Board member Don McLeroy, R-College Station, offered the amendment requiring coverage of “key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.” McLeroy said he offered the proposal because the history standards were already “rife with leftist political periods and events – the populists, the progressives, the New Deal and the Great Society.”

McLeroy probably doesn’t understand that the reasons why the above mentioned periods are included in the history standards–they resulted in concrete achievements. You know, things like safe food, eliminating child labor, social security, and medicare. If he thinks these are “liberal” causes and indicative of textbook bias, he’s not talking about history, he promoting propaganda and indoctrination. That would explain why he wants Joe McCarthy portrayed in a more positive light. Now was that change proposed by the expert reviewers or public comment?

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.

Texas Board of Education quashes dissenting report on rejected math book | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas News on Yahoo! | The Dallas Morning News

“This is about the credibility of this board, and I will challenge anyone here who tries to challenge my credibility,” said Rick Agosto, a Democrat from San Antonio who had abstained in the November vote over whether to reject the math book.

If he didn’t vote, how could this be about his “credibility?” If he had bothered to vote for approving the textbook to begin with (which meets all state requirements) this wouldn’t be an issue at all, now would it? What’s the deal, he’s afraid the board wouldn’t elect him as an officer again? Does he really believe that the board has the right to reject textbooks based on personal beliefs even if they meet all state requirements? No wonder he’s worried about his credibility.

The state Board of Education’s unusual decision to reject a math textbook used by Dallas and 70 other Texas school districts has evolved into a power struggle over the approval of classroom materials used across the state.

At issue is whether the 15-member state board can reject any book it wants for any reason it wants. That’s what some conservative board members, led by board president Don McLeroy, say they are allowed to do.

So much for local control.

Rejection of math textbook sparks debate on state board’s authority | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Latest News

In Dallas, officials rolled out Everyday Mathematics books in kindergarten through sixth grade at 19 schools with low math scores during the 2000-01 school year. By the end of the year, only two of those schools still had low scores; a year later, none of them did, said Camille Malone, DISD’s director of mathematics.

The district now uses the book to teach the nearly 79,000 students in kindergarten through fifth grade at all elementary schools. Ms. Malone said games and hands-on examples help the students develop computation skills.

“The TAKS test is a test of concepts as well as skills,” she said. “Had we not had a conceptually based program, I’m not sure we would have had the achievement we have had on TAKS.”

So because some board members are more interested in establishing the authority of their beliefs, Dallas can not use a textbook that it believes has been instrumental in improving it’s math scores.

Terri Leo’s comments have to be among the most pathetic.

Rejection of math textbook sparks debate on state board’s authority | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Latest News

Ms. Leo said. “I object very much being taken to task for rejecting a book that I actually read.”

Apparently it doesn’t matter to her that the textbook was recommended by a review committee, the TEA commissioner, and probably several textbook committees at various districts not to mention the teachers who have been using the textbook in the classroom for a couple years. Shouldn’t they be the ones “objecting” rather than Leo?

I’m pretty sure this is just a continuation of Leo’s attempt for the SBOE to regain absolute control of textbook selection which suffered a major setback in the fall of 2006. Why now? Because biology textbooks are coming up for approval soon. And if the board “establishes” it’s right to reject textbooks for any reason, then the board can easily reject books that fail to “teach the controversy” regarding evolution.

BTW, Terri Leo is up for re-election this year. Unfortunately, the Democrats don’t have a candidate in the race. However, the Libertarian candidate is Brian Kuzma. Why should seven board members get to decide on textbooks for every district in Texas based solely on their personal preferences?

Technorati Tags: Texas State Board of Education, Don McLeroy, Teri Leo, textbook selection

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

Although the standard requires students to earn at least a 70 in every subject to participate in extracurricular events, lawmakers authorized school principals to exempt students in honors and advanced placement courses so they wouldn’t be discouraged from taking tougher classes.

When the rule was revised in 1995, the Legislature opened a loophole in the law that gave school districts wide latitude in deciding what courses could be exempted from no-pass, no-play. That led to exemptions for classes such as jewelry-making, photography, professional baking, choir and theater production.

“It turned out that school districts were exempting courses that aren’t tough but are called honors classes so they don’t count against the no-pass, no-play statute,” said Sen. Kyle Janek, R-Houston, author of the bill and vice chairman of the education committee.

The Austin school district, for example, exempts 166 courses, including auto repair, cooking and hospitality.

Hmmm, do you think this is because students are abusing their eligibility for debate by getting exempt from classes?

Let’s pretend that you run a plant nursery. You sell a healthy, well-kept tree to your customer. You give them fertilizer and detailed instructions. You might even go out and check on the tree every so often. If the tree fails to grow because it doesn’t receive enough fertilizer, who’s fault is it?

Or maybe you’re a mechanic and you get a new customer who had been taking his car to another mechanic. The car hasn’t been maintained so you do a tune-up and explain basic maintenance tasks. The customer takes the car home and it breaks down. Are you a bad mechanic?

How about being a doctor and you’re treating a child for asthma and the child keeps having asthma attacks because the parent continues to smoke around the child. (Okay, I’m winging it here since I don’t what all can cause asthma attacks.) Would your treatment of the patient be considered successful?

Of course, in most cases your customers hold up “their side” of the transaction. Even so, as a manager you would need to take account such problem customers as the ones described above when evaluating your employees. You would have to figure which employees have had truly difficult customer situations and which are just using it as an excuse for poor performance.

However, if you were to use the methods suggested from the Texans for Excellence in the Classroom report, you would simply provide the mechanic with three more sessions on how to be a good mechanic. And if the customer’s car breaks down again, fire the mechanic. The doctor would be given special training on dealing with asthma patients and if the child continued to have attacks, her license would be revoked.

As much as people would like to believe otherwise, education reform isn’t going to have a simple, easy solution. It’s not true in business, why should it be in education?

I don’t think all teachers are against being evaluate in their performance. I do think they want and deserve to have extenuating circumstances considered in their evaluations.

You can’t “make” people into good parents by passing laws to make them go to teacher conferences or feed their children five vegetables a day. There is no licensing process you have to go through before you can be a parent even though there are plenty of parents out there who are walking advertisements for such a system.

As long as there is such a large uncontrollable variable that effects the results, it’s not only unfair to the teachers to apply a one size fits all to education accountability, it’s unfair to the student as well. Schools that take the time and energy needed to truly address education deficiencies that originate in the home are penalized.

Do businesses succeed when they focus on short-term earnings for investors or investment in infrastructure and training? Both? It all depends? Do businesses succeed when they take a “one size fits all” approach? Can you think of a better way to set up public schools to fail than demand that “no child be left behind?”

In the past 12 years, some districts have created no-pass, no-play exemptions for classes ranging from calculus to cooking and auto repair. Others allow no exemptions.”

I don’t think we ever would have envisioned (competing) schools being allowed to exempt different classes,” said former state Rep. Paul Sadler, who chaired the House education committee when the no-pass, no-play law was altered in 1995.

“It creates an uneven playing field,” he said.

First enacted in 1984, the no-pass, no-play law banned students who failed a course from practicing or playing in extracurricular activities for six weeks.

The perfect solution for allowing non-public school students to play on public school teams–just exempt all homeschool and non-public school classes!
Or better yet, get athletics out of the school.

U.S. public schools should be run by private contractors who would graduate most students by 10th grade, concluded an expert commission sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The plan also calls for state funding to replace local property taxes, free pre-kindergarten and higher teacher pay on a merit-based system. The Gates Foundation and other sponsoring groups may pay states to help implement it, organizers said.

I don’t know if this is the answer to improving our education system but I can already tell that it will never be given serious consideration.

Bloomberg.com: U.S.:

The nation’s largest teachers union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association, said that recommendations such as state funding and private control of schools “could potentially disenfranchise poorer communities and eliminate community voices.”

With everyone trying to meet NCLB mandates, what community voices are we talking about? Whether or not we pay a football coach $150,000?

Bloomberg.com: U.S.:

The 1.3 million-member American Federation of Teachers warned of “enormous upheaval” from allowing private control of schools and from graduating students early.

Never mind that most of the rest of the world seems to be able to graduate students at 16, they don’t have the senior prom.

I think the biggest impediment to education reform is the mythology we as a culture have developed for our schools. Any reform that would undermine that myth, state financing (no local control) or early graduation (the best years of our lives), will never see the light of day. Think about it. For all the changes in education since 1900, the school’s place in the community has changed little.

I’m not talking about changes from the one room school house that doubled as a church on Sunday to mega high schools. I’m talking about how the community sees and values the school. We see school as the soul and heart of the community rather than a tool by which to educate the population. So when we talk about doing away with things like football or the prom, we are challenging the very identity of a community. At this point, academics are irrelevant. This is why we will tolerate testing until it begins to interfere with the mythology of the school. As soon as testing or reform keeps us from going to the Friday night game or the prom, reform transforms quickly into outside interference.

80(R) HB 208 – Introduced version – Bill Text:

Sec.?33.087.??ELIGIBILITY OF STUDENTS PARTICIPATING IN JOINT CREDIT OR CONCURRENT ENROLLMENT PROGRAMS. A student otherwise eligible to participate in an extracurricular activity or a University Interscholastic League competition is not ineligible because the student is enrolled in a course offered for joint high school and college credit, or in a course offered under a concurrent enrollment program, regardless of the location at which the course is provided.

So did someone somewhere try to get a student disqualified from a UIL competition? Did some school accuse another school of having an ineligible player because he or she was taking a history class at the local community college? Sigh… do I even need to ask?