Educating Texans from and Educatators P oV

Educating our students for the future of Texas does not mean educating them for the jobs of today, or even the jobs for five years from now. It means educating ou students for the jobs of ten, twenty, thirty years from now. There are many things the legislature has done in the last session that have helped improve our ability to do this as educators but some general misconceptions need to be addressed before talking about where we go next.

1. Merit pay is possible but needs to be balanced and mathematically sound – in the district I work for I have helped develop an incentive pay (bonus) type system for secondary math. It is still a work in progress but each year we make improvements on it. But what people do not understand is you can’t just pay teachers and base their salaries only on “performance”. In some districts one teacher teaches every grade level and every student. In other districts some teachers only teach one subject. If that teacher has only AP or GT students then their students performance will most likely be very high, but a teacher who teaches in the same grade may have students who are typically low performing “performance” will most likely be much lower. How do you justify a teacher getting a raise or not when their teaching assignment as determined by their administrator. Student growth is equally as important as student performance but is much harder if not impossible at times to accurately measure.

2. Vouchers are not viable everywhere – as an educator I fully acknowledge that school choice is important, but the “voucher” plan where parents can choose what school their child attends and the money follows the child does not work in rural areas like it does urban areas. In Austin, Dallas, Houston, and other super large districts busses and even public transportation allow for students to travel between schools outside their home school region with relative ease. However, as districts become more rural and towns grow farther and farther apart those students who typically find themselves in struggling schools (Minority and low SES students) have fewer options because travel between districts and schools becomes more and more difficult.

3. TSTEM academies – in the last five to ten years there had been a huge push for STEM centered schools to help develop the math and science skills needed for the future our students would be living in. The idea and the intentions were admirable and even provided some positive new ideas and model for the education system in Texas, but we need to ensure that we are maintaining that model and continuing focus on those intentions. Last year I completed my dissertation on TSTEM academies in Texas. What I found was there was statistically little to no difference between those TSTEM academies and schools with similar demographics in what TEA identified as the College Readiness Standards. I believe that TSTEM academies and other charter schools can play an important part in educating Texas students but we need to make sure that we are staying true to the ideals those schools represent and not just making them a part of the traditional education system model. We also need to make sure that all decisions we are making are based on sound research and be willing to make changes if that research shows what were are doing is not making the difference it should

4. Plumbers are just as important as doctors – this is more a societal issue than an educational issue but there should be a focus to remove the stigma of blue collar jobs. When someone working on the oil pipe lines can make more than a teacher over time or more the even some school administrators we do not need to degrade those positions or those students who talk about taking up those jobs. We also need more opportunity at the secondary level to get students who want to go into those fields more opportunity to leave high school certified and trained to perform those jobs.

5. Finally, not everyone can teach – in education we need to take advantage of those people who have worked in industry, business, and other facets of the non-academic world who are willing and able to become educators. That does not mean every person in industry and the business world is capable of being teachers. Teaching is as much an art as it is a science. I have worked with teachers who started their careers in the business world and were amazing teachers, and I have worked with those who could not even make it past the first six weeks or school before running away. Not everyone can be a teacher. We need to make it possible for those in the business a world who want to make the leap to be able to do it without getting a second bachelors degree, but we need to make sure that those we train to do it are capable of taking on the task.

Those are just a few of my rants as a public educator in Texas. I welcome the discussion, disagreement, and arguments that follow. Without those we only allow our system to stagnate and we fail those who we are supposed to be doing this for

Richard Phillips, Ed.d