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Capitol Comment
by Jennifer M. Canaday, ATPE Governmental Relations manager
Standard time
Debate over Common Core invites scrutiny into Texas’ process
The federal government will soon announce recipients of $4 billion in Race to the Top grants, for which Gov. Rick Perry refused to allow Texas to apply. The governor objected to the grant criteria’s preference toward states participating in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, an effort to drive states to adopt rigorous college and career readiness standards. Texas and Alaska are the only states whose governors have refused to commit to the joint endeavor.
Responding to the governor’s decision on Common Core, State Board of Education (SBOE) member and dentist Don McLeroy stated: “It’s not up to the federal government or national groups to set standards for our schools. In Texas, we have elected officials to determine those standards, and if people disagree with their decisions, they can vote against them.”
Education Week’s 2010 Quality Counts report gave Texas high marks in the area of standards, primarily based on our state’s merely having course- and grade-specific standards in place. Time will tell whether the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) are more rigorous than the Common Core standards, but in the meantime, the debate invites us to take a fresh look at the standard-setting process. McLeroy’s statement illuminates its fundamental flaw—our standards are determined by elected officials rather than by educators.
We don’t need no educators
The TEKS revision process in which SBOE members nominate Texas educators to serve on writing teams is little more than smoke and mirrors. Few can forget the disastrous revision of the English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR) TEKS two years ago, when board members such as Cynthia Dunbar, Ken Mercer and David Bradley accused the writing teams of “hijacking” the process. The writing teams sought to place more emphasis on critical thinking skills, which Bradley famously referred to as “gobbledygook.” The board reacted by forcing the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to hire a professional “facilitator” to direct the writing teams. SBOE’s majority faction later complained that even the facilitator’s work product contained too much educator interference, so at the last minute those board members cobbled together their own version of the ELAR TEKS. As Mercer smugly described it, those “mean” educators who “lied” and “cheated ... got a very well-deserved spanking.”
With subsequent revisions of the science and social studies TEKS, the SBOE majority has continued to stifle educator participation. When McLeroy learned last year that social studies revisions were primarily being written by social studies teachers, he insisted the writing team’s early, unfinished drafts be critiqued by an outside organization—six months before the public got to review them. The group chosen for this extraordinary review was the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the conservative think tank founded by infamous private school voucher advocate James Leininger.
SBOE members have also brought in experts to guide the TEKS revisions, which would not necessarily be a bad move except that the board has set the bar for “expert” so embarrassingly low. (McLeroy: “If two [SBOE] members think they’re qualified, they’re qualified.”) Texas curriculum reviews have now become fodder for journalists nationwide. The notion that educators should steer the curriculum and textbook adoption process has been flatly rejected by those holding the reigns of Texas public education.
Voters can take control
If Texas leaders want to continue to claim superiority in the world of curriculum standards, they will eventually have to acknowledge the deficiencies of our standard-setting methods. The irony in the governor’s rejection of both the Common Core initiative and the Race to the Top grant program is that under his direction Texas leaders have employed many of the same tactics for which the Perry administration criticizes Common Core and the Obama administration.
In a December letter to Texas congressmen, Commissioner of Education Robert Scott, who serves at the will of the governor, complained that self-interested vendors were controlling Common Core: “Having the federal government use Washington-based special interest groups and vendors as proxy for the [U.S. Department of Education] in setting national curriculum standards ... represents unprecedented intrusiveness by the federal government into the personal lives of our children and their families.” Interestingly, one Common Core vendor is Washington-based attorney Sue Pimentel—whom TEA hired to “facilitate” the ELAR TEKS revision.
Similarly, announcing his decision to opt out of Race to the Top, Perry said, “We would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups.” The difference between Texas’ process and the Common Core methodology is that we’ve allowed elected bureaucrats and their special interests, not educators, to decide what students should know.
The fact that the real power over Texas standards rests with elected officials highlights the importance of two offices on the 2010 ballot. One is that of governor, who handpicks the education commissioner, appoints members of the State Board for Educator Certification, selects Teacher Retirement System trustees and decides who chairs SBOE. The other is SBOE, with its power over curriculum, textbooks and the Permanent School Fund. Eight SBOE seats will be filled this year. The only way educators can hope to take control of standard-setting processes is to make a statement in these important elections. You heard it straight from the dentist’s mouth: If you disagree with them, you can vote against them.
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