State curriculum should get an unacceptable rating
By Dave Lieber. Star-Telegram Staff Writer, October 8, 2004

LINK

Texas schoolteachers have not received enough credit from the rest of us for performing miracles. When the state released accountability ratings last week, the emphasis was on schools that saw their ratings decline.

What was left unsaid by many is that teachers were expected to reinvent the wheel by preparing their students to learn a statewide curriculum that is, in my opinion, hopelessly vague, too wide-ranging and of little help to educators. From this mishmash of suggested requirements, the state testing system is supposedly derived.

It's a miracle that not one greater Northeast Tarrant County school was ranked as academically unacceptable.

I was flabbergasted this week when I saw the statewide curriculum. I suspect most parents, like me, assumed the curriculum is specific, rigorous and helpful. I assumed that the curriculum would list books that ought to be read, areas of inquiry that ought to be taught and facts that ought to be learned.

In a small number of areas, the curriculum tries to do that. But in most subject areas, it fails miserably.

The hundreds of pages listing state education requirements are a hodgepodge of vague ideas and concepts lacking any specificity. That's why I call it a miracle that teachers can derive any idea about what they are supposed to teach.

I spoke with educators from most area school districts in recent days. Because they fear repercussions from state education authorities, none wanted to complain publicly about the lack of specificity.

Who can blame them? If school districts don't improve on test results, careers will be lost both at the top levels of a school district and also at the principal and teacher levels.

Unlike educators, I am not bound by fears of recrimination from the state. I believe Texas has performed a disservice to teachers and administrators.

A curriculum ought to be a specific guidepost about what to teach. Here are some of the most egregious examples of vagueness:

The ninth-grade English curriculum requires that students write and edit clearly, organize ideas, proofread and demonstrate control over grammatical elements.

Other requirements demand that students expand vocabulary, research word origins, use reference materials and read silently with comprehension for a sustained period of time.

Here are other vague statements:

"Make relevant contributions in conversations and discussions."

"Make informed, accurate, truthful, and ethical presentations."

"Deconstruct media to get the main idea of the message's content."

But in the 10th-grade English curriculum, there's something surprising: It has almost exactly the same wording.

Move on to the 11th-grade curriculum, and the wording is the same. Word for word.

The 12th-grade curriculum? It has almost exactly the same wording as for the three previous grades.

It appears as if somebody highlighted the ninth-grade curriculum on a computer screen, pushed the "copy" button and then pasted it into succeeding grades' curricula.

The state actually approved this? Teachers are expected to teach from this? Students are expected to learn this? Schools are expected to reach exemplary status with this?

Look at another area -- third-grade science.

There is so much required of 8-year-olds in this subject that it could take years to teach the curriculum -- not just a portion of each school day dedicated to science instruction. Here's a sampling:

"Observe and describe the habitats of organisms within an ecosystem."

"Describe environmental changes in which some organisms would thrive, become ill, or perish."

"Analyze how adaptive characteristics help individuals within a species to survive and reproduce."

"Identify and describe the importance of earth materials including rocks, soil, water and gases of the atmosphere."

When I asked a Texas Education Agency spokeswoman why the curriculum did not include greater specificity, she said the idea was to allow local districts to devise how to teach the material.

What material?

What we are left with are individual districts trying their best to figure out how to meet the vague requirements. For example, on some area school district Web sites you might find suggestions -- "educated guesses," one administrator calls them -- that show teachers and parents how to take the vague curriculum and turn its requirements into an actual lesson plan. Each district tries to do this in its own way.

The irony is that the new standardized tests are supposed to make it difficult to "teach to the test." Yet the only real tool that school districts and teachers have about what to teach is the tests.

What choice do teachers have but attempting to teach to the test?

We should go easy on districts and schools that watched helplessly as their ratings dropped.

Texas educators are bouncing around in the dark, trying to figure out what to do. This is happening because the statewide curriculum, more than any school, is what is really academically unacceptable.

Dave Lieber's Column Appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
(817) 685-3830 dlieber@star-telegram.com www.yankeecowboy.com

(Pt. 1 of 3)

I am certainly no authority on what is happening in Houston ISD with Direct Instruction, TAKS cheating allegations, etc. (the Donna Garner mentioned in the Dallas Morning News article is not I), but I do know that children must be given quality literature once they learn how to read or else they don't continue to advance in their reading skills. Dr. Sandra Stotsky has been concerned for some time about the multicultural names and poor reading materials which are now saturating the reading textbooks in the middle elementary grades. Her book, Losing Our Language, gives well-documented evidence to show that the textbooks in those grades are not helping children continue their reading improvement.

Our elementary children should be reading the time-honored children's classics with their rich content, involved sentence structure, and solid vocabulary. That is not happening in most schools nor in most state-adopted reading textbooks; therefore, children's reading rates, comprehension, and fluency are not improving as fast as they should once they learn the fundamentals of reading in K-3.

If the TAD had been approved, undoubtedly the textbook publishers would have included our rich literary selections in the state's textbooks. Instead publishers have filled the textbooks with "authentic literature" pieces which are full of multicultural words that cannot be sounded out using the standard English phonetic system. Children's reading rates are dramatically slowed down and they are frustrated because they cannot apply what they have learned about the English system of phonics to the multicultural proper nouns which proliferate their textbooks.

Here is the letter which I sent to Joshua Benton at The Dallas Morning News. He is the lead journalist who has ferreted out the possible cheating schemes on the TAKS tests across Texas:

My response to Joshua Benton at The Dallas Morning News, 12.31.05:

The Donna Garner from Houston who is quoted in your article is obviously an honest and forthright teacher; I am honored to share her name. You have done a fantastic job of exposing the cheating that has been going on in the past and which is evidently going on right now. Because of your in-depth analysis, I don't see how anyone can think otherwise. You have done a real service to point out the cheating problems with the TAAS/TAKS.

Now I wish you would do the same thing with the English / Language Arts / Reading (ELAR) TEKS which are the root of most English teachers' frustration and lack of clear direction. If you were teaching and you could not count on the teachers who previously had your students to have taught them definite, identifiable, prerequisite skills (because the TEKS do not spell out exactly what needs to be learned), how could you possibly bring the students up to grade level? Since the ELAR/TEKS repeat themselves in grade clusters, nobody knows for sure what needs to be taught/learned at each grade level. Because ELAR is the basis for all other success in school, it is vitally important that students gain a good grasp of ELAR content each year so that they can move into more sophisticated content at each grade level. When this mastery is not achieved as the child moves along, it is almost impossible for the next teacher to bring the child up to grade level; yet the new teacher may be the one on whose shoulders the TAKS results rest because of the testing schedule. Hence, some teachers feel they are justified in cheating because they have been given an impossible situation with no clear direction from the state. They think to themselves, "Okay. If the TEKS are not going to be clear and doable so that I and other ELAR teachers know what to teach our students at each grade level and have the time to do it, then I am just going to cheat. My job is hanging on my students' test results, yet the state has given me an impossible job to do. My only recourse is to cheat."

Donna Garner
wgarner1@hot.rr.com

(Pt. 2 of 3)

"Reporter Gets It Right"
by Donna Garner
October 8, 2004

Dave Lieber of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram has gotten it right (Please see Pt. 2 which is Dave Lieber's article). Texas' curriculum standards (TEKS) are too numerous, repetitious, and inexplicit. Teachers find themselves in the same position as a kicker who can't find the goal if the stadium is covered in fog or if the lights go out.

The TAKS tests are catching the flak from the disgruntled public, but the real problem is the TEKS curriculum standards. Since the TAKS tests are built upon the standards, if the standards are not explicit and clear, then the test-makers and test-takers don't know what the targets are -- similar to trying to find the goal in the dark. Rather than trying to fix the tests after the fact, we need to fix the root cause for the poor testing experience -- the wishy-washy TEKS standards.

As someone who taught for over 30 years, I can easily relate this situation to the classroom. If I decide to give a test, I must first decide what the test will cover. Before that, I must make sure I have taught my students the material over which I want to test them. Then I must tell my students what specific material they need to study. After I give the test over specific material, by looking at my students' grades, I can judge the effectiveness of my instruction and also the depth of their mastery on that material. If the targets are clear and the tests are based on those targets, the test results serve as a useful assessment tool for both the teacher and the student.

If, however, I decide to give a test, and I don't have any clear objectives in mind as to what material I need to test, it is going to be almost impossible for me to generate a decent test. It is also going to be almost impossible for my students to prepare themselves to take that kind of test. What should they know? What should they study? Might some of the students feel frustrated enough to cheat, justifying their cheating by the fact that I had not given them a fair opportunity to succeed? What points should I stress in my classroom presentations to get my students ready for a "shoot in the dark" test? If I proceed to administer such a nebulous test, even after I have calculated the grades, what do I really know about my students' achievement? If the objectives were foggy to begin with, then what do the test grades on such a foggy test actually mean?

In truth, if a classroom teacher did the same preposterous thing that Texas is doing with its foggy TEKS and the accompanying TAKS tests, the teacher would be run out of town on a rail by mad parents, students, and administrators! It is simply not fair to test students on wishy-washy objectives, and no teacher would be able to keep his job if he made a practice of doing so.

I ask you then, "Why is Texas allowed to do something that, if emulated, would get a classroom teacher fired?"

The Texas Legislature needs to step in and right the wrong which occurred in 1995 with the wording in SB 1. The Legislature should set new parameters for the curriculum standards, requiring them to be knowledge-based, academic, objectively tested, and explicit for each grade level. The TAKS tests by necessity would then be rewritten to follow the same requirements.

Donna Garner
wgarner1@hot.rr.com