Public education in Texas has the dunce cap on the wrong guy.
Public education in Texas has the dunce cap on the wrong guy.
School districts want the courts to block their own report cards because they know what those cards are going to say.
Library of Congress
Is it unfair to take the teachers’ unions in particular to task for being dull-headed and ham-fisted in their opposition to school reform, if the people they work for also are ham-fisted and dull-headed? Asked another way, if the entire public education establishment is a culture of muttonheads, should we have more empathy for the extreme mutton-headedness of teachers’ unions?
Troubling and difficult questions, these. They occur because this week the public school districts of Texas have engaged in the most mutton-headed political tactic imaginable.
Just as the Texas legislature begins gearing up for its next session and in spite of direct pleas from concerned legislators begging them not to do it, the school districts have gone to court once again to block the state from publicly releasing statewide school district accountability ratings.
The back story is this: the entire school reform movement in Texas, headlined by the state takeover last year of the huge Houston public school system, is driven by a public perception that public education is doing a lousy job. The state’s A-F ratings for school districts, based on student achievement tests and post-graduate success or failure, are the only hard evidence the public can find depicting the kind of job public education is actually doing.
A great many families are convinced school districts are failing -- enough of them that the 2025 legislative session will be mainly about helping them escape. The legislature will weigh enactment of vouchers, education savings accounts and various other mechanisms to allow a family to take back its tax money and run.
Some observers (the traditional journalistic euphemism for me) believe this coming initiative, when coupled with the growing flight in recent years of families taking their children to publicly funded charter schools, is significant enough to represent a mortal threat to public school education as we have known it since the early 20th century.
In Houston, where the state imposed a reform regime by fiat last year, Superintendent Mike Miles has said he is in a race to save public education by teaching it to compete. And competition, after all, is where this will be resolved.
Unless this becomes an un-free absolutist society any time soon, American parents will never agree to leave their kids in a bad school if there is a better one down the street with its doors open. In the long run, all of this will revolve around quality of instruction – how good or bad the schools are. And that’s what those A-F ratings are about. All about.
Ever since COVID, the school districts have been going to court, persuading sympathetic judges to block the state from releasing its accountability ratings. At first, the excuse was COVID. Then the districts said they hadn’t had time to get ready. Now they say the state’s student achievement tests might be too hard.
Weeks ago, concerned legislators began reaching out to the school districts begging them not to do it again this year. They were telling them, given all that’s going on, asking not to get a report card is a very bad look. Like you know in advance you’re going to flunk.
What’s worse than flunking? Not even bringing your report card home.
So they did it anyway. This week a small consortium of districts persuaded a judge to temporarily halt the state from issuing them their grades while they argue for a permanent injunction.
The school districts trade this task around every year. In the past the big districts went to court. This year it’s smaller ones. The way you know they’re working together is that the rest of them are not in court begging the judge to release the ratings.
If this sticks, if the districts succeed in stopping the state from releasing their ratings, it will Exhibit A next year in the legislative battle for vouchers and savings accounts. How do you know public education is doing a lousy job? By the fact that public education is in court to stop you from finding out what kind of job it’s doing.
I’m serious. How can I single out teachers for their stubborn resistance to any and all meaningful reform when this is how the people they work for behave? It’s more like the whole damned thing. Which is exactly what the legislature will be talking about in 2025.
If schools don't get a grade or score or measurement or rating or SOMETHING... how are they going to improve? We wouldn't treat any important activity like this -- say, football.
If nobody comes to the games or reads about them in the paper, and doesn't know or care if coach does or doesn't train his team to put points on the scoreboard and wins into the record book, why pay the coach more than a classroom teacher? On the other, more common and realistic, hand, communities DO watch the kids play and DO follow the sports pages and see not only highlights of Friday Nights but later how many and which athletes get scholarships to what level or league of higher edu-athleticism. Good coaches prosper, less good coaches leave.
What if the losing high schools and districts and coaches sued UIL to keep scores out of the newspapers, banned parents from watching the games, to ensure "fairness" among competing schools by keeping comparison statistics all -- well, not "secret" exactly, but certainly not public? What if? Judges might forbid administrators to bring up football scores at school board meetings. Trustees might be constrained against basing salary or - heaven forbid! -hiring and firing decisions based on a few seasons' scorecards. Seniority counts, for sure. What else? Maybe we could track "diversity" initiatives to see how many girls try out, or even win, first-string slots as kickers or special-team centers. If we couldn't track wins and losses and scholarships and injuries maybe we could rate coaches by anonymously polling the players, like "Rank My Professor", to see which are "cool" and "easy to get along with" ... My imagination fails me, frankly. How WOULD we evaluate the essentials, like successful high school football programs, if we couldn't use the scoreboard?
I have the same two reactions to almost every story in this series. First, how can the taxpayers let it be this bad? Second, OMG, all school districts are probably about this bad.