Archive for the ‘Texas Education Agency’ Category
Because they don’t like it
January 17th, 2008
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.
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.
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
Start checking your kindergartner’s credit report
January 15th, 2008
A new database will be collecting kindergartner’s social security numbers.
The new database for kindergarten test scores also includes sections for children’s names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, gender, school identification numbers and parents’ names and addresses, educators say.
For some odd reason, some people are disturbed by this.
“As adults you don’t even put your Social Security card in your wallet,” said Mr. Lukert, an officer with the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association. “And yet here we are required to give that information out. It doesn’t make sense.”
Basically, TEA is telling everyone to just “trust us.”
“It’s quite amazing the security that OZ has in place for this information,” said Susan Landry, director of the UT group, known as the State Center for Early Childhood Development. “You are overemphasizing the Social Security number.”
So the Social Security number isn’t that big of a deal? Then why use it all?
Pearson Educational Measurement officials, who develop or administer standardized tests in Texas and 22 other states, say they use ID numbers to link students to their test data.
“I don’t think in the testing side of it that we ever encounter Social Security numbers,” said David Hakensen, vice president of public relations.
I suspect that parents aren’t required to provide Social Security numbers unless maybe they’re receiving some sort of direct federal aid such as free lunch. I could be totally wrong here.
However, I went to my local school district website to see what documents would be needed to enroll my child and it said:
Back To School : Northside Independent School District – San Antonio, TX 78238
Child’s Social Security Number (if available)
Furthermore, the TEA PEIMS Data Standards makes it sound like Social Security numbers aren’t required either.
Identification – the information necessary to identify the person. This information is Social Security number or state-approved alternative student ID and student name. It is requested for all students.
Notice, it says “requested.” So how many schools request the information and parents provide it assuming that it’s required?
While part of the issue is trust, another part is “why do you need the data?” Do they need it because they want to link it to other data that is based on social security data? Or do they want it just because it will be easier than generating their own id system? And if they can’t tell us, what does that do to the trust factor?
Technorati Tags: Texas Education, Social Security Numbers, TEA, Texas Education Agency, OZ Systems, State Center for Early Childhood Development, Susan Landry
Texas SBOE does not support teaching of evolution
December 27th, 2007
In case you haven’t heard, the Texas Education Agency has fired the agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer, for forwarding an email about a talk on evolution. It also looks like the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is seriously considering approving a program that offers a Masters Degree in Creation Science. And if you don’t think our State Board of Education lead by Creationist Advocate, Dr. Don McLeroy, is getting ready to push for eliminating the teaching of evolution from the state’s biology textbooks, consider the following:
Official Leaves Post as Texas Prepares to Debate Science Education Standards – New York Times
But several months ago, in response to an inquiry letter, Ms. Comer said she was instructed to strike her usual statement about the board’s support for teaching evolution and to quote instead the exact language of the high school biology standards as formulated for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills test.
“The student knows the theory of biological evolution,” the standards read, and is expected to “identify evidence of change in species using fossils, DNA sequences, anatomical similarities, physiological similarities and embryology,” as well as to “illustrate the results of natural selection in speciation, diversity, phylogeny, adaptation, behavior and extinction.”
As I see it, the board no longer wants to be associated with teaching the theory of biological evolution. Therefore, Comer was instructed to use the exact language which makes no reference to the board’s support. If this wasn’t such an important issue to the board and they don’t intend to push for a policy change, who then is responsible for such a level of micromanaging?
Technorati Tags: Texas Education Agency, Christine Comer, teaching Evolution, Texas, Don McLeroy, State Board of Education, Lizzette Reynolds, Creation science, intelligent design
Who’s cheating now?
September 19th, 2007
Remember all the controversy around TAKS scores and the Caveon analysis about possible cheating in 2006?
Everybody Does It / Academic cheating is at an all-time high. Can anything be done to stop it?
It used to be that cheating was done by the few, and most often they were the weaker students who couldn’t get good grades on their own. There was fear of reprisal and shame if apprehended. Today, there is no stigma left. It is accepted as a normal part of school life, and is more likely to be done by the good students, who are fully capable of getting high marks without cheating. “It’s not the dumb kids who cheat,” one Bay Area prep school student told me. “It’s the kids with a 4.6 grade-point average who are under so much pressure to keep their grades up and get into the best colleges. They’re the ones who are smart enough to figure out how to cheat without getting caught.”
This sounds a lot like the kids at the schools the our former TEA commissioner, Dr. Neeley, said wouldn’t have to cheat to get good TAKS scores.
Money makes you honest « Texas Ed: Comments on Education from Texas
Dr. Neeley said the wealthy districts on the list – including many considering self-investigations – are unlikely to cheat.
“You look at Highland Park, Richardson, Eanes,” she said, naming some of the state’s wealthiest districts in the Dallas and Austin areas. “Do they have to cheat to have good scores? I gave a talk in Eanes not long ago and said, ‘Do you people think Westlake High School had to cheat to get good scores?’ “
But I’m sure things are different in Texas, right?
Technorati Tags: cheating, TEA, Caveon, TAKS, Shirely Neeley
Looking at numbers
September 4th, 2007
Study finds inequality in Texas education funding – Houston Business Journal:
High schools also tended to receive 18 percent more funding than elementary or middle schools, as did schools with more senior teachers.
So what do you think accounts for the 18% difference? A need to pay teachers more for teaching advanced subjects like physics and calculus? Are there really that many calculus teachers in high schools or are they really paid that much more than other teachers?
Where is that 18% going? Now I’m going to guess that it’s going to improve the “quality” of the high school experience by providing a variety of enrichment activities. Yeah, I think a lot more is being spent on high school athletics than any one cares to admit.
And until the districts and TEA are willing to show otherwise, I think I’m probably on the right track, at least in terms that the TEA and school districts aren’t anxious to reveal their funding breakdown. What in the world am I talking about?
You can go to the TEA website and generate AEIS Reports for Texas school districts. If you look up the Bexar County Northside district, you will find a breakdown of “Actual Expenditures by Function” and “Actual Program Expenditure Information.” The functions include “Cocurricular activities” and the program information includes “Athletics/Related Activities.” These items constitute only 2% or less of the budget, pretty small potatoes. But then why doesn’t the report list the number of students enrolled in Athletics/Related Activities when it does so for a select number of other programs?
Furthermore, when you get to the campus level, these categories go missing completely along with the functions “Student Transportation” and “Food Services” among others. Is this the start of the 18% increase in spending in high schools? We certainly can’t tell from the data since the date aren’t provided.
So why aren’t the categories listed at the campus level? Could it be because the disparities would be that obvious?
Technorati Tags: Texas, Education funding, per pupil funding, inequity, Texas Education Agency, Northside ISD, Center for Reinventing Public Education
Schools–education and so much more
August 4th, 2007
Another example of education not being the only concern of public schools:
Mexia Daily News – District pulls 4-day school week proposal
The Lancaster school board voted 5-1 last month to allow Lewis to seek a waiver exempting the district from the required 180-day school calendar. Under the proposal, the 6,000-student district south of Dallas would have longer days Monday through Thursday and Fridays off.
Supporters say the short week would boost academics by allowing longer uninterrupted stretches of class time and save money as the district deals with a funding deficit.
Critics have protested the idea over concerns about the cost of child care on Fridays and unsupervised students getting into trouble.
It’s an interesting cost benefit issue. The schools could save money and (theoretically) improve academics by switching to a shorter week. That would seem to meet the generally stated goals of public education.
But the argument against is that it will cost parents in day care and the possibly the community in general with increased youth crime. So shouldn’t the voters of the Lancaster district be willing to spend (you know, tax themselves) to address this social issue? It looks like it’s going to cost them either way, so why not send the money to education?
Too bad they don’t have some critical tourist industry that needs to operate on Fridays using student labor–the Lancaster board probably wouldn’t have ever been sent the 15 questions from TEA to begin with.
Technorati Tags: 4 day school week, Lancaster school district, Larry Lewis, Robert Scott, TEA, Lancaster Council of PTAs
Given the obscure definitions used by the Texas Education Agency to calculate the high school dropout rate, I can understand why the legislature might feel the need to explicitly define who is a dropout. But I have to wonder about the following requirement:
80(R) HB 3621 – Introduced version – Bill Text:
(e) Each school district shall cooperate with the agency in determining whether a student is considered a dropout under this section. The agency shall require that a school district provide at least the following documentation regarding a student who dies or who leaves school but is not considered a dropout under this section:
(1) for a student who dies, a death certificate;
Maybe I’m wrong and it’s no big deal, but it seems to me that requesting a copy of a child’s death certificate from grieving parents would make the hall of fame for insensitive, bureaucratic, and unnecessary policies. Perhaps the state will come up with a way for officials to by-pass the parents.
It would seem that the TEA should be able to trust the schools to list students as being deceased appropriately. Unfortunately, experience has shown that without requiring some sort of verification, some administrator will start listing students as being dead rather than admitting that they dropped out or have no idea of what happen to them.
Just as an aside, the bill once again unnecessarily distinguishes between withdrawing a child to enroll in another school and withdrawing a child to homeschool. Since homeschools are private schools in Texas there should be no difference. In these situations, it’s generally a case of ignorance on the part of the author. But there are times I wonder if there is this inclination to specify homeschoolers separately from private schools because if the state did decide to increase regulation over homeschoolers, it wouldn’t have to go back and make changes every time a law talked about private schools. But then I realize how little evidence there is of such forethought by our legislature and rest easy again.
No, really?
January 28th, 2007
At least half of all high school students in the state’s major cities are dropping out of school, creating a crisis that state leaders are not doing enough to address, some education experts say.
This was true when I did my masters report in the 1980’s. This problem spans generations in terms of “alarm” over dropout rates. All of the dramatic reforms of the past thirty years, no pass-no play, increasing requirements, teacher reforms, etc, have proven to be only tinkering on the edges of the problem with no real results. I suspect things won’t change until the state is willing to go to some sort of equitable state wide funding mechanism while allowing more control at the local and parent level.
Right.
What do we have right now–does 4 by 4 ring a bell? No child left behind? Or how about how we handle charter schools?
Shapiro’s proposed bill would make the closure of a charter school after two years on the academically unacceptable list automatic, removing intermediate steps that have slowed enforcement and helped spur courtroom battles. It would also set an absolute standard that a minimum of 25 percent of a school’s students must pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests in reading and math. If a school misses that mark two years in a row, it would have to shut its doors.
Shapiro’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Ransom Rice, said there has been discussion of adding a caveat to the proposed bill that would allow such schools to prove that students are making considerable progress, even if their TAKS scores are sub par, thus saving themselves from closure. Rice said even if that measure is added to the bill, however, it would likely be a one-time-only second chance.
The logic behind this “reasoning” is astounding. First, you have schools taking kids who have managed to fall several/many grade levels behind over ten or eleven years and the school gets two years to bring them up to standards.
Then there is the whole “school choice” aspect of it. No one is forcing parents to send their kids to these schools. If these schools are doing such a terrible job, why are the parents still sending their children there? There are two possibilities.
One, the parent believes that the child is benefiting from the school regardless of what the state standards say. After all, they probably do take into account that their child is six years behind when he started the school.
Or two. The parents really don’t have a clue as to how their children are doing which is probably indicative of their own education experience. Can anyone say “culture of poverty?”
How will increasing standards reduce the dropout rate when part of the problem is that the students can’t meet the existing standards to begin with? How can shutting down a school because it doesn’t meet average yearly progress improve students’ performance if they are simply placed back into the situation that generated the problem to begin with?
Why do we still have a 50 % dropout rate after 40 years of alarm over the issue? Because no one is willing to come out and say resolving it would require spending more on students from poor economic backgrounds compared to those from wealthy, suburban districts. Because it would mean that people in a wealthy district would have to recognize that spending money on poor students is a necessary investment for their own children’s standard of living. It would mean letting go of the idea that somehow “those” students are in such poor schools because they deserve it.
Good news for Kerrville
October 9th, 2006
The Texas Education Agency has reversed an earlier rating and given an “academically acceptable” rating to Tivy High School and the Kerrville Independent School District, according to a KISD news release.
This was a case of counting students who were assigned to Tivy High School because they were housed at the Kerr county Juvenile Detention Center.
The school and district were given an unacceptable rating because of completion rates for students housed at the Kerr County Juvenile Detention Center. Several students who didn’t graduate or complete a TEA-approved General Education Development program were from counties outside of Kerr, KISD Superintendent Dan Troxell said at a September board meeting.
It’s even better news for Texas education lobbyists:
In a September board meeting, Troxell told board members that the district had hired a Houston attorney to help Rep. Harvey Hildebran, R-Kerrville, draft legislation to modify the education agency’s system of rating schools and districts.
Don’t you think it’s a problem when an issue like this has to be resolved at the legislature (which meets only every two years to ensure responsive, good government) rather than dealt with sensibly by the district and TEA?
What’s wrong with this picture?
September 24th, 2006
Tivy High received a preliminary unacceptable rating from the Texas Education Agency. The rating did not reflect the performance of Tivy High School students, but was given as a result of completion rates at Kerr County Juvenile Facility.
