Girls Gone Wild!!

Girls Gone Wild!! 

Secretary Spellings and Commissioner Neeley, former Texas teen queens turned back slapping “Good Ole Girls,” have stuck it to Texas kids again.  The ladies are incapable of doing the right thing.  Texas children will pay the price.

What’s The Problem?

A September 30, 2005 Washington Post article titled:  No Child Rules to be Eased For A Year sets the stage for Texas children to languish in poor performing schools for yet another year.

The lead paragraph said:

“Under pressure from hurricane-stressed states, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced yesterday that the agency will for one year relax academic accountability standards under the administration’s signature education initiative, allowing schools affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita to recoup without facing penalties for poor annual assessment.”

Why Is This Bad?

Texas Educrats are renowned for gaming our children’s future for their own benefit.  Texas has neither earned, nor deserves, forbearance in the reporting requirements of No Child Left Behind.  Our Educrats have proven perfectly capable of coming up with their own excuses.  They don’t need help from the feds.

Need Examples?

Texas has a long ignoble history of cheating on tests, lying about tests, gaming our children’s future, ignoring the needs of children and paying fines to avoid responsibility.  If anything, Texas public schools need a greater level of accountability and scrutiny.

The following examples provide ample reason to hold Texas public schools fully accountable, hurricane or no hurricane:

Teaching To TAKS

A September 19, 2005 Dallas Morning News Article by Josh Benton entitled TAKS Push Not So Equal, describes how Texas teachers game the TAKS to the detriment of Texas children.

It works like this.

Texas Educrats administer a sample TAKS test to their charges early in the year.  Based upon these results, our children are classified into three groups; passers at the top, remedial kids at the bottom and bubble kids in between.  Bubble kids are the ones whose score is just below the states passing standards.

According to the article, which was based in part upon a graduate research paper by Jennifer Booher-Jennings of Columbia University, our “Educators” pour everything they can into the bubble kids.  They ignore the children that can already pass the test and those that they’ve declared remedial.

Ms. Booher-Jennings came to these conclusions after observing Texas “Educators” for months.

If your child can pass the TAKS, additional instruction is non-existent to negligible.  If a Texas teacher decides your child is remedial, his education is over.

Quoting directly from Mr. Benton’s article:

As one teacher said of the remedial kids:  “It’s really a lost cause.  They must have fallen through the cracks somehow.” 

These are third-graders we’re talking about.

These kids are getting written off as hopeless cases before they turn 9.

Secretary Spellings and Commissioner Neeley are abandoning these children.  If NCLB were permitted to work, many of these 9-year-old children would be offered tutoring or permitted to flee schools that have given up on them.

Consider this.

Only the worst public schools in Texas will benefit from this year of unaccountability.  If the school was academically acceptable last year, the NCLB penalties are negligible the first year the school fails to make the cut.  If the school failed last year, the family of the child, not the commissioner or the secretary, should be the one to decide whether their child will stay with the school or move to another.

The actions of the commissioner and the secretary have usurped parental authority and will result in a less literate Texas.

Cheating On The TAKS

Beyond pervasive “Teaching to the Test”, Texas public schools have other significant integrity issues.  We’ve written about cheating in Texas public schools previously,  Click Here.

Ignoring problems is the Texas public school way.

Another Josh Benton Dallas Morning News article dated December 30, 2004 entitled:  Cheating Allegations At Wesley Go Back To 2003 recites the following:

“The fact there might be cheating at Wesley Elementary is not news to Houston officials.

In June 2003, former Wesley teacher Donna Garner stood before a meeting of the Houston school board and directly accused officials of cheating at Wesley.  “I was instructed on how to cheat and that the expectation was that I would cheat,” she said, according to a copy of her speech. 

District officials pledged an investigation.  But it has taken a year and a half just to hire an outside law firm to do the investigating.

The paragraph concludes with this uncanny insight.

The lengthy delays could make it harder to catch cheaters.”

You think?

Maybe they’ve figured it out.  It’s 2005 now, surely Houston ISD has cleaned house.

Not a chance.

An August 18, 2005 Houston Chronicle article is titled Challenges at HISD.

The district sent two assistant principals on the “reform team” to turn around Kashmere High School.  Both team members lost their jobs in the TAKS cheating scandal.  After their conduct became public, Houston ISD quickly removed them from the team.

The lack of concern by the people to whom we’ve entrusted our children shows that many Texas Educrats have no real stake in the education of our children.  Instead of worrying about education, they’re single-mindedly focused on preserving their jobs.

Nothing will change until Texas families can walk away from bad schools.

TEA Ignores Cheating

Houston’s not the only problem.  We should have a lot more information about cheating at other Texas public schools.  However, Commissioner Neeley moves like molasses when she prefers not to know.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Josh Benton and his colleagues at the Dallas Morning News, Texas families have an understanding of the depths to which our feckless Educrats will sink to preserve their positions.  A Dallas Morning News analysis of the TEA’s TAKS records showed that 400 schools had unusually large year over year changes in test results.  These types of changes may indicate cheating.

Now that Mr. Benton and his colleagues have exposed the mendacity of some Texas public schools, you’d think Commissioner Neeley’s TEA would start cleaning house.

Not a chance.

The TEA commissioned a report by University of North Carolina Professor Gregory J. Cizek.  The completed report was dated July 27, 2005.  Within that report, Dr. Cizek noted that of the 1697 test security violation reports reviewed for the 2003 – 2004 academic year, about 6 percent warrant referral to the State Board of Educator Certification.

As of April 5, 2005 almost half of them are pending.  This is nearly a year after the reporting cycle.  The Texas Education Agency has given the offending Educrats a year to cover their tracks and get their stories straight.

Thank you Commissioner Neeley.

To view Dr. Cizek’s report.  Click Here.

Fifty odd cases in unidentified districts potentially denying at least tens of thousands of Texas children a quality education are still open.  If the cases are in big districts like Dallas, Houston, San Antonio or Austin, Texas Educrats lack of interest in accurate testing could be condemning not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of children to a bleak future.

The miscreant Educrats represented in these fifty cases are still drawing a paycheck, denying our children the education they deserve, and, given the underwhelming interest of the TEA, likely to be doing so until they start drawing their state pension.

All of this happened well before Hurricane Katrina struck.

Lackadaisical, complacent, content, smug, and self-satisfied are adjectives that accurately describe Neeley’s TEA.

Texas families don’t need Neeley or her agency.  We need the power to act in the best interests of our children.  That means 100% fully funded education vouchers.  With school choice, inept Texas Educrats will lose their leverage over our children.

Previous Dereliction Of Duty

If everything were great in Texas schools and the hurricane was the first time educational standards were relaxed, Texans would have a different attitude.  However, this is not the first time.  Not once, but twice previously, Neeley negotiated fines with Spellings, the purpose of which was to compel Texas children to stay in non-performing schools, thereby saving the jobs of incompetent Educrats.  Neeley has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from Texas families to keep her cronies employed.  Secretary Spellings permitted this travesty.  While our two Texas “Good Ole Girls” congratulated themselves on saving Educrat jobs, our children were left twisting in the wind.

For an expanded discussion, Click Here.

Parents On The Ground

Neither Secretary Spellings nor Commissioner Neeley is compelled to face the consequences of their actions.  That’s left to long suffering Texas families.  Distance and the trappings of their offices permit them to adopt an abstract, detached attitude towards the children they purportedly serve.

Texas families can no longer afford their hubris.

The following is the text of an e-mail sent to me by a lady whose grandchild was displaced by the hurricanes.  This child, and the tens of thousands of children just like him, is the reason educational standards must not be abandoned.

The grandmother’s e-mail was dated October 7, 2005.  Information permitting identification of the child or the family is withheld to prevent retaliation by Texas public schools.

“I need to know if there is a school voucher program in Texas.  My grandson was doing very poorly in the public school.  Because of Hurricane Rita he is staying with me because of the extensive damage to their home in (Texas city withheld).  (School withheld) Christian School in (Texas city withheld) have let him come to their school free for thirty days.  He is excelling in that school and we really hate to have to take him out and send him back to the public school but we have a very limited income and the tuition is too expensive for us.  Please tell me there is a way we can get help to keep him in the Christian school.  I would appreciate any information you can give me.  Thanks (name withheld)”

This is a real person, with a real child that has a real need.  The last thing this lady is worried about is saving an Educrats job.  If NCLB were enforced, the public school that failed him may have been compelled to provide tutoring or compelled to permit him to flee to another school.

Better yet, with fully funded school choice, the child could have attended the Christian school and become a productive Texan.  One educated child is worth the job of every feckless Educrat in Texas.

Abandoning standards will doom countless other Texas children to educational purgatory.  This lady’s grandchild is an abstract concept to Secretary Spellings and Commissioner Neeley.  To them, he’s just another child that fell between the cracks of our monstrous, monolithic, one size fits all abomination that we call Texas public schools.

I believe both the commissioner and the secretary consider this little boy another acceptable loss.  If it weren’t true, neither the commissioner nor the secretary would provide yet another reason for Texas public schools to escape accountability for their acts.

Getting Serious About Education

Former British Prime Minister William Gladstone said:

“Justice delayed is justice denied.”

Suspending the provisions of No Child Left Behind permitting a Texas child to flee a failed school denies justice to every Texan looking to our youth to lead.

The statutory disconnect between schools and the people they serve facilitated 100% of the aforementioned problems.  Everything could have been resolved to benefit the child if his or her Texas family were provided the “Power of the Purse.”  Until Texas families are permitted to select the public, private or parochial school that best serves their needs, Texas is not serious about educating her children.  Without the support of parents empowered to act, the Texas Education Agency and the Department of Education will continue to be comedic at best, destructive at worst.

To learn how Fully Funded Texas Education Vouchers will assure that every Texas child receives the best education possible:  Click Here

Work With Us!

Texas children need your support.  If parents are not permitted to place their children where they’re allowed to learn, Texas will never experience the benefits of a highly educated citizenry.

Contact the Governor, your state senator, state representative and your State Board of Education Representative today.  Urge them to support Texas families desperate to see their children educated.  Urge them to support 100% Fully Funded School Choice in Texas.

Be sure to register for Texas Journal™ Updates to stay abreast of the struggle for Texas children.  The link is below.

 

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