Texas Education Newsletter

October 1, 1996

B. Rice Aston, editor

Internet email: bra@hal-pc.org

TEKS for Reading -- A Disaster Coming October 31, 1996

A recent education symposium at Katy, Texas discussed the Texas Education Agency's ("TEA") current draft of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills ("TEKS") for reading. Included in the symposium were front line teachers who must use the TEKS, teachers from California who taught under similar TEKS, and persons knowledgeable in current research in the teaching of reading.

The conclusion: The TEKS, drafted by a TEA committee over two and one half years, promote a social agenda and not education; they are generic, standardless, lack accountability, dwell upon emotions and feelings, eschew knowledge and skills, and are disaster for the classroom teacher and the student. For example, the TEKS are so standardless that a teacher who has a student transfer from another school district into his/her class will have no clue as to what the student has been previously taught. Educators from California who operated under similar TEKS warned that TEA's current TEKS will be an enormously costly mistake, both in dollars and human resources. The cost to California: over one billion dollars wasted.

The TEKS reading "standards" were to be written by a committee supposedly composed of knowledgeable persons throughout the state whose sole interest is teaching Texas children to read. There is some evidence, however, that the TEKS for reading were already written before the TEKS committee ever met, and there is compelling evidence that the TEKS committee served no purpose other than to give the appearance of a committee engaged in as substantive process, when in fact the outcome had been determined before the committee began its work. This is a clear signal that in spite of the good intentions of TEA Commissioner Mike Moses, social agendas at the TEA are more important than the education of our children.

The symposium's recommendation: The TEKS for reading should be rewritten by persons whose sole interest is excellence in education, and who are knowledgeable in the current research that tells us generic, standardless, TEKS, lacking in accountability, are an enormously expensive disaster for the taxpayers and the school children of Texas.

The time for action is very limited as a very narrow window for public comment closes October 31. 996.

Public Education In Danger

A Massive Political Battle Must be Waged for Core Academics and Excellence. The Alternative: Leave Education of Our Children to An Out of Control Bureaucracy Consumed With Social Agendas.

Jeff Judson, president of Texas Public Policy Foundation, San Antonio, reprinted with permission.

Texas parents and concerned citizens have been given until Oct. 31 to review the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). an opportunity that should be taken very seriously.

The 2,000 page TEKS is a complete re-write of Texas curriculum standards and will completely transform public education in Texas. As currently written, it reflects the goals of radical curriculum specialists who want to dumb down our schools, eliminate standardized testing, and minimize individual differences to create equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity.

The TEKS spells out everything Texas public school children are expected to do and know in all public schools at all grade levels. it will dictate all teacher training, all textbook content and all standardized testing.

Commissioner of Education Mike Moses recently announced he was giving extra time for public review so substantive changes could be made to the document. He directed the TEKS writing teams to use only measurable, declarative verbs in the performance descriptions, such as "list", "identify", and "locate", rather than explore", "investigate", or "discuss." This problem - that most standards are vaguely worded, making it impossible to test what students have learned - is one of the worst aspects of TEKS. Many standards call for exposure to concepts rather than to master skills (e.g. "student uses listening to increase knowledge of self, one's culture, the culture of others & the shared culture"). The words "viewing", "speaking", and "listening" appear throughout the document, yet they represent inherent physiological functions, not facts or skills to be taught in school.

In the first grade math standards, the TEKS states that "student recognizes addition and subtraction". "Recognizing addition and subtraction is one step removed from performing the calculation correctly. Performance, after all, is what we are striving for in our schools and can be objectively assessed.

Luckily, we have a commissioner who can come to the rescue at the eleventh hour when things get our of hand. But consider that these taxpayer-funded writing teams have worked for 2 1/2 years creating a documents that promotes a failed education philosophy.

As Commissioner Moses noted, the sheer length of the document (2,000 pages) is still a major problem. Virginia recently adopted its own counterpart document- rated "exemplary" even by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), with which I usually disagree - which describes all the core education elements in 101 pages. There is no way for any teacher to teach, or textbook or standardized test to contain, all the elements in the TEKS. Therefore, it would be up to individual teachers, schools, and textbook publishers to decide what is important, which is what state standards are designed to prevent. Standards should set the irreducible requirements all children should know, with local districts controlling enrichment requirements.

The criteria of the AFT that Virginia followed are consistent with an "equal opportunity" rather than an "equal outcome" society. The AFT criteria include such common senses as "...must be manageable given the constraints of time," "... must be rigorous and world class," and "...must be written clearly enough for all stakeholders to understand." The TEKS fails the AFT criteria miserably.

The TEKS also reflect an extremist, bilingual education agenda by allowing non-English speaking students to learn the rules of the English language "in their native language." How one does this escapes me.

If the TEKS are still unacceptable when they are presented to the State Board of Education for final approval, then it may be time for Governor George Bush to carry out his stated desire to abolish the Texas Education Agency's regulatory powers. Even a well meaning TEA commissioner has difficulty controlling the individual agendas of the bureaucrats he manages and the TEKS is proof. TEKS substantiates the need to return education to local and parental control. The TEKS system designed by our bureaucracy would never survive in a competitive system where parents had the power to vote with their feet. Instead, all concerned Texans must now mobilize to fight a massive political battle for core academics and excellence.

To Whom to Write

Hon. George W. Bush, Governor, P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX, 78711.

TEA Commissioner Mike Moses, William B. Travis Building, 1701 N. Congress Ave. Austin, TX 78701-1494.

Your representative on the State Board of Education at Texas State Board of Education, William B. Travis Building, 1701 N. Congress Ave., Austin, TX 78701-1494. If you don't know who is your representative on the SBOE, call you local school distinct. They know.

What to write

A short concise letter. Handwritten letters are effective. The fact that you took the time to send a handwritten letter indicates an above average level of interest and concern.

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