TALKING POINTS
Texas practices 'Gotcha Education'
BY DR. JIM LARGENT
Let me ask you a couple of

DR. JIM LARGENT

questions. If you go to college and over the course of a year you make nine As and one D, are you an "A" student or a "D" student? Well, according to the Texas Education Agency and the No Child Left Behind Act, you are a "D" student. You see, when we are graded as a school and given an accountability rating, we are rated on our lowest score on any single measure and in any single subgroup. The fact that we score high on 95 percent of the measures means nothing. The only thing that matters is our lowest score.

If we used this methodology at the local level, assigning grades for the six weeks would be easy for our teachers. No more averaging grades or weighting tests and daily grades. No, we would simply look for the lowest grade a student made during that grading period and that would be the score on their report card, and we wouldn't give different grades for every subject. If a student makes an "A" in six classes, but makes an "F" in one, the only grade on that student's report card should be an "F." Does that sound fair? Is that a true indication of how well the student is performing at school? Of course not. It is ludicrous. Yet, that is how schools are rated under our current system.

Imagine you are driving down the road going 45 mph in a 45 mph zone and a policeman uses a radar gun to record your speed. Two months later, you get a ticket in the mail because they changed the speed limit to 35 on that stretch of road a month after you passed the policeman. How would you react to that ticket? Well, recently I got a letter from TEA saying that we had to form another committee and come up with an intervention plan because one group of our students would have failed a portion of the TAKS test if we had used the measures that will be used in 2008. So, let me get this straight. This group of students passed the test in 2007, but if it had been 2008, and if it were a different group of students, and if they took the same test, they would have failed using the 2008 standards. And we are mandated to form a committee and write a plan for this? Do you see a pattern here?

Last week, we were notified that we are going to have to write an improvement plan because we had 17 students absent out of 1,211 who took the math TAKS test. This number of absences (during flu season) is unacceptable to TEA. What our plan for improvement should include?

Unfortunately, these are just a few of the many examples of why we are now in a period of what I call, "Gotcha Education." It is no longer about educating students in the best way our local professionals know how. It is no longer about looking for positives in our students. It is no longer about helping students who have no desire to go to college, but who desperately want to be productive and successful in whatever career they choose. We no longer use common sense. We even have to give a test to students who cannot speak, communicate, feed themselves, or speak the English language. We have lost our common sense?

The education community is desperately asking, "When will it stop?" When will we have leaders who understand and recognize that we are doing great work in our local schools and will let us do our jobs? When will we be allowed to use the word "independent" that is in so many of our school's names? Will they understand that we don't have the staff, resources, or time to have a committee and write plans to submit to Austin or Washington for every tiny piece of data they find that doesn't meet some computer generated formula? Will they ever celebrate all the good things going on in our schools, or just continue with the same old gotcha education policies?

It is time for the real leaders to stand up for public education and create legislation that recognizes that an entire school should not be given a failing label based on the lowest score on one of over 60 measures we are required to meet that may only represent a fraction of the students we teach. Education should be about local professionals working with, and teaching their students to be the most productive, prepared, conscientious, ambitious, and successful persons they can be. This cannot be measured by a single test.

I am not just a school superintendent who is crying over spilled milk because his district does not perform well on these tests. Rusk ISD currently has three of our five campuses rated as Recognized and our other two were very nearly rated the same.

We would have had a fourth campus Recognized, but we scored too high in one area on the previous year's test- but as they say, "that is a whole other story.