I was reading through my twitter feed today and someone was screaming “Reform Education” . And every time we have a new president, we want to reform education.
I’m a teacher and every teacher will tell you that every 5 or so years, someone comes up with a new “reform”. In fact, during the 16 years I’ve been teaching we gone to block schedule, back to regular schedule, instituted principals of learning, learning walk, and many other programs. Here’s the problem. We never leave things alone long enough to find out if the change works!
You are not going to change education in 5 years. First you have to get the teachers trained, so figure in at least two years for the changes to actually take place and take hold in the class room. Next you have to have enough time for the changes to take hold and change the kids. Figure another two years. You are not going to see gains in test scores, etc until year 5, and you should not even see dramatic changes.
When I first came to Texas, it was a mess. Some school districts did a really good job of educating their kids and put a lot of money into it. Some didn’t. The governor put together a committee which was chaired by Ross Perot. They came up with a plan that was designed to take over 20 years to change education in Texas. Guess what, it is still in place and things are only getting better.
I’m not going to say that we are the best in the country but we are up there. But the best thing, is no matter what school system you are at in Texas, you are going to get the same basic education. If not, TEA is soon coming to shut you down — and they have. They shut down Wilmer Hutchings not long ago. We’ve even shut down a high school in our district because they weren’t complying.
We started out by putting in place standards for teachers. A lot of teachers across the state lost their jobs because they couldn’t do basic high schools skills like reading, writing and math. And even through I had a BS in Computer Science, I still had to pass a test proving I had those basic skills. They also instituted a certification process that was rigorous that proved you had basic knowledge in your subject area. I was first certified in Math and Computer Science and had to pass tests in pedagogy, mathematics and computer science. I later got certified in Technology Applications and had to take a course in that. I could now do it by testing. We have people who don’t pass those tests and have to leave the teaching profession.
We next started on the students, we first had the TASS, then the TAAS, and now have the TAKS. They have gotten harder in each permutation. Our next phase is the End of Course test. We’ve gotten to the point that we don’t socially promote 5th or 8th grade and we haven’t graduated due to the other tests from almost the beginning.
We also instituted No Pass, No Play and that goes across the board, not just athletics, but academic competition and activities. I’ve had kids not able to take part in UIL Computer Science because they failed another class. This is a good thing. I have student who work in my class only enough to keep their soccer or football eligibility.
The whole point of this, is that we’ve got a set of systemic changes in place in order to reform education. It isn’t perfect it a huge monolithic system to move and we’ve made a major start. And it’s been going on for over 20 years! The only way you are going to reform education is to sit down, bite the bullet and realize you have to change the whole system, slowly from top to bottom like we did.
And there has been a lot of resistance, those fellows in BFE, Texas don’t hold with educating girls and only care about winning football on Friday night. They resisted the change and as result lost funding, etc. and got their schools shut down — remember Wilmer Hutchings.
We’ve even been going through reform with Special Ed and with the non-English speaking students. By the way, that’s the toughest group we have to deal with. The powers-that-be seem to assume those babies went to school in their home country, but when we get them we have to teach them how to learn first, and that’s really hard with an 17 year old kiddo.
But the again, is that you just can’t fix part of the system and you can’t just expect it to happen over night. It’s going to take several decades before you can get the system changed. Look at us.