My kids are in kindergarten and prekindergarten which are not testing grades. However, my three and five year old already know the word STAAR and their experiences at school will be dramatically impacted by the testing that takes place on their campus this week.
Ultimately, if your family has the wrong combination of members or doesn’t conform to certain gender roles, you are excluded at these GOMM events. This exclusion is hard to reconcile in a public school setting, particularly one such as ours where our district and campus have committed to be free from discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, religion and other manner of diversity.
This example of exclusion and bias is not what we want for our kids.
To the rest of the trustees, you need to ask yourself... 1) Why HISD is relying more and more on Alternative Certifications to staff its classrooms? 2) Is this staffing model is equitable to all kids? 3) And is the item in front of you which allows the district to grow TFA teacher by as much as 150% next year taking the district in the right direction?
Could you imagine honoring the memory of someone who went on record to say that – NAACP– stands for The National Association for the Agitation of Colored People, or that Rosa Parks was just a paid protester, or that African Americans who protested at lunch counters around Harris County in the 1950s were simply trying to create an issue?
What if I told you that this person once served on THIS very school board and fought relentlessly for decades AGAINST desegregation in HISD? This person was James M. Delmar– namesake of the new $35 million athletic complex directly behind Houston ISD headquarters.
The children of Houston need a school district less focused on the STAAR. Less focused on what the TEA wants to hear and more focused on what our kids actually need. For the first time in many years, we have a progressive Board of Trustees who trust teachers to do their jobs, who want to invest in the arts and other evidence-based programs to educate the whole child and rely less on standardized testing as the primary measure of success. However, it seems that many of those values walked out the door last Saturday when the TEA consultant walked in.
Promotion standards, or the requirements students must meet in order to move on to the next grade level, have recently been a significant topic of discussion in the Houston Independent School District. Given that the Board of Education and the district’s senior administration are seeking to overhaul these promotion standards in 2017 and in recognition of the fact that the current standards were put in place prior any sitting trustee’s tenure on the board, HISD Parent Advocates provides this brief to summarize the policy’s origin, history, and effectiveness as well as propose best practices and guiding principles that parents believe trustees should include in the design of the district’s new standards.
With respect to over testing our children, the tide is turning in HISD.
In the state’s largest school district and arguably one of the birthplaces of corporate education reform, these years of parents asking questions, expecting more and opting out when they’d had enough is working. Trustees—new and old—and now their new superintendent see that change can no longer wait.
And it looks like that change may get one step closer this week.
The board should take a number of proactive steps to protect students, parents and teachers:
1) Table approving any school calendars until administration has solved these conflicts to the satisfaction of the board.
2) Follow last year’s precedent and suspend the use of STAAR scores as a promotion standard for non state-required grades: 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th.
3) Bring the summer school schedule into the same official calendaring process as the regular school year so that conflicts like this have greater transparency and receive the same public input.
4) Guarantee that all teachers necessary to a student’s grade placement and accelerated instruction planning are available and compensated for participating in GPC meetings.
If student success and school accountability are important to this board, then students, teachers and parents need to know that trustees are putting the policies and tools in place not to just give assessments but to also appropriately respond to their results.
I’ve written about this conflict before with regard to both negotiating a separation with Dr. Terry Grier, the former superintendent, and when the board was negotiating with Mr. Carranza to become the new superintendent. I warned about the inherent conflict in those dealings. Now when I attend board meetings and workshops, I can see that conflict manifest itself right in front of me. I wonder what they were talking about this morning.
The board of trustees represent us and their lawyers represent them. If we are to believe they are working in our best interests, we must demand that they receive independent advice.
So I’m here to ask you, our trustees, to do the right thing. The problem is complex and solutions aren’t easy or cheap. But you could start by making a statement as a body about how this situation is wrong and begin investigating what district policies constructed to such a low identification rate. I’m asking you to take affirmative action to show families that their children and their needs are important. The administration certainly hasn’t given us any indication they do.
