The Senate has passed its version of House Bill 5, which makes sweeping changes to standardized testing and curriculum requirements for high school students. Texas high school students would have new curriculum requirements under legislation unanimously passed by the Senate on Monday — but they won’t be the ones the House envisioned when it approved [...]
Posts Tagged ‘standardized testing’
More test tweaking
Seems reasonable. Students in elementary and middle school would get a little testing relief under a House bill that passed overwhelmingly on a preliminary vote Monday. Amid a backlash against state-mandated testing, the legislation eliminates writing exams in fourth and seventh grades. It also aims to alleviate some of the stress- inducing elements of the [...]
School stuff
Just a basic roundup of education-related stories, since there’s so much going on. From the Trib, action in the House on testing in grade school. Elementary and middle school students currently take a total of 17 state exams before high school. They are tested each year in grades three through eight in reading and math, [...]
House passes major changes to testing and graduation requirements
This is a big deal. Texas public high school students would face far fewer high-stakes exams and gain more freedom in choosing courses under a major education bill approved by the state House on Tuesday. Hours of debate among lawmakers centered on whether the state was giving students much-needed flexibility or scaling back too far [...]
Pauken for Governor
We have our first official non-fringe candidate for Governor next year. Saying he hoped to reunite the “Reagan coalition of social and economic conservatives,” former Texas Workforce Commissioner Tom Pauken confirmed to the Tribune that he will file to run for governor in 2014. “I like [Gov.] Rick Perry. I like [Attorney General] Greg Abbott,” [...]
How much testing is too much?
There’s not a consensus on the right number of mandatory high school standardized exams, but a lot of people are saying that what we’re doing right now is too much. The number of high-stakes exams in Texas is the most nationwide, according to the Education Commission of the States. Texas students previously had to pass [...]
Here come the STAAR reform bills
Fire one: State Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, R-Killeen, the newly appointed chairman of the House Public Education Committee, filed legislation Wednesday that would restructure the state’s high school graduation and student testing requirements. Aycock’s proposal, House Bill 5, would move public schools to an accountability system with grades of A through F, a concept that [...]
School finance system ruled unconstitutional
Surely no one is surprised by this. The system Texas uses to fund public schools violates the state’s constitution by not providing enough money and failing to distribute the money in a fair way, a judge ruled Monday in a landmark decision that could force the Legislature to overhaul the way it pays for education. [...]
More STAAR changes proposed
Everyone’s least favorite standardized test is a fat target these days. State Sen. Kel Seliger, the Amarillo Republican who chairs the Senate Higher Education Committee, filed a bill Tuesday offering broad changes to student assessment and high school graduation requirements in Texas. Senate Bill 225 would significantly reduce the number of state standardized tests students [...]
Everybody hates the STAAR test now
In reading this story about the flood of legislation being filed to scale back or defer the STAAR tests, I am struck, but not surprised, by the genesis of this activity. The clamor for change may have more to do with who’s finally speaking up, said Patricia López, a research associate at the Texas Center [...]
Early extension for Grier
This was a surprise. The Houston school board gave Superintendent Terry Grier a big but not unanimous vote of confidence Thursday, extending his contract through 2016 and awarding him $115,000 in bonuses for the last year. The board voted 6-2 to approve the surprise two-year extension, and the lone absent trustee said later that she [...]
TAB yields on testing
Retreat! Some of the strongest advocates for high-stakes testing, Texas business leaders now want to cut the number of exams students must pass to finish high school, the latest attempt to ease tougher graduation requirements that went into effect last year. The number of high-stakes tests would fall from 15 to as few as six [...]
Some sanity on STAAR
This is a welcome development. A requirement that the state exams count toward 15 percent of a student’s course grade sparked a backlash last spring over the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, among parents whose ninth-graders were the first to take the more rigorous exams. A statewide parent group emerged out [...]
TAB does not intend to release its hostage
And why should they, if it’s a viable strategy? Representatives from the Texas Coalition for a Competitive Workforce, which includes major business groups and local chambers of commerce, said at a news conference that the assessment and accountability system known as the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness cannot be rolled back. Too many [...]
Eight billion dollars
That’s how much is needed per year to make public education whole. Lynn Moak told state District Judge John Dietz that it will take more than $8 billion a year in additional money to get students on target to graduate and to meet new college and career readiness standards. About 150,000 9th-grade students, or 47 [...]
Pauken responds to Hammond
Tom Pauken responds to Bill Hammond on the subject of school accountability. Hammond encourages us to “stay the course” of the existing high-stakes testing system and “4×4” curriculum that have come to dominate public education in Texas. Implicit in this expensive testing system (the cost to Texas taxpayers is an estimated $450 million over a [...]
Fort Bend ISD goes BYOD
Students in the Fort Bend Independent School District may now bring their own mobile device to class to connect to the school’s WiFi and be part of the curriculum. Fort Bend ISD’s policy allows students to use electronic devices to access the WiFi network in the classroom. Before this year, the district forbade cellphone use [...]
Hammond pushes back on Pauken
After I read Patti Hart’s column about Tom Pauken and his anti-standardized testing quest, I noted the absence of a mention of uber-testing advocate Bill Hammond. Hammond has no trouble talking about Pauken, however. Tom Pauken, former chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, said in The Texas Tribune that he wants to change the state’s [...]
Pauken on testing
Patricia Kilday Hart has a conversation with Texas Workforce Commission Chair Tom Pauken about testing and accountability in public schools. As a Texas Workforce Commissioner, Pauken has spent a lot of time studying whether our public school system prepares an educated workforce. His conclusion? The focus on college-prep and testing has, well, “left behind” kids [...]
Focusing on reading
This sounds promising. When HISD Superintendent Terry Grier took charge three years ago, he quickly latched onto a troubling statistic: roughly 70,000 of the district’s students were not reading at grade level. Students who should have learned reading basics by third grade continue to enter middle and high school stumbling over words and struggling with [...]
Some children left behind
Oops. Nearly half the public schools across Texas failed to meet tougher federal academic standards this year, according to preliminary data released Wednesday. The failures spiked sharply from last year, when a quarter of the state’s schools missed the mark. Nearly all the districts in the Houston area earned failing grades under the federal No [...]
TAB takes a hostage
Can’t say I’m surprised by this tactic. Leaders in the business community said Wednesday that they would not stand for increased funding for education if it came with any rollback of accountability standards in Texas public schools. “If we are going to remain competitive in the world’s market, we are going to have to have [...]
STAAR pushback
The House Public Ed committee gets an earful. Members of the House Public Education Committee on Tuesday questioned why the first batch of students who took the end-of-course exams scored so poorly. For example, 55 percent of ninth-graders met the minimum passing standard on the English writing test, and only 3 percent hit the college [...]
Not a great start for the STAAR tests
Whatever we think about standardized tests, we’ll need to do better than this. Thousands of Houston-area high school students failed the state’s new standardized exams and must retake them – or risk not graduating. Preliminary test results released by several local districts Thursday reveal that ninth-graders struggled the most on the writing exam, indicating they [...]
Are the end of course standards too low?
Beginning this year, high school students must pass new end of course exams in a variety of subjects in order to be able to graduate. These tests begin in the ninth grade and continue through the 12th. The standards will be relaxed for the first couple of years while everyone gets used to them. Some [...]
Another story about parents and education cuts
I really want to believe that there’s an uprising in the works and that the Lege could be a very different place for the better next year, but I’m reserving judgment on that for now. Deep cuts in school funding approved by the Texas Legislature last summer could energize angry parents in a way similar [...]
Are you smarter than a Texas high school student?
Well, why don’t you take this sample STAAR test and find out? It’s very much non-trivial. I got 11 out of 15 correct – I punted on the two physics questions and on the first World History question, though in retrospect I might have gotten it right if I’d thought about it, and I guessed [...]
The “Moneyball” approach to public education
Via Lisa Falkenberg on Facebook, SBOE member Thomas Ratliff uses the philosophy from Moneyball to analyze the accountability system for Texas public schools. The book says, “One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.” In Texas public schools, you [...]
Make sure you measure everything
A lot of groups are measuring a lot of things related to the state’s cuts to public education funding, but there’s one big thing not mentioned in this story that needs to be accurately tracked as well. In March, the Texas Education Agency will release the official numbers on school district employment for the 2011-12 [...]
Teacher evaluations
HISD is gearing up to implement a new teacher evaluation system, but not without a fight first. The Houston Federation of Teachers has launched what is expected to be a protracted battle to void the new evaluation. It starts with a hearing Wednesday before an attorney, who will hear evidence from the union and the [...]
HISD approves tougher teacher evaluation plan
I have some concerns about this. Teachers in the Houston Independent School District next year will face tougher job evaluations that grade them on their students’ test scores under a nationally watched plan that trustees approved Thursday. The 7-2 vote did not shift from last month when the board gave initial approval to the evaluation [...]
Lege loosens graduation requirements
A sign of the times. The Texas House tentatively approved legislation Wednesday to make it easier for high school students to pass end-of-course exams, a move critics called “a substantial retreat” from school accountability. “This bill creates a clear, understandable path to graduation,” House Public Education Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said of his bill, [...]
Should we do away with school police forces?
Grits makes the case. If public school budgets will be radically cut in Texas, a prospect which for the moment appears all but inevitable, which employees should be eliminated first? Judging from the ongoing debate, maybe campus cops. Jason Embry at the Austin Statesman describes some of the debates surrounding school budgets thusly: One of the [...]
Hochberg’s plan for less testing
A new bill filed by State Rep. Scott Hochberg that would exempt students who easily passed standardized tests one year from taking them the next, makes all kinds of sense. The bill, co-authored by Hochberg and freshman Rep. Dan Huberty, R-Humble, would exempt fourth graders from taking the state’s standardized tests if they passed their [...]