With the recent elections, Texas voters have spoken and now school employees must brace for what will be, without doubt, the worst state legislative session that any of us currently in education have faced. Many state legislators who are strong supporters of public education were defeated.. The result is that the starving of public schools will only worsen. There is very little hope that the inadequate, inequitable school finance system will be addressed. This will leave low-wealth districts, like SAISD, and the children they serve out in the cold. With no new resources, school districts will be faced with no option other than cuts in programs and/or personnel.
We anticipate significant cuts and losses via legislation during the legislative session. There are conservative representatives who have already said they will go after the K-4 class size caps, as they have done in the past, only this time, they will likely have the votes needed to succeed in eliminating the cap. If the cap is removed, school districts will be able to pack more K-4th grade students into each classroom, thereby saving money by hiring fewer teachers. Duty-free lunch and the 450 minutes of planning/preparation time for teachers will likely also be on the chopping block. If districts do not have to provide the planning/preparation period and/or the duty-free lunch, they do not have to hire as many teachers, which would be a way for them to cut costs.
Given the election results on Tuesday, pay-for-student-test-scores will move to the top of the agenda for the state legislative session. We can expect a bill, with a very good chance of passing, which will require tying a teacher’s evaluation to student test scores in spite of the cautions from all corners of the research community that such use is inappropriate. We can expect state leaders and the majority of legislators to ignore the recent Economic Policy Briefing Paper on the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers which states, “ . . . there is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed.”
This session of the Texas Legislature will not likely be one in which we make gains. It will be one in which school employees will have to play defense with all our might, if we are to have any chance of avoiding disastrous results. On the local front, we will work with our school board members to make sure that, if cuts have to be made in SAISD due to insufficient funding from the state, those cuts are made in areas that have the least negative impact on our students.
This is a call to action. Now is the time to prepare ourselves for the fight. Sign up now for the Texas AFT Legislative Hotline and the TSTA Briefing so that you can stay informed on what is happening in Austin. Set aside the Monday of Spring Break, March 14th, to attend the Texas AFT Lobby Day along with hundreds of other school employees from around the state. This legislative session we cannot wait for someone else to step up. Each of us is that someone. We teach our students about our democracy. Now is the time to show them by example what it means to participate in a democracy.
Copyright 2010 San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel