New Math Standards Get Blowback from Business Community
In January, when members of the State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to revised standards for the state’s K-12 math curriculum, Education Commissioner Robert Scott told them, “My goal is for Texas to have the best math standards.”
But Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, believes the proposed standards — up for final consideration at this week’s SBOE meeting — are far from the best. He is trying to rally support to prevent them from being approved.
In an April 9 memo sent to the 15 members of the SBOE as well as legislative leaders, Hammond ...
Comments (11)
Luisa Inez Newton via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The Texas SBOE is always an embarrassment. No one should be allowed on the Board unless they have a M.A. from a well-known, thoroughly accredited school, preferably not from a Texas school unless it's Rice!
Jeremy Jones via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I agree with your sentiment but also not sure advanced degrees equate to quality. But yes, some sort of minimum bar needs to be set for these clowns.
Chuck Newgren
Our State Board of Education seems to embarass the State of Texas on an increasingly regular basis.
Luisa Inez Newton via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Ideally, the SBOE would have someone well-educated in all fields: History, English, Foreign Languages, Biology, Physics, but instead Texas gets a bunch of religious know-nothings so mentally constipated they fail Texas kids year after year.
hans5162@ix.netcom.com hans
If Bill Hammond has a problem with the incompetent religious zealots installed on the State Board, then perhaps he should look in the mirror and speak with those in the business community who support those idiots, such as Tim Dunn, James Leininger and Bob Perry. You get what you pay for and this is what the business community has been paying for. Live with the results of your efforts Bill or shut up. Bill Hammond has been unwavering in his support of Rick Perry, who consistently appoints know-nothing evangelical home-schoolers to leadership positions on the State Board of Education with predictable results. Texas has become a joke. Then again, perhaps Bill Hammond has a client who just happens to have a world class curriculum he can sell to the state. That is generally behind what he is pushing. He really doesn't care about education or he would have addressed the funding issue.
wfborges
The standards mean nothing when state and local government has abandoned the state's teachers and educational system in favor of lower taxes. You can set all the high standards you want, but if you do not provide the teachers and a functional educational system, who cares?
Is the TAB is supporting higher taxes to hire more math teachers to meet these standards, or is it looking for more incentive packages for businesses that include school tax breaks?
Texas Parents
Who the hell is Bill Hammond that he can continue to dictate what and how our public schools teach? From what college did he obtain his degree in Education? We would like to see his teaching certificate and years of experience teaching in Texas Public Schools. And what difference does it even make what standards are set when we constantly underfund our schools? Let's have Mr. Hammond take the new End of Course Exams in Mathematics, publish his scores and then we can hold his former teachers accountable.
Matt Prewett via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I don't think this has as much to do with a failure of the Texas SBOE as it does with the US Chamber of Commerce (i.e. Margarget Spellings) enthusiasm for the common-core. There is a desire by some to see US students taught/tested on the same curriculum.
Alice Taylor
Quote- "As Barbara Cargill, a Republican from The Woodlands and chairwoman of the SBOE, explained in a February newsletter to her supporters, state leaders believe they are capable of creating superior standards. “The [common core standards] are less rigorous and they lower expectations for academic progress at each grade level,” she wrote. “We do not need the federal government telling us what and when to teach our children.”-Unquote.
Obviously not.
Every single person in the article who is not working for the TEA said the new standards were lower than the National Core Standards. Maybe Texas SHOULD adopt what 45 other states have adopted. It seems we can and are doing worse and while we're flailing around with an inadequate proposal, we're losing federal money that could be coming to Texas.
Isn't it foolish pride that makes people insist on going their own way when there's a perfectly good model out there to use?
Texas Parents Union via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The Education Gadfly podcast on 4/5/12 has an excellent discussion about common-core.
Steven Schafersman
I appreciate the many comments here that State Board members should not revise curriculum standards about which they have no expertise. The Board has done this in the past with science and social studies standards and the results have been deplorable. Sometimes, as with math, they use input from citizens--who often have no expertise either--and change standards by majority vote. All it takes is eight votes to change a standard or create a new one. Most of the time Board members write their own standards to promote their political, religious, and ideological agendas. The results have been calamitous. In no way does Texas have the "best standards" in any discipline.
You only have to read this article to see the confusion and ignorance exhibited by State Board members. Barbara Cargill writes: “The [common core standards] are less rigorous and they lower expectations for academic progress at each grade level,” she wrote. “We do not need the federal government telling us what and when to teach our children.” In fact, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have exactly the right amount of rigor, since they were written by math education and curriculum experts, top math teachers, and math professors. More rigorous standards are not what Texas students need when half of all college freshmen in this state have to take remedial math courses before they can even start their real studies. Students desperately need to study fewer standards in greater depth so they really master them, not be overwhelmed with dozens of standards. Perhaps students and teachers would do better if the standards-writing process was not so politicized. Also, the CCSS were not written by the federal government or have any association with the federal government; they were written by a consortium of states who have lost patience with the politicized, haphazard, and often incompetent curriculum standards found in this country. At this time 45 states have adopted the CCSS and Texas should, too. Texas students and schools are the losers every year we have to wait until the CCSS are adopted. We can't even compare our students' academic achievement to students in other states unless we use the same standards.
The SBOE leaders might have you believe that the math standards initially presented to them were incompetently written and needed their expert oversight to improve them. That would be untrue. The math standards, as is the case with all curriculum standards presented to the State Board in Texas, were written by curriculum experts, master teachers, and Texas university professors. The process usually takes 1-2 years. In every case in my experience, the initial standards written by the education experts were better than the ones that came out after a majority of Board members digested and excreted them. Invariably, the individual State Board members do not have the expertise to revise or create new standards, but rather a majority use the power of their public office to push their own political and religious prejudices. They can create their own reality with eight votes and impose it on Texas students. I closely monitored the standards-writing process for biology and Earth and space science, and it took only minutes for the anti-science Board members to undo a year's worth of work by degrading the standards. Typically, the majority censors and damages the standards and then tells the press "we did a good day's work for the students of Texas by adopting the best standards in the country." And that's just a lie.