From the Texas Tribune: Here’s what Texans need to know about the new FAFSA to get aid for college

You might just find this worthwhile.

- and a terrific example of fiscal federalism

- Click here for the article.


Key Terms: 

- federal application
- aid for college
- Free Application for Federal Student Aid
- Mandated by Congress in 2020
- formula used to award need-based aid.
- U.S. Education Department
- Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board
- Academic Success Program
- National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators
- the old version was unduly complicated and acted as a barrier to college.
- funding formula
- Pell Grant
- sibling discount
- Brookings Institute
- high school counselors
- San Angelo ISD

Wikipedia: FAFSA.

Wikipedia: Higher Education Act of 1965.

Wikipedia: Higher Education Act of 1965 Title IV.

Education in Texas in the News - 8/23/16

For consideration:

All from the Texas Tribune.

- East Dallas High School Plants, Nurtures College Dreams.
- How UNT-Dallas' Grand Law School Experiment Could Be Overruled.
- Education Officials Point Fingers over College Readiness.
- Judge Denies State's Request to Toss STAAR Suit.

From the Texas Tribune: Texas Supreme Court Upholds School Funding System

A repost from a few months back - a look at Texas' top civil court, and education policy in Texas, and the meaning of the Texas Constitution.

- Click here for the article.

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday issued a ruling upholding the state’s public school funding system as constitutional, while also urging state lawmakers to implement "transformational, top-to-bottom reforms that amount to more than Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid."

But without a court order directing the Legislature to fix specific provisions in the system, school groups worry that lawmakers will either do nothing or something outside the box.

“Our Byzantine school funding ‘system’ is undeniably imperfect, with immense room for improvement. But it satisfies minimum constitutional requirements,” Justice Don Willettwrote in the court’s 100-page opinion, which asserts that the court’s “lenient standard of review in this policy-laden area counsels modesty.”

There were no dissenting opinions; Justices Eva Guzman and Jeff Boyd delivered concurring ones.

"Good enough now ... does not mean that the system is good or that it will continue to be enough," Guzman wrote. "Shortfalls in both resources and performance persist in innumerable respects, and a perilously large number of students is in danger of falling further behind."

Friday’s ruling is the second time the state’s highest civil court has upheld the state’s school finance system. Since the 1980s, school districts have repeatedly sued the state in an attempt to increase public education funding, and have often prevailed. The latest case, brought by more than two-thirds of Texas school districts, is the seventh time such a case has reached the state Supreme Court.

For background:
- Edgewood v. Kirby.
- Rodriquez v. SAISD.

More on the 85th session

- Open Carry, Funding Likely Police Issues Next Session.

Within hours of the recent ambush killings of five Dallas police officers — and again 10 days later, when three Baton Rouge officers were killed — messages of respect and support for law enforcement coursed through the nation's social media, filled the airwaves and prompted countless press releases.

As politicians nationwide rushed to reiterate their support for police, Texas elected officials figured prominently in the calls for a greater societal embrace of officers and more protections for first responders who perform some of the toughest jobs.

"As Texans and Americans mourn the loss of our men and women in uniform, we must continue to remember that police officers put their lives on the line every day to ensure our safety and our freedoms," Abbott said in a statement a day after the July 7 Dallas shooting.

But while grateful for the rhetoric, law enforcement groups have seen some disconnect between the professions of support and the track record of Texas elected officials in listening to their concerns.

Most notable was the 2015 legislative session, when lawmakers — including Patrick and Abbott — enthusiastically approved the open carry of handguns by licensed Texans despite opposition by many of the state's law enforcement officials.

As the 2017 legislative session approaches, law enforcement groups say they'll be asking lawmakers to consider revising the open carry law, as well as looking at restoring funding for programs that help police do their jobs. They say they'll focus on bread and butter issues like funding officer training and maintaining retirement and death benefits.

- In School Choice Fight, a Fresh Force Emerges.

An ambitious new player has emerged in the controversial effort to use taxpayer dollars to help Texas parents send their kids to private or religious schools.

Texans for Education Opportunity, whichlaunched in May, supports all forms of “school choice,” including charters and traditional public schools, said Executive Director Randan Steinhauser, an Austin-based school choice activist and public relations consultant who co-founded the nonprofit advocacy organization.

But she said the group’s main goal is to get Texas lawmakers to create “education savings accounts” — a program under which the state would dole out taxpayer money directly to parents via debit card to cover approved education-related expenses, like private school tuition, tutors or homeschooling materials. About a half-dozen other Republican-dominated states, including Florida and Arizona, have already created such programs, although most of them target specific student populations, including disabled and low-income students. (Nevada is an exception, offering assistance to all students.)

Literature provided by Texans for Education Opportunity, which appears to be the first statewide organization focused solely on school choice, suggests the state offer up to $7,800 for any student pursuing an alternative schooling route. That is about 90 percent of what the state provides on average to traditional school districts per student for annual maintenance and operations, the pamphlet says.

From the Texas Tribune: Rate of Prison Spending Growth Outpaces Schools

A quick look at public policy priorities in the state.

- Click here for the article.

Texas spending on prisons and jails is the highest in the nation, a new federal study concludes, and has grown about five times faster than the state's rate of spending growth on elementary and secondary education over the past three decades. But the state still spends significantly more on its schools than its prisons.

A new analysis of federal data released last week by the U.S. Department of Education found that Texas corrections spending increased by 850 percent between 1989 and 2013, while the rate of funding for pre-kindergarten to grade 12 education grew by 182 percent. In the 1979-80 fiscal year, for example, Texas spent $14 billion on education and almost $604 million on corrections. In 2013, it spent about $41 billion on schools and $5 billion on incarceration (in constant 2013 dollars).

On average, growth in spending on prisons and jails in other states tripled the rate of growth in funding for public K-12 education over the same period, the report found.

The wide disparity in Texas is caused by the state’s harsh sentencing laws and the strict enforcement of non-violent offenses, which have quadrupled its incarceration rate, the report asserted.

“Budgets reflect our values, and the trends revealed in this analysis are a reflection of our nation’s priorities that should be revisited,” said U.S. Secretary of Education John King Jr. in a statement. “For far too long, systems in this country have continued to perpetuate inequity. We need to invest more in prevention than in punishment, to invest more in schools, not prisons.”

From the Nation:  Millennials Have Lived Through a Doubling of School Segregation The old methods of encouraging integration in our public education are failing.

Brown v Board didn't quite have the impact alleged.

- Click here for the story.

About 62 years after the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” in America’s schools unconstitutional, on the cusp of a demographic tip toward a majority of people of color, the lessons of Brown v. Board of Education seem to be skipping a generation.

The racial disparities surfacing in school data have been dialing back history. Since 2001, according to a report by Government Accountability Office (GAO), the number of poor, racially segregated schools (with more than three-fourths of one race and high poverty rates) jumped from 9 percent to 16 percent. So today’s millennials have, from the time they entered first grade through high-school graduation, witnessed the degree of educational segregation more than double, from about 7,000 segregated schools to 15,000 nationwide. GAO criticized the Department of Education for being lax in using legal intervention in cases of extreme educational discrimination.

But segregation is less about the extremes than abouteveryday discrimination. Among predominantly black or Latino schools, for example, students tend to have less access to core college-prep classes—so about a third of mostly black and brown schools offer calculus, compared to over half of schools with high white populations.

Even within schools, enrollment in “gifted” and advanced placement programs skew white—suggesting that subsurface prejudice and resource gaps operate even in an “integrated” school setting.

Under the grip of the school-to-prison pipeline, repeated suspensions, and other disciplinary actions—which lead to chronic absenteeism and impede academic progress—are especially high for black, Latino, multiracial, and Native American high schoolers.
The cumulative effect isn’t just an “achievement gap,” but a social gap that leaves communities of color increasingly isolated, hampering social mobility and deepening inter generational poverty.

From the Fort Stockton Pioneer: STAAR student test was decades in the making

Where did that high stakes test come from anyway?

- Click here for the article.

Developed to measure student success in college and in future careers, STAAR raised stakes to a level that alarmed many, including middle-class parents who saw the tests as a threat to their college-bound children. The program initially required all high school students to pass 15 STAAR end-of-course exams to graduate. The requirement, long in the works, resulted from an executive order and initiative by then-Gov. Rick Perry in 2004 and 2005 and a law that passed in 2007.

Since 2013, grass roots efforts of parents and teachers resulted in lawmakers reining in requirements that fifth- and eighth-graders and high school students had to pass the STAAR to move on to the next grade or to graduate. Now, students in those grades who fail can appeal to a committee of their teachers, parents and administrators to move on.

State officials also made other concessions with the STAAR, which has seen the most changes compared to past assessments, including shortening the test and changing the testing vendor from Pearson Education for the first time in more than two decades.

Between 1995 and 2015, the state spent an estimated $268 million on testing. According to a 2012 study by the Brookings Institute, per-pupil spending on testing in Texas was $34, falling in the middle compared to other states.

Nationwide, a growing movement is pushing back against the status quo of standardized testing, according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which advocates for testing reforms. Middle-class parents and Republicans are joining longtime critics — minority student advocates and Democrats — to urge a more developmentally appropriate test, said Bob Schaeffer with the center.

“The two major critiques are that the instruments themselves are narrow measures of what matters in education,” Schaeffer said. “The second interrelated facet is how test scores are used, and Texas was again in the vanguard of attaching high stakes – significant consequences for students and teachers and schools — to test scores.”

Is there a right to education in the United States? Part One

According the Supreme Court, in its decision in a case from Texas, no.

The case was San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez.

For background on it:

- Wikipedia: San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez.
- TSHA: San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez.
- Oyez: San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez.

For the actual decision click here.

Oyez has details of the case:

Facts of the case: In addition to being funded through a state-funded program designed to establish a minimum educational threshold in every school, Texas public elementary and secondary schools rely on local property taxes for supplemental revenue. The San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD), acting on behalf of students whose families reside in poor districts, challenged this funding scheme by arguing that it underprivileged such students because their schools lacked the vast property tax base that other districts utilized. The reliance on assessable property, SAISD claimed, caused severe inter-district disparities in per-pupil expenditures.

Question: Did Texas' public education finance system violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause by failing to distribute funding equally among its school districts?

Conclusion: 5–4 DECISION FOR SAN ANTONIO INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT

No. The Court refused to examine the system with strict scrutiny since there is no fundamental right to education in the Constitution and since the system did not systematically discriminate against all poor people in Texas. Given the similarities between Texas' system and those in other states, it was clear to the Court that the funding scheme was not "so irrational as to be invidiously discriminatory." Justice Powell argued that on the question of wealth and education, "the Equal Protection Clause does not require absolute equality or precisely equal advantages."

Two items about the State Board of Education

1 - Education Board Rejects Panel to Review Textbook Errors.

Weeks after a Houston-area mother sparked an uproar over a caption in her son’s textbook that inaccurately described African slaves as “workers,” the State Board of Education tentatively approved several changes to its textbook adoption process.

However, the 15-member elected board on Wednesday narrowly rejected a proposal that would’ve given it the option of creating an expert panel for the sole purpose of identifying errors in textbooks.

The board, which oversees the textbook adoption process, voted 7-8 against an amendment proposed by its vice chairman, Thomas Ratliff, a Republican from Mount Pleasant who often clashes with more conservative Republican members.

Those members, including David Bradley of Beaumont and Geraldine Miller of Dallas, blasted Ratliff’s proposal Wednesday, saying it would send a signal that the current textbook adoption process isn't sound and unnecessarily add an additional layer of bureaucracy to the process.

2 -  SBOE: Trustees Can't Hire Just Anyone as Superintendent.

The State Board of Education on Wednesday rejected a rule change that would have allowed school boards to hire anyone they wanted as superintendent — even if the candidate had no public education experience — as long as they had some kind of post-baccalaureate degree and intended to pursue superintendent certification.

But the 15-member elected board still appears poised to drop a current requirement that would-be school district chiefs have classroom teaching experience. That's something representatives from several teacher groups said Wednesday was crucial to effectively running a school district.

The proposed rule change the board rejected on Wednesday, which was approved last month by the State Board for Educator Certification, contained two components.

One would have allowed people seeking superintendent certification to substitute three years of managerial experience in a public school district for a principal certificate, which requires two years of classroom experience. That means someone who had spent three years in an administrative role like chief financial officer could obtain superintendent certification.

The second, more controversial component of the rule change would have allowed anyone to become a superintendent without a principal certificate or managerial experience — at least for a three-year probationary period — if a school board hired them, they had a master’s, law or medical degree, and they planned to pursue superintendent certification.

Random items related to the Texas Legislature

All from the Texas Tribune:

- Long Legislative Road for Voucher Bills Begins.

A preview of the looming battle over school vouchers played out Thursday as a state Senate panel considered two proposals to provide state financial support to parents who want to send their children to private schools.

Debate focused on how to ensure taxpayer funds are well spent at participating private schools as lawmakers traded questions over whether such plans would improve education in the state.

- District Attorneys' Report: Misconduct Exceedingly Rare.

In a report issued Monday morning, an association representing Texas prosecutors disputed what they say are illegitimate claims of rampant prosecutorial misconduct without accountability.

“It’s just not true,” said Rob Kepple, executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.

The association spent months reviewing 91 Texas cases in which the Northern California Innocence Project in a Marchreport identified prosecutor error or misconduct. The TDCAA said it discovered only six instances “in which a prosecutor arguably engaged in deliberately dishonest or fraudulent conduct that produced unjust results.”

Kepple said the Innocence Project report was “replete with errors” and called it “really kind of embarrassing from a scholarly aspect.”

Cookie Ridolfi, founder of the Northern California Innocence Project, who researched the Texas misconduct data, said she stood by the organization’s findings.

- Ethics Bills Draw Ire of Conservative Activists' Lawyers.

Lawyers for some of the state's most influential conservative groups voiced bitter opposition late Wednesday to several proposals to reform Texas' campaign finance laws, arguing the bills would only make a broken system worse and trample First Amendment rights.

Anticipating the backlash, state Rep. Sarah Davis nodded to the tough crowd after presenting her House Bill 22, which would overhaul the Texas Ethics Commission, particularly to beef up its enforcement authority.

"I love agreed-to bills, but I have a feeling there is absolutely no change that comes before this committee that contains the words 'Texas Ethics Commission' that Empower Texans would not just immediately oppose," the West University Place Republican said, referring to the conservative group that has come under scrutiny by state campaign finance regulators. "But I'm happy to work with them."

The late-night meeting of the House State Affairs Committee offered the latest snapshot of the intense, organized scrutiny some lawmakers face as they put a renewed focus on ethics reform. Gov. Greg Abbott elevated the issue last month by naming it one of five emergency items, and some of the ideas before the panel Wednesday were similar to what he has called for.

- Senate Passes Patrick's Tax Cut Package.

The Texas Senate on Wednesday approved Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s multibillion-dollar tax relief package to cut property and business margins taxes, tossing the ball into the House's court.

"Rather than spend excess revenue, the Senate has voted to return $4.6 billion to Texas homeowners and businesses over the next two years," Patrick said in a statement.

The biggest piece of that package, Senate Bill 1, authored by Senate Finance Chairwoman Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, passed the Senate 26 to 5. The bill devotes about $2.4 billion to increase homestead exemptions from school property taxes.

- Senate's Property Tax Cut May Stall in House.

While the Texas Senate easily approved a $2.4 billion plan to provide property tax relief to homeowners Wednesday, the measure may lose momentum when it reaches the House, where leaders appear more interested in cutting the sales tax.

“We’re going to present our plan here soon, and you’ll see what we’ll be driving for,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, said. “I think it’s fair to say at this time that we’re focusing on taxes that will have a more meaningful impact on growing the Texas economy, and property tax cuts are not part of the plan.”
Bonnen said he will publicly present his full proposal for tax cuts early next week.

Earlier this month, he filed three tax cut bills, two similar to Senate proposals to cut the margins tax paid by businesses, and a third that would cut the state sales tax.

For 2306 today:

California voters will be able to decide if certain felonies can be reclassified as misdemeanors.
- The purpose is to reduce prison over crowding.
- Here's background from the New Yorker.

Derek Cohen and Deborah Fowler: Texas Legislature should decriminalize truancy.
- There may be better ways to handle truancy than pushing kids into the criminal justice system.
- The Texas Committee on Jurisprudence is holding hearings on whether civil penalties are more appropriate.

UT/TT Poll: Texans Favor Voter ID by 3-to-1 Margin.
- But the results are divided over partisan lines.

UTSA professor champions new approaches to criminal justice.
- He'd like a shift away from arrest and punish to "community justice and restorative justice."

A Plan to Cut Costs and Crime: End Hurdle to Job After Prison.
- Does Texas make it too tough for ex-felons to find jobs? Does this make it more likely that they will return to prison?

Editorial: The benefits of fighting abuse with education vs. jail time.
- Batterer prevention programs seem to work better than jail sentences.

From Slate: The Amazon of Higher Education

OK, I waved the suspension for this article on higher ed. I might post a few more on this topic.

A school in New Hampshire rides the wave of online learning. We're noticing the change here as well. While enrollment in some sections continues to be strong - others, notably evening classes, are taking huge hits. The most likely explanation is that these students are taking online courses.

It's no longer the future - its reality - and it is affecting the economics of higher ed.

The near demise and subsequent rebirth of SNHU offers a glimpse into the crisis facing American higher education. More than a third of American colleges and universities have deteriorating finances, according to a 2012 report. While more Americans find that a college degree is their only ticket to the middle class, fewer institutions are able to provide it at a reasonable cost.


When LeBlanc took over in 2003, SNHU was struggling. It had poor name recognition and fewer students could afford its rising tuition. When the recession hit, enrollment dipped and it looked as though the school would have to make cuts to stay afloat. LeBlanc, who previously had run an even smaller institution, 300-student Marlboro College in Vermont, thought SNHU’s one hope might be its fledgling online division.


He had long been friends with Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and author of the groundbreaking book The Innovator’s Dilemma, which examines the impacts of disruptive technologies on traditional industries. LeBlanc made Christensen an SNHU trustee and consulted extensively with him about embracing online education as a way to escape what seemed like certain decline.


In 2009, instead of cutting, LeBlanc asked the board to double down on the online division. He argued that rapid growth in online could quickly produce new revenues that could save the main campus in Manchester, N.H. “It was a big-gulp moment,” he says.


But he was convinced by Christensen that there were no other options. “The business models implicit in higher-ed are broken,” he says. “Public institutions will not see increasing state funding and private colleges will not see ever-rising tuition.”


His solution was to tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt. The low completion rate can be blamed partly on the fact that college is still designed for 18-year-olds who are signing up for an immersive, four-year experience replete with football games and beer-drinking. But those traditional students make up only 20 percent of the post-secondary population. The vast majority are working adults, many with families, whose lives rarely align with an academic timetable.


“College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience. But in the process, he turned what had been a small New England college with red-brick buildings and a quad into something barely recognizable. There are still nearly 3,000 students enrolled at its campus in Manchester (the men’s soccer team won the NCAA Division II championship last season), but the action has shifted to its fast-growing online division.

SB 2 - the charter school expansion bill - passes the Senate

The Bill now heads to the House - click here for info from TLO.

From the Texas Tribune:

As colleagues praised Education Chairman Dan Patrick's efforts at building consensus, a significantly altered version of his expansion of the state's charter school system quickly passed out of the Senate Thursday afternoon.

Patrick, R-Houston, said Senate Bill 2 accomplished what should be the goal of lawmakers — lifting everyone through quality education.

"The key to that is to have the opportunity for a great education, and I'm real proud to be a member of the Senate today," he said as senators approved the measure by a vote of 30 to 1.

The lone dissenter, Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, did not explain his reasons for doing so from the floor but later issued a statement saying he could not vote to expand charters until the Legislature adequately addressed the issues of over-regulation and inequitable funding in traditional public schools.

. . . Patrick originally intended to lift the state's 215-school cap on charter contracts. After amendments, including one from Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, it now incrementally increases the limit on charters, reaching a hard cap of 305 by the year 2019. Charter schools aimed at dropout recovery or operated within traditional school districts would not count toward that cap.

The Senate dropped a requirement for school districts to lease or sell underused buildings to charter schools and another that would have provided facilities funding for charters, which — along with the state cap on charter school contracts — is a primary issue in a lawsuit pending against the state.

Some superintendents and school board members objected to the proposal, saying that in a time of limited resources, charter schools that serve only 3 percent of the public school population should not received additional state funding for facilities. Other critics said that before adding more new charter schools, the state should focus on closing those that perform poorly.

On Thursday, Democrats in particular commended Patrick for his effort to be inclusive and bipartisan in drafting the bill, which has undergone many changes since it was originally introduced.

HB 5 - the high school curriculum bill - clears the Senate Education Committee

Now it heads to the Senate floor.

The Texas Tribune touches on the controversies associated with it - especially allegations that by limiting end of course tests, and redusing the number of required sources, the state is watering down is high school education standards.

Senators are hearing testimony Tuesday on House Bill 5, which does away with the state’s so-called 4X4 graduation plan, which requires four years of courses in math, science, social studies and English. Instead, students would complete a “foundation” program with four credits in English, three in math, two in science, three in social studies and earn "endorsements" by completing five credits in areas like humanities, science, engineering, technology and math, and business and industry.

Speaking Monday night at a “tele-town hall” hosted by Empower Texans, Gov. Rick Perry said that he was in favor of keeping the 4X4 plan while also noting the national attention.

“I support the efforts to re-evaluate our state’s curriculum but we need to keep that 4x4, those four years of science, those four years of math, and protect the academic rigor that keeps our graduates able to compete in the global marketplace,” Perry said.

A battle seems to be brewing that pits Senator Patrick against governor. Perry seems worried about what the reduction in course requirements will have on Texas' competitiveness. Other opponents believe the reduction will negatively affect job prospects for minority students.

Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, D-San Antonio, offered an amendment, which has not yet been voted on, that would automatically place students in the college preparatory plan and allow them to "opt over" to a career-skills focused graduation plan if they earned low scores on their state standardized exams. It would also add a fourth year of math and science to core curriculum. She said it addressed concerns raised by national advocacy groups like LULAC and MALDEF that the legislation would hurt the academic achievement of low-income and minority students because they would not be encouraged to take the most rigorous courses.

"There's a way to have high-level math and science courses that are relevant to a career," she said.

The business community is divided on the legislation — a fact Patrick alluded to when he challenged the "misinformation" that a majority of Texas businesses are against it.

Some leaders, like Texas Association of Business CEO Bill Hammond and Texas Institute for Education Reform Chairman Jim Windham, who both testified Tuesday, see it as backing off from hard-won accountability measures.

Windham said that it would be a "huge disservice" to the state if algebra I and English II became the highest level for state standardized exams, adding that all of the current 15 tests should continue to be administered and reported to the state, whether or not they were required for graduation.

"What gets measured gets done," he said.

But others, like Hector Rivero, the president of the Texas Chemical Council, favor the changes. Speaking on behalf of a coalition that represents 300,000 companies in the state, Rivero said, those companies couldn't find workers with the qualifications necessary to meet their high-paying jobs.

"The current education system while well-intentioned is not meeting needs of employers," he said.

A few related links:

- TLO: HB 5.
- TEA: State Graduation Requirements.

Debate rages over assessments in K-12

House Bill 5 intends to change high school graduation and student testing requirements. The Texas Tribune provides this description:

Aycock's proposal, House Bill 5, would move public schools to an accountability system with grades of A through F, a concept that has drawn support from Sen. Dan Patrick, the Houston Republican who chairs the upper chamber's education committee, and Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams. It would also significantly reduce the number of standardized tests students must pass to graduate.

The legislation removes a requirement that graduating students must achieve a certain cumulative score across 15 end-of-course exams and changes the number they must take to five in reading, writing, biology, Algebra I and U.S. history. Students would be able to count satisfactory performance on Advanced Placement, SAT or ACT exams toward graduation requirements. It also expands the diploma options available to high school students, allowing them to earn "endorsements" with focuses on areas of studies like humanities, science, engineering, technology and math, or business and industry.

"House Bill 5 will improve education in Texas by better equipping schools to meet students' individual needs," Aycock said in his announcement. "The filing of this bill is the first step in a very important conversation about the quality of both our schools and our workforce."

But not everyone belives this is the case. Quorum Report tells us that two nationa interest groups - La Raza and the Education Trust - testified that the changes will do little to address the achievement gap that persists between white and minority students in the state. They have been joines by business groups and Rod Paige, the former Secretary of Education.

Two nationally recognized groups that advocate for closing the achievement gap between white and minority students have urged Texas House members to reconsider the graduation plans created under House Bill 5.

This is one of the first times in recent memory that national education advocates have raised concerns over Texas policy. In past policy decisions, such as requiring four years in core subject areas or setting college readiness standards, Texas has been ahead of most states. In the letter from La Raza and Education Trust, sent to House members on Friday, however, the two groups said the state was taking a step backwards from recent progress and raised concerns about the treatment of minority students.

“The proposed changes would take Texas back to the bad old days of pervasive tracking, ignoring the clear evidence that all students, regardless of the path they choose after high school, need the same rigorous course content to succeed in an economy that demands high-level skills,” wrote Kati Haycock of Ed Trust and Janet Murguia of The National Council of La Raza. “We urge you to stay the course; maintain rigorous expectations for all students.”

The two groups are not the only ones to raise concerns. Last week, a business coalition raised similar concerns with the Texas Senate, noting that rigorous coursework was the prime indicator of potential success in a two- or four-year college. According to the letter, fewer than 20 percent of those whose highest level of math was geometry ever earn a college degree. Among those who take trigonometry, that rises to 60 percent.

And this morning, former Secretary of Education Rod Paige sent out his own statement, urging lawmakers to reject House Bill 5 for weakening both high school graduation requirements and standardized assessments.

“I urge the Texas House to reject House Bill 5 and to say no to these kinds of efforts to lower the standards in Texas schools,” Paige said. “Our children and our schools need high standards of learning, and abandoning strong accountability and assessment is wrong for Texas.”

- The Fort Worth Star Telegram is not impressed with the bill: "It has elements aimed at making students feel better about their academic performance.

- A grassroots group called Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment has advocated for the bill in order to limit the number of assessments given to students.

- The Texas Association of Business intends to support a number of amendments to the bill.

- The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board commissioner argues that the reduction of assessments will reduce college readiness. 

You will more likely than not achieve the same level of education as your dad's

Here's another argument that the United States does not have the level of social mobility we think we do. People tend to attain to the level of education that their parents do - in this case their fathers:

If your father didn't graduate high school, then you are 8 times more likely not to graduate high school than if your father did. If your father graduated college, then you are 3 times more likely to graduate college than if your father didn't.

You would think this would be a result of income inequality. Fathers who don't graduate high school, with children who don't either, tend to be much poorer than fathers who have, with children who have. That's true.

But you'd be wrong to think that this effect is largely explained by income. It's not. Intergenerational inequality in educational attainment persists after adjustment for income inequality.

The data suggest inequality is a problem of families, not of individuals. Even among the poor, basically every person whose father graduated college graduates high school themselves, and 40 percent or so graduate college. Whether your father graduated high school is much, much more predictive of whether you have than how much you make.

So how might this alter our attitude towards education policy?

Why can't we be more like Finland?

Another student forwards this story that tries to understand why Finish schools are so successful. For starters they do everything exactly the opposite of how we do things here in the US:

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.

"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

Who sets education policy?

The Texas Legislature is reviewing the tests used to assess high school students amidst concerns that the focus on assessments has had a negative impact on the education kids are getting in K-12.

The Washington Post posted an article from a recently retired high school teacher apologizing for the poor students he has had to pass on to colleges, but argues that their poor performance is due to the time spent figuring out how to answer multiple choice tests, not how to think at a deeper level about subject matter. He pins blame on the fact that education policy is not set by educators, but by corporations that benefit from the use of tests because they design and implement them:

During my years in the classroom I tried to educate other adults about the realities of schools and students and teaching. I tried to help them understand the deleterious impact of policies that were being imposed on our public schools. I blogged, I wrote letters and op-eds for newspapers, and I spent a great deal of time speaking with and lobbying those in a position to influence policy, up to and including sitting members of the US House of Representatives and Senate and relevant members of their staffs. Ultimately, it was to little avail, because the drivers of the policies that are changing our schools—and thus increasingly presenting you with students ever less prepared for post-secondary academic work—are the wealthy corporations that profit from the policies they help define and the think tanks and activist organizations that have learned how to manipulate the levers of power, often to their own financial or ideological advantage.

A useful look at how public policy is actually shaped. I'll catch up on what the legislature is doing regarding education policy - and assessment (the STARR test especially) soon.

Texas School Districts lobby and lawyer up.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram reports that independent school districts in the state have organized prior to the 83rd session in order to push for a restoration of the $5.4 billion in finding lost in the previous session.

In related news, the lawsuit against those cuts continues. Schools argue that the cuts violated the mandate in the Texas Constitution that adequate provisions be made for public education in the state.

Detail about the lawsuits can be found here at the website of the Texas Association of School Boards.

Ross Ramsey argues that all spending decisions will be at a standstill until this issue is worked out.

Texas School Reform Plans Introduced

State Senator Dan Patrick and Lt. Gov David Dewhurst outlined a variety of proposals they will make to transform K-12 education in the state. The proposals will make it easier for students to go to private schools:

Patrick, a Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said he would carry legislation that would increase the options for public school students through lifting the state's cap on charter schools, fostering open enrollment within and across school districts, and creating a private school scholarship fund through offering a state business tax savings credit to corporations. When asked for further information about how such a scholarship program would operate, Patrick said the plan was still in its formative stages, and earlier, Dewhurst indicated that it may begin through a smaller-scale pilot program.

Patrick also said he would revamp the accountability system by reducing the number of required state tests and increasing the pathways to graduation for high school students interested in technology. A new system would also evaluate school districts with letter grades instead of the current ratings of acceptable or unacceptable.

Though the set of reforms the two men described at the news conference did not contain a plan for what are often called private school vouchers, which allow parents to use public funding to send their children to private schools, Patrick said afterward that the legislation was still evolving. He indicated that it could include a measure that would be along the lines of "what some people might call vouchers."

- Here's detail on Patrick's focus on education.