Texas Ed Spectator

EducationNews.org – A Global Leading News Source – Five “Honorees” of Bunkum Awards Announced for their Contributions to Sub-Par Education Research

In an effort to help education policy makers separate the wheat from the chaff, expert third party reviews are provided by the Think Tank Review Project, a collaboration of the Education and Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University. Each year the reports identified by experts as the worst of the worst are awarded a “Bunkum.” The Think Tank Review Project today announced five “honorees” for 2009.

While the social science of the winning reports was sub-par, they typically had very high production values, glossy paper, multi-color printing, and artful layouts. “Given the bibliographies, footnotes, charts and tables, policymakers or laypeople may be forgiven for thinking that these honoree reports are based on the highest quality research. We hope that our expert reviews have helped to correct that impression,” said EPIC director Kevin Welner.

I’m not surprised that educators fall for the glitz. I remember in high school helping a friend make up information on studies of prisoners and the effect of television for an English research paper at a magnet school. I had actually done the research and report but my friend was doing it all the night before and had a major advantage–he had a computer to write and print it out on. So the next day he turned in the report, all typed out, in a little report protector, with an extensive bibliography we had made up the night before. The teacher took his report, flipped through the pages, and started ohhing and ahhing over the quality of his report. He got the same grade I got, an A.

Texas refuses federal school funds

But Perry said Texas “reserves the right to decide how we educate our children and not surrender that control to the federal bureaucracy.”

Perry’s objections seem to center on the fact that the grant rules give preference to states that sign on to a push for national curriculum standards. Perry and Scott have been critical of the Common Core Standards Initiative, a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers with support from the Department of Education. Texas and Alaska are the only two states that have not joined the initiative.

So the grant rules giver “preference” to those who sign on for national standards–why not apply anyway and see what happens? And isn’t “local control” the basis of Texas public education? So why isn’t the state supporting districts (if any) that are implementing such standards on their own?

Are there potential negative consequences of national standards? Of course there are. But national standards or no, Texans, parents, students, and citizens, deserve to know why over 80 percent of students in the more desirable high schools are considered “college ready” but only half of them can meet the minimum SAT/ACT scores required by state colleges to enroll in schools without remediation.

Kerrville Daily Times

Kerrville Independent School District officially supports the six plaintiff districts in claiming that commissioner Robert Scott is overreaching in his interpretation of a recently enacted law against minimum grades.

Minimum grading policies are the practice of giving failing students at least 50 percent on report cards regardless of whether a student’s cumulative work on individual assignments actually justifies a lower percentage.

Such a policy currently exists at KISD and more than half of all Texas schools. The KISD policy states teachers must record a 50 for any student scoring below that amount during the first five six-week grading periods.

I understand wanting to make sure that kids are able to succeed at school but maybe the point is to put them in classes that are a better match to their abilities?  And I can see this maybe working for a History or English class but what about math or science? How many kids can actually pass the remaining grading periods if they bombed the first one in Algebra? And how is this policy going to help students pass the year end tests that will soon be administered in high schools?

Maybe this is something that only happens at the elementary school level which would make more sense. In any case, I would like some specific examples and numbers. And the fact that none are provided suggests that neither side really has any reason for supporting/opposing the policy.

Recently, there’s been another article on the need to regulate homeschoolers. As best as most homeschoolers can figure out, it’s because we don’t think like everyone else and are passing that trait on to our children. See, it’s not about preventing harm, it’s about control and we all know how well that turns out education reform.

Class Struggle – How fashion frustrates school improvement

James P. Comer is one of the most successful school improvement experts in the country, but that doesn’t mean he gets much respect. Policy makers often resist his ideas. Take, for example, the Midwestern elementary school that went from 23rd to first in its district by using the School Development Program created by Comer and his Yale colleagues.

Did the school district leaders celebrate and recommend the program far and wide? No. They appear to have been disturbed by the results. They accused the school of cheating and insisted on a re-test, with local newspapers suggesting scandal. The students did even better the second time, but that did not win Comer’s team any plaudits. The superintendent removed the principal who had done so well with their methods and installed a new staff not trained to use them, bringing the scores back down to where the district leadership apparently thought they should be.

Yeah, the public education system does so much more to ensure a quality education. This isn’t about education, this about brainwashing our children and who gets to do it.

Are there children out there who would do better in public school than being homeschooled? Of course, depending on the public school and the randomly assigned teachers. But I would bet that there is an even larger percentage of children in public school who would be better served by homeschooling.

Tell you what, fix the system for the kids that are already there and then talk to me about regulation.

Star-Telegram.com: | 01/10/2008 | Report gives an average grade to Texas education

Texas gets a C for public education, according to Education Week’s 12th annual Quality Counts report.

Because Texas is interested in producing future presidents.

Technorati Tags: Texas Education, Education Week’s Quality Counts, Education rankings

MySA.com: Metro | State

In recent weeks, community members have rallied and pleaded with trustees, begging them to spare West Campus, which has about 600 students. But faced with a heart versus head dilemma, trustees voted to close the campus, which has had chronic low enrollment for years, operates at a deficit and has an “academically unacceptable” rating from the Texas Education Agency.

Now what is the point of school vouchers again? A way for poor parents to escape a failing school system? But what if parents are fine with their local schools no matter what its academic rating?

MySA.com: Metro | State

Parents, many of whom have their own memories of school days at West Campus, haven’t taken the decision lying down. On Friday, they filed a request for a temporary restraining order in U.S. District Court to challenge the school district’s effort to keep the dispute from bubbling up during the evening’s football game.

The latest legal challenge came after district officials announced that they would not tolerate any save-the-school fundraising efforts at the game or allow audience members to wear shirts or carry signs emblazoned with defamatory messages.

Despite the fact that their children will go a better rated high school, these parents aren’t happy. So how can you expect vouchers to “save” the school system if parents aren’t going to behave as voucher proponents expect them to? Let’s face it, “vouchers” at the higher education level, (grants and loans) don’t guarantee that students attend only schools with high graduation rates or job placement. It does allow quite a bit more diversity in education choice but it doesn’t mean that poorer quality schools shut down.

Technorati Tags: Texas, higher education, vouchers, South San Antonio High School West Campus, education quality

Critics say TEA’s dropout figures mislead public | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

Bob Sanborn, who runs a Houston-based education research and advocacy group, said the changes addressed some of his concerns. But, he said, the state still allows schools to get credit for students who never graduate. Students can say they are dropping out to be homeschooled, for example, but the state never checks on whether that is true.

Is he seriously suggesting that the high school dropout rate will be affected by cracking down on those “fake” homeschoolers?

HISD has already shown that if a high school has listed a big enough number of students having withdrawn to homeschool that it actually gets notice then the problem is with the keepers of the list, not the homeschoolers. They could just as easily have stated that they had transferred to a private school or moved out of the state.

Counting dropouts in Texas has been a problem for over 30 years. If the best Sanborn can do it to point to “homeschoolers” then you’ve got to wonder about the quality of his education analysis. Somehow, I have a feeling that Sanborn would want to check up on homeschoolers regardless of the dropout situation.

Technorati Tags: Texas, dropouts, Bob Sanborn, homeschooling

This is a good idea.

MySA.com: Metro | State

Under UTSA’s proposal, guaranteed admission for top-ranked high school students would expand from the top 10 percent to the top 25 percent.

Below that threshold, students would have to score from 920-1020 on the SAT, up from the current range of 830-970; on the ACT, that range would rise from 17-20 to 19-21.Romo said higher standards are part of a strategy to slow enrollment and manage runaway growth, as well as raise graduation rates and push UTSA toward it goal of becoming a premier research university.

A draft of UTSA’s strategic plan calls for capping enrollment at 35,000 by 2016. Romo estimated that 400 students would be rejected under the new standards.

“You cannot be open admissions and say you have standards,” Romo said, adding that high schools must turn out better students because the university cannot afford remedial education.

“The message we send to high schools is that UTSA will take you, no matter what,” he said.

Of course, in some ways, this just shifts the issues of qualifications and enrollment to community colleges. And given the lack of predictability of transferring course work from community colleges to four year institutions, low graduation rates, and lower profiles, I can’t help but think it’s brushing the problem under the rug so the legislature doesn’t have to deal with it.

What problem? The problem that obviously a significant number of students graduate from Texas colleges believing that they are ready for college but the low graduation rate at many Texas universities suggest otherwise.

Then there is the problem of capping enrollments as a means to controlling growth. Even if our public school system never improves, the number of graduates capable of succeeding in college is going to grow simply from population growth. Where are these people supposed to go?

Our local school district has a bond issue on the ballot to build more more schools to accommodate the 4,000 plus students being added to the district each year. Where are the new universities being built?

This is basically why it’s so hard to get into the Ivy League schools. They probably have ten times the number of people applying than they had 30 years ago and all of them meet the minimum qualifications. However, they haven’t expanded to accommodate ten times the enrollment. Students are being turned away who would have been an automatic admission just 20 years ago.

UTSA will become more selective simply because it can’t keep growing, just like UT Austin and Texas A&M already have. So what happens next, the community colleges, our last door that opens the path to higher education to all, will start turning away students?

I don’t know what to think about this.

School separates races for TAKS talk | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle:

Administrators at a Katy school are facing criticism from parents after holding separate assemblies for black, white and Hispanic students to address low scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test.

The assemblies at Mayde Creek High were held for ninth- and 10th-grade students of different ethnicities to discuss steps to boost scores on the state-required test, said district spokesman Steve Stanford. He said only students at risk because of their scores were called to the meetings, and that no negative message was intended.

Ultimately, he has a point.

School separates races for TAKS talk | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle:

Stanford said students were segregated because that’s how the state looks at and reports achievement.

Except it is if you are going to reward effective teachers.

Star-Telegram | 03/03/2007 | Report: Future rests on teachers’ shoulders:

“Five years with an effective teacher, not just an average teacher, is sufficient to close the achievement gap between middle- and low-income youngsters,” said Sandy Kress, an Austin-based lobbyist and author of the report.

As former chief education adviser for President Bush, Kress helped construct the federal No Child Left Behind Act. He is also education adviser to the Governor’s Business Council, a nonprofit organization of Texas business leaders.

So it takes five years for a student to catch up? Is that with the same teacher or within the same subject? Is the improvement distributed evenly over the five years or does it start off slowly and then accelerate? How do they match the students and the teachers? If it takes five years, why are schools expected to get students on grade level within a year? And most importantly, how is a poor school district going to keep these effective teachers from moving to wealthier districts and better teaching conditions?

Star-Telegram | 03/03/2007 | Report: Future rests on teachers’ shoulders:

The initial cost of implementation, Kress said, would be between $125 million and $150 million.

Which will be funded how?

MySA.com: Metro | State:

As outlined by Kress, the system would develop over several years, take into account factors such as test scores, test score growth, principal and peer evaluations and ultimately allow the state and school districts to offer higher pay to teachers who demonstrate better results and take on more challenging assignments.He said no new money would be tied to the legislation this session, but that business leaders would endorse bonuses for teachers once a fair evaluation system was in place.

Are these the same business leaders that refuse to disclose the selling price of property to avoid paying their fair share of school property taxes? Until these business experts get real and address school finance, why are we even listening to these people?