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Brewing Texas Education Battles Likely To Be Shaped By New Parent & Business Coalitions

Posted byHoumanitarian

Kate Alexander, Austin American-Statesman
Barely a peep of dissent was uttered in 2009 when the Texas Legislature adopted what state leaders called a landmark overhaul of the public school testing and accountability system.

Not even four years later, legislators are hearing loud and clear that the state needs to rethink that high-stakes testing system, the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. Potential changes that not so long ago would have been dead on arrival are now open for discussion because of evolving political dynamics in the Capitol and some alarming results from the first round of tests.

State Sen. Florence Shapiro, the powerful committee chairwoman who championed the 2009 law, is retiring. After Tuesday’s election, about half of the House members will have been elected after that much-ballyhooed 2009 vote.

And newly engaged — and politically astute — groups of parents and businesses will be calling for fundamental changes. On the agenda are proposals that range from tweaking the law to a full overhaul.

“If they need to see 500 angry moms, we can make that happen,” said Dineen Majcher, an Austin lawyer who helped launch the parent group, Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment. In Capitol circles, the group is sometimes referred to as Mothers Against Drunk Testing — a wink to another group of women that aimed to upend the status quo, Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

“I kind of take that as a badge of honor,” said Majcher, noting the success of MADD in pushing tough limits on drinking and driving and mandatory seat belt laws.

To Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, the concerned parents are being needlessly frightened by school superintendents who are failing to prepare their students. The parents have been told, Hammond said, that some of the provisions of the system “will make it harder for their son or daughter to get into a flagship (university) and that simply is not true.”

“This has never been about those kids. It’s about those kids who have never been given the opportunity to go beyond high school,” Hammond said.

Hammond, who has strong ties to Gov. Rick Perry, has long been the primary business voice in the Texas Capitol when it comes to education issues along with Sandy Kress, one of the architects of the federal No Child Left Behind Act under President George W. Bush. Kress is now a lobbyist for Pearson Education, which creates the state’s tests under a five-year, $468 million contract.

But other business voices are for the first time joining the fray and challenging Hammond in the education policy arena.
(Read more of this story at the Austin American Statesman)

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