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Executive Director's Message:
As the holiday season approaches, it’s hard to imagine that it will be quickly followed by what may well be a fierce political season, but that’s the case. Most legislative districts in Texas are drawn to be either solidly Republican or Democratic, so unless the electorate is in a particularly feisty humor, the majority of state legislative races will be decided in the primaries on March 4, rather than in the general election in November.
So the season of the “sound bite” is drawing near. As always, election year outcomes have a huge impact on what we can expect as your advocates during the legislative session to follow in 2009. You’ll hear from us repeated encouragement that you be informed, be active, and vote, and those activities will be especially important in the primary (see related story on page 20). With a presidential election and potentially a race for the Texas House speakership as a backdrop, this primary season promises to be especially lively.
Since we regularly hear from legislative candidates the sound bites they use to assure us of their understanding and interest in our issues, usually couched in terms of “supporting public education,” we thought a few of our own might be useful to provide. Here are a few of our priority messages:
Don’t believe the bad stuff you hear about the performance of Texas schools.
Much of it isn’t true. In fact, while Texas ranks in the bottom half in per pupil spending, our National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results indicate that our schools are providing a tremendous value. On the math portion of the 2007 NAEP test, Texas fourth grade African American students had the second highest scores in the nation, while Texas fourth grade Hispanic student scores tied for second place in the nation, and Texas fourth grade white students had the third highest scores in the nation. Additionally, all of these subgroups performed among the top 10 states in reading. Texas eighth-graders stacked up well also on the math portion of the NAEP, with Texas Hispanic students earning the highest scores in the country, and Texas white and African American students tied for second in the nation. This measure is a favorite of mine, since nobody drills for the NAEP and potentially distorts its outcome; it’s a truer and broader measure, in my mind, of student achievement than TAKS scores. Many of the doom and gloom messages are coming from people who either think they have the magic answer or who stand to gain financially if their product or program is accepted as a “solution.”
Don’t mess with TRS.
Despite the ups and downs of the market in recent years, TRS remains a fiscally sound system whose benefits for current employees should not be reduced. (In fact, now that the System is showing the signs of the recovery we had anticipated, we’ll be working hard to reverse changes made in the 2005 legislative session.) Ronnie Jung, the Executive Director of TRS, recently indicated that TRS pays its annuitants three times the benefit they would have at a comparable income level under Social Security. And, for all but the newest employees, the Rule of 80 permits retirement for many at a much earlier age, while Social Security allows only a reduced benefit at age 62 or full retirement at age 65-67. The number of employers offering an annuity, as opposed to an invested savings program such as a 401(k), is small and declining rapidly. Other than addressing the needs of current retirees to receive regular benefit adjustments to maintain their purchasing power, and reversing cuts that adversely affect current employees, this system should not be touched.
The schools are not crawling with sex offenders.
Without a doubt, one employee engaging in inappropriate conduct with a student is one too many. But the recent series of headline-grabbing articles indicating Texas ranked second in the nation in the number of complaints of inappropriate conduct, while sensational, did not provide the full story. Texas has the second largest student population in the nation, following California, which – interestingly – ranked number one in complaints of this nature. It stands to reason that student population would be a significant factor in the number of offense complaints, just like it would in the number of students affected in any other category. And in Texas, the law was changed many years ago to eliminate the possibility of a quiet resignation and a move to another district for those accused of inappropriate conduct. Texas law requires that a superintendent make a report to SBEC any time that an educator resigns and reasonable evidence exists to support a determination that the conduct occurred. This standard does not require proof; rather, the assumption is that SBEC will investigate the allegation upon receipt of the complaint. Failure to make the report risks the superintendent’s certificate. Given that requirement, it’s likely that Texas administrators are reporting allegations of these incidents at a much higher rate than their colleagues in states without similar laws.
It’s not hard to nonrenew the contract of a bad teacher.
One lobby group has in recent sessions pushed a reduction of teacher contractual protections, using as “evidence” the low number of teacher contract terminations and nonrenewals that occur each year. In prior sessions, the rising legal costs of districts have also been cited as a reason to eliminate or ease teacher contractual protections, until proof was demanded that letting teachers go was actually driving these costs. Turns out the bulk of district legal costs is not in this area, but large expenditures are far more likely to occur on issues like special education or administrator contract buyouts. State law for the nonrenewal of a teacher contract requires only some documentation of poor performance in the classroom, and the district’s evidentiary burden to uphold a nonrenewal is more than a “scintilla” (read “shred”) of evidence, not the “preponderance of the evidence” or “beyond a reasonable doubt” standards used in many other areas of the law. That’s why a reasonable estimate of the number of teachers who resign when faced with a proposed nonrenewal is likely somewhere in the vicinity of 90% - hence the low number of contract nonrenewals in districts statewide.
Something’s got to give.
The “mission creep” in the public schools has been fast and punishing. Though we all care about children and the various aspects of their physical, mental and social well-being, it is simply unrealistic to expect the public schools to take on missions in areas such as student body mass index (BMI) and risk for diabetes. We must persuade policymakers to focus on the core mission of the public schools, and let some of the other, though worthy, goals be handled through different entities. While new programs and requirements are layered on, none of the old ones are being removed. Required meetings and activities for educators are consuming the summers and encroaching on the weekends in many districts, leaving little time for educators to tend to their own families or do what they deem most necessary to help their students. Legislators should adopt the approach regarding teacher time that the appropriations committee uses regarding money when considering the state’s budget – if you want to spend more money in one area, you have to take it out of another – in deciding when and how to add programs and requirements.
The accountability system needs to be rethought from the ground up.
Few would argue that the initial stages of the accountability system were a good thing, particularly the requirement that student performance be addressed by subgroup so that districts could not rely on “averages” to obscure poor performance in some subgroups. But the “accountability on steroids” system that is now in place has reached the point of diminishing returns – far too much time and energy are being spent on the system itself, while teachers and students suffer. There is good in the mantra that all children can learn, but the suggestion implicit in our current system that all children can learn the same material at the same rate does a disservice to all. And the unintended consequences of the current system can be devastating. Many teachers have described the sort of triage approach that now takes place, with the bulk of time, energy and attention focused on those students who are close to passing the TAKS, while the top performers and those who are farther from the cut score languish. I can’t help but believe that the expectation that all children will learn the same content at the same rate contributes significantly to the dropout problem, as well – even if the system won’t face the reality that some students are not college-bound, the students know, and some opt for an early exit. And there’s something wrong with a system in which, but for a few star performers, you can predict with considerable accuracy the results and ratings at each campus by simply looking at the socioeconomic status of the students.
Just because beginning teacher salaries are rising doesn’t mean the teacher salary issue has been addressed.
Beginning teacher salaries in Texas have made significant progress in recent years due largely to the jockeying among districts in offering competitive salaries to new hires. But the veteran teachers who have made a career of it are finding their salaries stagnant or increasing at a snail’s pace in many of those same districts. It’s time for a serious effort to reward those who have committed their working lives to educating our youth. The new hires who come in at competitive salaries (up to $45,000 in some districts) are not going to stay for the long term once they encounter the often difficult realities of the classroom and learn that they may expect to make maybe $10,000 more in 15-20 years. That lack of career potential does not escape the “best and the brightest” that policymakers claim to want in our classrooms. Many of the veteran teachers who have helped those new teachers learn the ropes and succeed in the classroom are nearing the age at which they can retire with a full pension; we need to make it worth their while to stay. Continuing to focus the bulk of new salary money on new hires, coupled with the relative ease of alternative certification, is likely to transform teaching into a sort of transient profession in which just about the time employees really get good at teaching, they move on to private sector employment due to the lack of earning potential. It’s not a bad thing that beginning teacher salaries are rising, but it’s short-sighted and dangerous to ignore the needs of career educators.
Vouchers are not the answer.
We’ve had a pilot voucher program in Texas for more than a decade, though we called it charter schools. The charter schools experiment has shown that, like their regular public school counterparts, some are very good and some not so good. In fact, the percentage of charter schools rated “academically unacceptable” is much higher at 19%, than the percentage of regular public school counterparts at 3% (according to the 2006 District Accountability Ratings). There is nothing wrong with private schools; many are very high performing, though they tend to have financial support far beyond what is offered to our public schools and to be highly selective in their admissions criteria. But they shouldn’t be funded by the public. If public funds are being expended, the public has the right to expect that certain standards will be met (such as certification of educators and class size caps), that outcomes will be measured and reported, and that laws will be followed with regard to public information and meetings, among others. Though intra-district public school choice, along with magnet schools and the prospect of moving into another school district to take advantage of higher performing schools, should remain an option for any parent, the state needs to appropriately support its public schools and focus on providing the resources needed for those that are underperforming to improve their outcomes.
It seems that the point regularly made to me by our Communications staff has now been proven by any evidentiary standard: lawyers are way too verbose to be good at the “sound bite.” Nonetheless, these are the sorts of messages that legislators and would-be legislators need to hear – and it’s up to us to deliver them.
Web posted: 11/30/07
