By Bob Ray Sanders
bobray@star-telegram.com
Labels have always bothered me, especially when they are placed on children.
The branding of our young people can be a degrading exercise that results in negative outcomes rather than the positive effects we desire.
And yet that's exactly what we do by labeling public schools based on test scores whose outcomes are often difficult to explain to educators, much less parents and an entire community.
I don't pretend to understand it all, but I know I don't like the terms like "unacceptable" or "failing" when they are applied to an entire population of students on a single campus or a district.
We certainly need accountability in education, and standardized testing is one way -- not the only way -- to assess achievement. But it's almost as if our school systems have become slaves to a testing industry, one that breeds other enterprises that advertise themselves as saviors of public education.
Practically every year school districts are adding new costly programs, often pushed by some retired superintendent/consultant, with the express promise of helping improve test scores.
The angst that administrators and teachers go through each year preparing for the tests, drilling the kids, providing incentives and then just waiting on the results -- the labels -- is almost too much to bear. Between the state accountability system and the federal No Child Left Behind standards, educators are constantly in some form of testing mode, although not necessarily a teaching one.
Consider this year in Tarrant County, where we recently learned that not one or two school districts failed to meet the benchmark of the federal accountability standards, but 12 districts and 181 total schools missed the mark, including some that had been highly rated before. Statewide 605 districts failed to meet the standards.
Tarrant County districts "failing" (a misnomer, for sure) to make the fed's proscribed "adequate yearly progress": Arlington, Azle, Birdville, Burleson, Crowley, Eagle Mountain-Saginaw, Everman, Fort Worth, Kennedale, Lake Worth, Mansfield and White Settlement.
We know instinctively that not all of those districts are failures. But the federal guidelines, with a goal to have all children in a district proficient in math and reading by 2014, are measured here by students' performance on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and graduation rates.
The system is so conflicted that it's being phased out this year.
Because so many districts nationwide are not meeting the requirements of the federal law, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that states will be offered waivers to the standards while the government tries to come up with ways to improve the law.
Again, just because a district didn't meet a federal standard, we must not be quick to call it "failing."
Take Mansfield, for example, which for the first time did not make adequate yearly progress, though all four of its high schools were rated by the state as academically acceptable or above. The district "failed" because the TAKS scores of some special education students.
Keller dropped to academically acceptable from recognized because one elementary school was rated unacceptable when less than 70 percent of Hispanic and economically disadvantaged fourth-graders passed the writing test.
An elementary school in Fort Worth has been making tremendous progress over the last five years with the commitment of a dedicated staff and the help of the Women's Policy Forum, which "adopted" the faculty and provides volunteers and financial support to benefit the kids.
Maude I. Logan Elementary, in Stop Six, is 65 percent African-American and 25 percent Hispanic, with 95 percent of its students on the reduced or free lunch program. It was rated acceptable and was clearly, as its motto says, "on the road to being
recognized."
Last year, it dropped to academically unacceptable, primarily because of a fall in its science scores on the TAKS.
On that disappointing news, Principal Sonya Williams and her staff immediately began work on an enhanced science initiative to have it ready for the students this fall.
All I'm saying is that the so-called accountability system is fickle, and we need to concentrate more on teaching than testing.
Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.817-390-7775
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