Date sent: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 16:15:53 -0600 (CST)
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: Still at Risk

Loop Members [on bcc]:

5:16 PM 2/14/1997

Houston Chronicle editorial

Still at Risk

Decade of school reform has eased few concerns

Even before the National Commission on Excellence in Education published "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, many Americans realized that higher standards were needed. Almost 14 years later, however, student achievement still lags, and few Americans can agree on what those high standards should reflect.

The Texas Education Agency recently halted payment of dues to an organization trying to draft higher standards for the nation's schools. The TEA's decision to hold up the check came after concerned citizens convinced several State Board of Education members that the National Center for Education and the Economy was implicated in an insidious international plot to undermine Texas public schools.

Some people might find it hard to understand the motive or point of the plot, but several religious-minded members of the board said the undermining would be accomplished by infesting the state's new curriculum -- the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills -- with notions of "outcome-based education."

A professor of education at the University of Houston says outcome-based education is at heart a model for deciding what students should learn and the best way to teach them. Opponents use the term as a catch phrase for various newfangled methods that depart from basic drills.

The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, to be completed this summer, is required by Senate Bill 1 passed in the previous legislative session. The English grammar section is being redrafted after well-founded protest about its mushy, almost nonsensical wording. The other parts of the TEKS completed so far seem so broad and vague that they offer neither much guidance nor much to inspire protest.

A section on eighth-grade theater, for example, does not mention the name of Shakespeare or any other dramatist, requiring only that students find their way to some stage and depart with some knowledge of what a theater is. At least the high school biology curriculum requires that students understand evolution, whether or not they believe in its existence.

The new state curriculum leaves local school districts, which can choose their own textbooks, with plenty of leeway on what to teach and how to teach it. The Houston Independent School District has offices full of officials who develop local curricula, and more offices full of officials who transmit those curricula to teachers.

National standards, state-mandated curriculum, local control, campus-based management? It's no wonder teachers are confused and exasperated and parents fret about where the whole ungainly system is headed.

Defending national standards, President Clinton recently said that "reading is reading and math is math." Would that it were so. In Texas, educators and parents are locked in mortal combat over how much class time should be allotted to phonics and multiplication tables and how much to reading stories and solving word problems.

If the issue of subject matter were suddenly decided, heated disagreements over teaching methods would remain. A dean at the University of Texas swears that some of his colleagues in UT's College of Education preach that homework is not a good tool because some kids don't do it and fall behind.

Even if everyone agreed on what should be taught and how it should be taught, Texas would still face an exploding student population and a growing shortage of qualified (i.e., intelligent and learned) teachers.

One-third of the teachers in Texas either received no certification or are teaching subjects they did not master in college, and too many of those who are certified come from the bottom third of their graduating classes. Unfortunately, the lifetime earning power of a teacher in the public schools is paltry incentive to board such a leaky ship on such a stormy sea.

Concerned readers may wish to test their knowledge, completing the sentence below by choosing among the following options:

Public education in Texas ...

a. is making some progress.
b. needs work.
c. remains deeply troubled and at risk.
d. all of the above.