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worth repeating |
Angela Valenzuela of the University of Texas led the first Goizueta Seminar in the College of Education earlier this month, focusing on the results of the educational accountability movement in Texas. Some excerpts: “What I want to do is spend a little bit of time and in a nutshell tell you about the Texas accountability system. The more I learn about Georgia, the Georgia educational system and even Georgia politics, there are some similarities. . . . In a nutshell the Texas accountability system is mandated state tests, a hyper-standardized system that has driven down the quality and the quantity of education. It crowds out other forms of learning and . . . destroys real teaching while it creates the need for teaching to the test. . . . In the Laredo Independent School District they reported that they administered 71 standardized tests in a year, and 41 of those were mandated. Teachers reported that 60 percent of their time was devoted to the tests. . . . “So we have the impression that there is no improvement, and what we have documented is that the system rewards principals for losing -children. That is, principals are rewarded for getting their test scores up, even if they do it by pushing out those who are liabilities. . . . While test scores in Houston were rising, HISD [Houston Independent School District] was losing half its students. . . . Texas children do not do well on national tests . . . and there’s also recent evidence that the graduation rate is lower now that it was in 1980. This is a historic problem, but it is also reversing a trend.” |
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—Beth
Roberts |
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