Mark Williams, president of Austin Independent School District, is facing a conundrum. How is he supposed to set policy for the years ahead when the state doesn’t seem to know what it needs?
AISD got hit hard in the latest accountability ratings (see today’s issue for more on that.) Williams said, “You never want any school to be graded academically unacceptable for any reason.” But this year’s seeming under-performance is colored by major changes in state’s accountability system. Forget an apples-to-apples comparison: This is oranges to bananas. “Some people have quit trying to understand it,” Williams said, “They see it goes up, they see it goes down, and what they really care about is the feel they have for their kid and their school.”
Whatever tags are stuck on schools, he added, the underlying numbers show “we are making progress.” However, he added, “It’s not nearly as fast as anyone would like it to be. Whatever the criteria, no matter how you measure it, there are schools that are not performing at the level they need, or that the accountability system says they should be at or need to be at, there are kids in there that are not passing tests that they need to pass, and they are not going on to the next grade. That’s a problem and a frustration.”
The reality is that the same old issues – English language skills, poverty, changing address regularly, low attendance – that underlie low scores. Williams said, “What you’re trying to do is close the gaps as quickly as you can, but there are non-school factors that come in to play.”
So talk about kicking kids when they’re down. This year, he said, Texas schools face “pure resource reduction at a state level. Federal level, Title One ‘higher needs’ schools are going to have less resources.” Then there is the climate of fear hovering over teachers due to the mass firings (the local ones, it must be said, approved by Williams and his board.) Put it all together, he said, and it raises a simple question about breaking the achievement gap: “Are people going to be more productive or less productive than they were in the past?”
Here’s the coda: The tools for breaking those performance patterns are changing, but the accountability system is still stuck in aspic. “The accountability system can tell you which kids passed the standardized test at a better rate,” he said, but it does not go far beyond that. Not only are kids less dependent on memorizing data (“Give us a content question, and you and I can probably pull it up on our phone in about 30 seconds”) but the Texas TAKS approach of ‘must score x in all five subjects’ does not account for expertise. Williams said, “If the person is very artistic and creative, maybe they’re not math and science guys. But the way our accountability system works, it says, ‘That kid’s not ready.'”
This article appears in July 29 • 2011.
