proposes and what school districts are supposed to receive under current law for such things as enrollment growth, teacher merit pay, technology improvements, pre-kindergarten grants and compensation for losses in local property values...
Moak, Casey and Associates, financial consultants for Dallas and several other large school districts, have estimated that the proposed House cuts could force a loss of 80,000 to 100,000 jobs in school districts across the state. In Dallas, the projected reduction was nearly $239 million under one scenario and $253 million under another.
The NEA report also looked at average teacher salaries, finding that Texas teachers rank 31st with an average salary of $48,261. That is nearly $7,000 less than the national average of $55,202 for the 2009-10 school year. A decade ago, Texas ranked 33rd in the comparison.

From Obama's State of the Union speech:
That responsibility begins not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities. It's family that first instills the love of learning in a child. Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done. We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair. (Applause.) We need to teach them that success is not a function of fame or PR, but of hard work and discipline. ..
Let's also remember that after parents, the biggest impact on a child's success comes from the man or woman at the front of the classroom. In South Korea, teachers are known as "nation builders." Here in America, it's time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect. (Applause.) We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones. (Applause.) And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math. (Applause.)
In fact, to every young person listening tonight who's contemplating their career choice: If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child -- become a teacher. Your country needs you

Hmm...not on the same page!

Educon "News" A Possibly Satirical Look at Education in Texas

The royal governor of Texas has decided to fast-track legislation related to photo-ids for voting, sanctuary cities, and requiring sonograms for women seeking an abortion while being unwilling to fund education in Texas. The Right-wing Republicans (RWRs) in the legislature refuse to provide funding for the increase of 170,000 new students in Texas and rather choose to cut funding to public education...hmm, they apparently want more Texans born but don't want to educate them, provide health care for them or other basic services...

He would see how terrible this looks if his perfectly coifed head weren't so far up his arse.

Here's the full article:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/19/2022606/texas-budget-draft-cuts-137-billion.html


"Rep. Jim Pitts, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said he would explain the proposal to the chamber on Wednesday.

"There are no sacred cows for this next biennium for our introduced bill," Pitts said last week. "So many people said, 'You cannot cut education'. You can't not cut education . . . We will be cutting every article within our budget. We will be cutting health and human, we will be cutting education and we'll be cutting our own budget in the Legislature." "

No sacred cows, eh? How does he account for this?

"While almost every other state agency would see a reduction in employees, the average number of full-time employees in Perry's office over the next two fiscal years would go to 132 from an average of 120."

Sigh...

There are days I am ashamed to admit that I'm a Texan.

Educon "News", A Possibly Satirical Look at Education

The royal governor of Texas has decreed that he will see to it that the state of Texas quickly moves to on-line instruction for every child who cannot afford private schools. His highness stated that instruction with real teachers is "so 20th century and, besides, it requires taxes". He is contracting with the group Schools Handling Instruction with Technology to create regional learning labs run by facilitators who do not need a degree. A single "teacher" can "teach" at least 1000 students a year rather than the financially draining normal load of about 150 students. All grading will be done automatically by computer. "Soon," the governor proclaimed,"We'll be able to have a 1 to 2000 teacher to student ratio. Imagine how many tax dollars that will save! All we will need the school facilities for is to maintain the athletic programs." The parents association representative's only comment was, "As long as my kid is out of the house from 8:00 to 5:00 and being kept out of trouble, it suits me just fine."

Educon "News"The royal governor of Texas pushed through his plan to pay for public education in Texas by charging a $5 fee per person for those who visit adult entertainment-strip clubs-venues. He also added extra education taxes to cigaretts and alcohol, i.e., he is funding education with 'sin' taxes. Texans are encouraged to sin freely and often. In response to the new legislation, schools have begun selling cigarettes and alcohol in their vending machines and created smoking lounges for students. School calendars which advertise local businesses that support the schools have replaced their common advertisers with ads from "Bably Dolls" and "Ricks" plus "Bud Light" and "Malboro". Dozens of schools have changed their mascots to camels. Selected school sponsors have donated poles to be added to the dance rooms for use by the drill team and dance classes. Schools receive extra funding for these classes now since they are now considered job training classes. Dancers from various clubs have volunteered to help with dance classes and drill team choreography. Attendance at home football games has increased by over 300% as the videos advertising businesses on the scoreboard are now provided by the new sponsors. Representative Com N. Sense suggested an education tax on guns and ammo sold in Texas but this was quickly dropped in response to an impassioned speech by Rep N. R. Aye, who supported a $50 fee for a Texas id card to allow people to vote, as being an unconstitutional and, more importantly, an unTexan tax on a basic human right to own as many guns as one wants. Instead, Rep Aye said that gun owners should get a tax credit for every gun that they buy.

Country club state

The royal govenor of Texas has decreed that he plans to make the state the largest country club in the world by not funding any services to the young, the poor, the elderly, the infirm, or those trying to earn an education or those public servants and others who work in professions that serve these populations. However, the rich will be just fine and able to enjoy their good fortune in a state in which the message to all the others is "You must work to provide for those who do not need aid or you must leave the state". His plan for those in need is to provide bus service to the other side of the state line along with a piece of a cardboard box and a "brand new sharpie pen" so they can "fend for themselves if they can find people who care". At this point, hope is not warranted in the state in which the state motto of "Friendship" has been dropped.

Educon "News"

defintions:
data-driven decisions-(1)use of selective information chosen to support decisions made by those in authority who have no experience in the field in which their decision applies and who are not impacted by the decision but which creates extra unnecessary work for those who actually do the work and have experience in field, (2) devotion to selected information contrary to common sense and experience but which supports administrative agendas

Semester Two

It's the first day of the second semester. Yeah!

"The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average." ~ Charles Murray on No Child Left Behind

Day One

This is the inaugural post for the Teaching Texans blog. Please be patient and supportive as I learn how to do this.