Fighting the testing mania in Texas

IN WHAT is being called an "open rebellion" against standardized testing in public schools, parents, teachers and even administrators are speaking out as the mania for standardized testing gets ratcheted up in Texas amid devastating budget cuts.

Forty-six school boards across the state have signed onto a resolution declaring that high-stakes standardized testing is "strangling our public schools." And more districts in Texas' big metropolitan areas are considering adopting the resolution.

This is the latest development in the debate about public education in Texas as our schools are thrown into crisis, caught in a vice between $5.4 billion in budget cuts and new "accountability" standards passed by the legislature.

Last year, the conservative-dominated legislature took an "all cuts" approach to closing a $27 billion deficit, gutting funding for everything from women's health to firefighting equipment. Texas' public schools, which are adding 85,000 new students every year, saw unprecedented cuts in a state already ranked 44th in education spending.

The slashing of school funding was "a true cut in an entitlement," state Sen. Dan Patrick said last year, speaking about Texas' longstanding practice of providing enough money for a basic education for all students. "There are no guarantees, and for a legislature to say we can guarantee this forever is not being straightforward to the people."

A year later, the disastrous effects of this "new normal" for education are becoming visible to more and more people.

A report from the Texas Tribune documents that state public schools have 25,000 fewer employees than this time last year--11,000 of them laid-off teachers.

Class sizes have ballooned as a result. While Texas law nominally caps elementary school classes at 22 students, a new provision from the agency overseeing education allows for a waiver for districts claiming financial hardship. Larger classes have been authorized at over 1,600 campuses since last fall--over a third of the elementary schools in the state.

Because of Texas' crazy-quilt system of school funding, some districts have had to impose more painful cuts than others.

For example, the school district in Hutto, a small central Texas community, is trying to figure out how to cut over $1 million from its budget after slashing $4.5 million last year. The district has already closed one elementary school, moved fifth grade to middle school, and laid off 69 employees. Now it is considering proposals to charge students $100 to ride the bus to school, and to participate in sports and other extracurricular activities.

Among Texas' biggest metropolitan areas, Dallas public schools have taken the worst beating, having already seen $250 million slashed from the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) budget before the state cut education funding last year.

At a highly contentious meeting last January, the DISD board of trustees voted to close nine elementary campuses and two middle schools with the goal of saving $11.5 million--and to extend teachers' work day by 45 minutes without extra pay.

Teacher morale is plummeting in the Dallas-Forth Worth metroplex. DISD has been without a superintendent since last June, and has seen one top-level administrator after another resign over the last few months.

Against this dreary backdrop, DISD board president Lew Blackburn recently affirmed his enthusiasm for bringing in more charter schools, including reopening one of the recently shuttered elementary schools as a charter.

"Charters operate more as a business," Blackburn told the Dallas Morning News. "[Charter operator] Texans CAN! serves primarily high-risk students, drop-outs. Dallas does not have enough opportunities to handle that market, if you will...Dallas ISD needs to realize what our market is, what our market is asking for, and we need to supply that other."

ALL OF this has been playing out as the state is getting ready to debut a new battery of state-mandated standardized tests known as the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR.

The STAAR test is the result of legislation going back five years that mandates 12 extremely rigorous "end of course" exams for high school students. School officials say they will now spend at least 45 days--in some cases, many more--out of a 180-day school year preparing for and administering STAAR.

Testing in Texas will continue to be used as a way to "filter" students, according to Patricia Lopez, a research associate for the Texas Center for Education Policy. "It disproportionately impacts poor and minority students, and it really impacts students that are English-language learners, and that's our fastest-growing demographic in Texas and in many states across the nation," Lopez told the San Antonio Express-News.

The STAAR test and related services are being provided by Pearson, a giant conglomerate in the educational testing and publishing world--which, adding insult to budget-cutting injury, was awarded a $500 million contract from the state.

Compounding the anxiety over STAAR is the fact that the Texas Education Agency, the state agency overseeing standardized testing, saw its budget cut by a third last year--and has provided little information to teachers and schools about the new test.

This train wreck in the making was the straw that broke the camel's back, prompting a backlash from administrators and even some prominent Republicans who have been the biggest proponents of "school accountability."

The floodgates were opened in late January when Robert Scott, the highest-ranking education official in Texas and an appointee of right-wing Gov. Rick Perry, told a meeting of school administrators that testing in Texas has become a "perversion of its original intent"--and received a standing ovation for his remarks.

More recently, Scott postponed for a year the most controversial aspect of STAAR: the state-mandated requirement that the test results count towards 15 percent of high school students' final grades, which would affect everything from class rank to access to Texas' public universities. (Scott had previously claimed to be bound by state law and unable to waive the requirement.)

The only party that has remained steadfast in its enthusiasm for STAAR has been the Texas Association for Business (TAB), which took out a full-page ad in an Austin newspaper criticizing school administrators who raised concerns about it. TAB President Bill Hammond has been extremely vocal on the issue, calling critics of STAAR "cheerleaders of mediocrity."

IN ADDITION to the rebellion of the administrators, there have also been flashes of a revolt from below, as parents, teachers and students often find themselves at odds with some of the school officials who are now criticizing STAAR.

In Austin at the end of last year, community organizations joined with the Occupy movement and Education Austin, the local teachers' union, in a hard-fought campaign to keep a charter school out of an elementary and a high school in East Austin, an underserved and largely Black and Latino part of town.

Despite overwhelming community opposition, the Austin Independent School District (AISD) board approved a deal with IDEA Public Schools. IDEA is a charter operator out of South Texas which has come under criticism for exaggerating its record of success, employing rote instruction methods, and not providing adequate resources for special ed and English-language learning students.

AISD's deal with IDEA--the result of the notorious steamroller tactics of superintendent Meria Carstaphen--was the backdrop to her recent announcement that the district is receiving a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation--and possibly millions more--to pursue collaboration with area charters, opening the door to the further privatization of Austin's schools.

But then a funny thing happened: Due in large part to continued community organizing, the elementary school being taken over by IDEA has registered only one-third the number of students it needs to take in this fall under its contract with the district. That's despite that fact that students in the school's attendance zone had to choose to opt out of the charter, or they would be automatically enrolled.

Since the battle of IDEA, Occupy Austin has taken on the fight to defend public education as one of its signature issues and continued to work with other groups, organizing a rally against standardized testing, picketing an appearance by Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino, and giving the "mic check" treatment to Education Secretary Arne Duncan at a recent town hall meeting.

On March 24, Austin will host the Save Texas Schools rally at the state Capitol, the sequel to a mega-protest last year that drew 13,000 people. The rally is calling for a restoration and expansion of school funding and a rethinking of standardized testing.

The rally has an electoral focus, calling on Texans to elect pro-education candidates this fall. But even a politician with the best of intentions will go into next year's legislative session facing a deficit which some predict could be as much as $15 billion.

Texas' "structural deficit" is the result of Perry's "open for business" policies, in which revenue comes from a feeble patchwork of largely regressive taxes. So far no political figure has advanced a serious proposal to address this, other than more regressive taxes.

To actually fund our schools and other badly needed social services, we need to tax the rich--who pay a much smaller proportion of their wealth in taxes than working people--and the corporate powerhouses based in Texas. Houston is second only to New York City in the number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered here.

There's no doubt that education politics will continue to roil in Texas in the coming months and years. We need a grassroots movement of students, teachers, parents and community members--infused with the spirit of protest that the Occupy movement has brought into the mix--to push back against those imposing the "new normal" of budget cuts, school closures, privatization, inequality and out-of-control testing.