Wading through the four hours of testimony on Tuesday before the Senate Education Committee hearing on the new omnibus education bill Senate Bill 3, the recurrent meme was that it tackles the worst concerns about TAKS as the ultimate metric for student achievement. On the other hand, no-one seemed happy that, while it got rid of the acceptable/unacceptable tags for schools, it did little to change the “all or nothing” metric for school assessment. Rod Schroder of the Texas School Alliance likened it to calling a student with almost straight As and one C a C student.
Richard Kouri, Director of Public Affairs for the Texas State Teachers Association, weighed in with an apt metaphor.
“Madame chairwoman, this will probably come as a surprise to you, but it did to me, my doctor told me I need to lose weight. For a month I’ve been going in the bathroom and weighing myself, and you know, I haven’t lost any weight. None! And I told my wife, the problem has to be the damn scale.”
“We’ve had it since we got married, I want a new scale. I think a digital scale would be in order, and I’m sure if I had a digital scale, I could walk into the bathroom every morning and I could lose some weight. And she said, just be quiet. I said, ‘You don’t think so?’ and she said, ‘No.’ My point […] is be careful you know what it is you’re building. Buying a new scale is not going to cause me to lose weight, stepping on the scales isn’t going to make me any thinner, and testing children is not going to make them any smarter.”
This article appears in March 13 • 2009.
