Texas Board of Education Approves New Math Standards
The State Board of Education has unanimously approved new K-12 math standards, despite objections from business leaders that they weren’t rigorous enough.
The new standards, approved today as the board concluded three days of meetings, will have a staggered rollout, with K-8 standards taking effect in 2014 and the high school standards in 2015.
"We are dedicated to making this the best document possible," said board member Marsha Farney, a Republican from Georgetown. "I think we have a tremendous document that's a great improvement due to the submission from the business community and teachers."
As part of the ...
Comments (5)
Alice Taylor
I'm a bit surprised that private-citizen Bill Hammonds hired a consultant out of his own pocket to verify his own opinion that the math standards were lax and that he couldn't understand them and then the consultant agreed with him. It makes you wonder about what the world is coming to when people you hire agree with you.
Wayne Guidry
Could it be that Bill Hammond may no longer be the driving force in Texas education? The commissioner and now the SBOE have went against his wishes. Our problem in Texas is not higher standards as much is it is having the advice of education experts leading the way in education. I think we have learned that Mr. Hammonds idea of testing students to death has done very little to improve student performance. The ultimate problem with our standards is not that they aren't rigorous enough as it is there are just too many of them. When you study countries that fare much better than us in math they cover much less material during a school year. They cover less but they go into much greater depth and students come away with more of a concrete understanding of the content. It has been estimated that Texas has 30% more TEKS than other states. This is why our students come back to school in August and don't remember anything from the previous year because we have covered the content in such a superficial manner in order to cover all of the TEKS.
Alice Taylor
I agree with Mr. Guidry. We teach a mile wide and an inch deep and now we're testing to the point where Texas has weeks out of the school year devoted to standardized tests. With tests such a huge part of the school year and the material tested so wide and superficial, the entire process becomes one of Trivial Pursuit, not real teaching with deep understanding of the subject matter.
I'm getting ready for an entire week of high stakes testing next week in my high school. I think the number is 10% of this entire school year has the kids sitting down for standardized tests. Next year it's worse. I heard we'll have 26 days or 14% of the school year devoted to testing. Those are just the formal state testing days. That doesn't include practice and diagnostic tests taken during the regular school year.
Heads up, folks! We can't teach when we're testing! Mr. Hammonds might want students ready for the world of work, but it's awfully hard to get there when kids are taking tests in stead of learning. What he's getting is a bunch of kids who are really, really good at bubbling in Scantrons and not going to the bathroom for 4 hours.
I understand the desire for tests as a way to establish teaching effectiveness, but we don't need as many tests as what we have to get to that goal and the tests don't need to be 4 hours long. The new STAARS test in 10th grade English, for example, is 4 hours for the reading and grammar portion and 4 hours for the writing portion. In comparison, an Advanced Placement (AP) English exam for college credit is 4 hours long. Why are we testing twice as much for sophomore English? This stops being a test of literature and comprehension and starts to become and endurance test. It's High School Survivor.
Under the new STAARS system kid will take a test for every course they take. That's a minimum of 16 hours of testing or as much as 28 hours of testing. That's a ridiculous amount of time out of the school year on one testing block doesn't include AP, SAT, Adsvab, PSAT, TELPAS and whatever else alphabet soup is out there.
LLC LLC1923
The high stakes testing corporate industry wins again. Pearson, lobbyists and the favored subcontractors view the students as cash cows. More testing generates more profits.
Steven Schafersman
The 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.
After reading the article you might believe that the math standards initially presented to State Board were incompetently written and needed the expert oversight of members to improve them. This would be very 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 agendas. They can create their own reality with eight votes and impose it on Texas students. 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 a totally false statement.