RED HOT CONSERVATIVE

 It sounds really good, doesn’t it? We need a transformation in Texas schools, “one that fosters innovation, creativity and a thirst for learning with new, more meaningful, assessment and accountability measures, rather than a system built around narrowly focused standardized tests that end up as the ‘be-all, end-all’ yardstick for a school’s success.”

We’re all in favor of improving our public education system, after all. We want students who are smart, engaged, thirsty to attack knowledge. We want to be able to look at what is going on in our schools and be able to say, “We’re doing this right.”

The above phrase comes from transformtexas.org, an organization run by the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA). Interestingly enough, it’s almost the same language I saw used back in the mid-1990s, when the Texas Education Agency, TASA and other leaders of the education bureaucracy were promoting the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.

For those who can’t read education-ese very well, it translates into four simple English words: “Send us more money.”

You’ll be happy to note that this idea of transforming Texas education was crafted by a select group of superintendents from across the state, gathered in “facilitated meetings” (meaning the Delphi Technique was employed). Not a single non-educator parent was involved in making this decision, no school board was consulted, the State Board of Education took no vote on it.

Kind of like how CSCOPE was developed, and we’ve seen how well that works, right?

(By the way, remember the big hullabaloo about “getting rid of CSCOPE” this spring? More than 70 percent of Texas school districts are still using it.)

Texas education has been getting “transformed” since at least the mid-1970s. Looking back, I recognize the elements of Transformational Outcomes-Based Education being implemented in my junior year in high school … and mine was a rather conservative school district. I can only imagine it started much earlier in others.

The problem is, since the beginning of the era of “transforming education,” it’s never been transformed. A few new educational fads sneak in with each “transformation,” but the basic methodology — and, more importantly, the results of that transformation — never changes. We jack up spending on public education and get two new layers of administraors, and our kids get dumber.

Here’s a trick for you parents out there with kids in junior high or high school: ask them how to spell the word “there.” There’s a 90-percent likelihood they’ll rattle out a quick answer, and it will be correct — but they’ll never ask you whether you’re asking them to spell the word “there” (that place), “they’re” (they are) or “their” (belonging to them). The word “two,” also spelled three different ways, can generate a similar response.

That’s because spelling isn’t important in an outcomes-based system. It’s irrelevant “because we have computers to correct that now.” People know what you mean, anyway.

Therein lies the problem with an outcomes-based education: it doesn’t really educate. It’s not designed to. It’s designed to ensure perpetual high-paying employment for the education establishment.

Consider the radical changes made in American public education between the 1950s — when the U.S. education system was the best in the world, hands-down — and now, when we’re in the second echelon.

Prior to the late 1960s, most American kids left the first grade able to read almost anything in the English language; they might not understand it all, but they could pronounce the words. That’s because they were taught using old-fashioned phonics — they were taught the correlation between letters and combinations of letters  and the sounds those letters made.

Phonics was taught systematically: a lot of drills and skills and memorization. It was, at times, boring — but it worked.

Once a student learned how to read, then you could focus on developing comprehension. I recall doing exactly that in the second, third and fourth grades — becoming a voracious reader and sometimes tackling material way over my head (Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” anyone?).

When American schools began “transforming” starting in 1968 with the creation of a federal Department of Education, all that stopped. Literacy moved into the affective (values and feelings) realm through a false methodology called Whole Language.

The idea of Whole Language is that humans learn to read the same way they learn to speak — by watching others. Instead of looking at letters and combinations of letters and reasoning what the sounds of those letters should be, students have to learn to memorize entire words — “sight words,” the idea is called — which become increasingly familiar to read as they see the same words more often.

That is why so many of today’s kids struggle to read “at grade level”— it’s hard to comprehend a word you haven’t committed to memory when you have no idea how it’s pronounced. Being able to read a passage was never a problem for those of us brought up in that old system.

The education bureaucracy has learned, and we now have “balanced literacy” — an attempt to inject a little phonics in \to what is still essentially a Whole Language environment.  The upshot of that is it is now easier for schools to identify kids with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, get those kids labeled — and get the extra money for them.

When you hear the word “transform” used in conjunction with public education, you can bet a very expensive process is about to begin. And you can bet you won’t get a say in that process.