SBOE: On Step Forward, One Back
Steve Blow, in The Dallas Morning News Metro blog, weighs in on last week's preliminary votes by the Texas State Board of Education on science curriculum standards. Blow's opinion? "The right-wing bloc basically wants humans exempted from evolution."
The way I read it, the right-wing bloc wants all life on earth exempted. The lost the vote to keep the requirement to teach "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution, then slipped in a requirement to teach arguments "for and against" common ancestry and "sufficiency and insufficiency" of evolution to explain the fossil record.
Wonder what kind of lessons that language would enable? During the hearing, Don McLeroy, the chairman of the State Board of Education and a dentist in private practice, suggested that the fact that teeth fit together so perfectly was a sign of the weakness of the theory of evolution.
When people say Texas is becoming the laughingstock of the nation regarding science education, I don't think they are exaggerating. Steve Blow cites a New York Times editorial on the subject:
"The lesson we draw from these shenanigans is that scientifically illiterate boards of education should leave the curriculum to educators and scientists who know what constitutes a sound education."Texas voters should retire the SBOE members who want our kids to learn religion instead of science in science classes. SBOE members like Don McLeroy, Cynthia Dunbar and Terri Leo don't know the damage they are doing to Texas' reputation and, more importantly, the education of our children.
TAKS' Mismeasured "Achievement Gap"
William McKenzie, in a Viewpoints essay in The Dallas Morning News, takes a crack at improving education in America. He bases it on his observation that Barack Obama is a product of Columbia University and Harvard Law School and Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton. McKenzie asks:
"Why wouldn't everyone in this country want to devote as much attention as possible to enabling every child to have those same opportunities? ... Why are we even having this debate? What parent doesn't want his or her child learning at grade level?"Let me take a crack at answering. The measurement system called for by the federal "No Child Left Behind" act and the state program "Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills" (TAKS) defines a minimum level that students must achieve. It's all well and good to require our education system to do its very best to prepare children to get over that low bar. But let's not pretend that getting over that low bar will get our students into Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. Only the top students will achieve that and then only if our schools pay attention to them, too. So, one explanation for some of the dissatisfaction with the TAKS system is not that it "teaches to the test" but that the test is only minimally helpful. We need programs tailored to all our students, from underachievers to overachievers. TAKS is not that program.
One of the ironies of TAKS is that it doesn't even necessarily measure one of the main goals of the program, what McKenzie calls closing the "achievement gap" between white and minority kids. TAKS measures how many kids get over that low bar, not by how much they exceed the standard. Say we reach the state where every last kid in class gets over that bar. TAKS would say the "achievement gap" has closed to zero. In reality, the minority kids all might be just making it over the bar, while the white kids are vaulting higher and higher each year. The real achievement gap between white and minority may be as wide as ever and even growing. TAKS is not designed to measure that.
Those are just a couple reasons why we are even having this debate. It's not that people have a problem with the goal that every child should learn at grade level. It's that many people want more than that. They want every child to learn to his maximum potential.
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