Feds Grant Education Waiver to Texas

Feds Grant Education Waiver to Texas

Posted: 8:12 p.m. Monday, Sept. 30, 2013
EmailFacebookTwitterShareThis
BY KATE ALEXANDER - AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Texas got a reprieve on Monday from federal education rules that would have labeled as failing almost every school district in the state.
The U.S. Department of Education granted Texas a long-awaited waiver from certain provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, the signature domestic policy of President George W. Bush. There is broad agreement that the 2001 law needs an overhaul but Congress has failed to act.

Related Photo
+Feds grant education waiver to Texas photo LAURA SKELDING
Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams
Texas joins 41 other states and Washington, D.C. that have been relieved from federal standards that this year require more than 90 percent of students in each school and district to pass the state’s standardized tests in reading and math.

Education Commissioner Michael Williams estimated that 95 percent of Texas school districts would not have cleared that bar. Missing the standards for consecutive years can lead to sanctions such as replacing a school’s teachers and principal.

“The underlying message throughout our negotiations with the federal government has been Texans know what’s best for Texas schools,” Williams said. “I believe our school districts will appreciate the additional flexibility this waiver provides while also adhering to our strong principles on effective public education.”

The waiver, however, comes with a potentially problematic condition: Texas must create an evaluation system for teachers and principals that is tied to standardized test scores.

In order to keep the waiver for the 2014-15 school year, the state will have to launch a 40-district pilot program to test the new teacher and principal evaluation system. The Education Department expects the program to be used statewide by the following year, and Williams committed that the system will be fully implemented at that point.

But that poses a problem for Williams.

“I still do not have the authority under state law to require anyone to either participate in the pilot or when we want to roll this out statewide,” Williams said, who said it is too early to say if he would seek that authority when the Legislature returns in 2015.

Without that authority, Williams said the state will have to “invite, encourage, cajole the other 1,200 some-odd school districts statewide to use that system or one just as rigorous.”

In the recent legislative session, lawmakers focused on reducing the state’s emphasis on high-stakes tests and chose not to enact a bill that would have included student test scores as part of the teacher’s evaluation.

The teacher evaluation policies have been hugely controversial in states that implemented them to abide by the terms of the federal waiver. Teacher groups say test scores are a limited measure of a teacher’s work, and research has called into the question the validity of teacher assessments based on student test scores.

“The pursuit of this conditional waiver is an unfortunate about-face by Texas in agreeing to many of the same requirements that were in the federal Race to the Top grant program, in which Texas declined to participate,” said Holly Eaton of the Texas Classroom Teachers Association.

Texas initially refused to cede to the conditions established by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, but after months of negotiations eventually agreed to the terms. The waiver was granted on Monday just as the federal government readied for a partial shutdown.

Superintendents welcomed the newfound flexibility they will get to spend federal education dollars to help students improve test performance, said Casey McCreary of the Texas Association of School Administrators. The law had required school districts to spend 20 percent of their money with specific federally approved tutoring companies.

One of the flaws of No Child Left Behind, critics say, has been that it fails to distinguish between schools that are serving almost all of their students well from those that are serving none of their students. So the reprieve allows for the state and to focus attention on the bottom 15 percent of schools.

Despite the waiver, Williams said Texas is not backing away from the law’s objective to improvement academic achievement of minority students.

The law’s basic tenets, he said, “we do as a state and we will continue to do as a state.”





Education
State
An enacted policy that has been passed to help with a problem/issue that individuals/families face

This is important because it is dealing with education at a state wide level. This has to do with how our students are teaching in the classroom when it comes to evaluations and showing the progress of students. It is also focusing on the No Child Left Behind Act.

I think that this waiver is a good thing for Texas schools. It is apparent that there need to be adjustments to the No Child Left Behind Act, and until those provisions are made this waiver is the way to go at this point. Texas, along with 41 other states obviously cannot meet the standards that are set under this act, so that clearly shows that there need to be some changes made. I think that the evaluation system is a great idea along with the waiver, but needs to be implemented in the right way. I do not think that implementing it in the way of evaluating a teacher with student’s test scores is the right way to do it. I don’t think you can determine a teachers skills and whether they are doing their job by just looking at standardized tests scores. Another problem I think the state will face with this is the fact that it states that along with the waiver you have to do the evaluations, but then it goes on to say that under the state law it is not required to use these evaluations, only encouraged. How is this going to be accurate and useful if it is not required? If I was a teacher and knew that I could be doing my job better I would push for our school/district to vote against not using these evaluations in the fact that I could potentially lose my job. I think that overall the waiver is a good thing, because the act does need revisions and most schools cannot meet the standards stated. I do think that there are some better ways around this until the issue is resolved.