Don’t weaken TX school accountability standards

The Texas public education system is at a turning point.

Recent national assessment results are lower than they have been in a generation. While the pandemic had an impact, Texas student performance has been declining since the early 2010s.

Today, 60 percent of Texas students cannot perform math on grade level, according to our state test. On national assessments, less than a quarter of Texas eighth graders are proficient in math. Reading scores are also the lowest in 20 years, with fewer than 1 in 4 Texas eighth graders earning a proficiency grade.

At this critical moment, we need more investment in public education by the Legislature so we can pay our teachers more, resource higher-need students and schools, and support all students academically.

Texans agree.

Public education was a top priority of Texas voters asked in our latest statewide poll how the Legislature should invest the current budget surplus. And by wide margins, Texas voters support paying teachers more, both across the board and based on merit. In return, Texans deserve to know how their public schools are performing and that their increased investment results in better students.

Unfortunately, there is a concerted movement to reduce Texas’ ability to monitor how its public schools are performing. A series of proposals have been floated that would reduce Texas’ graduation requirements, eliminate all state testing in American history, and reduce the importance of student outcomes in our school accountability system, swapping in nonacademic and extracurricular activities.

Now is not the time to make these changes.

Almost half of Texas students cannot read on grade level, but 87 percent of Texas schools are rated an A or a B. The system is already not rigorous enough, and these proposals would make this crisis even worse.

Texas needs to hold the line on recent education reforms, invest more in the public school system, and continue to hold our students and schools to high standards. That’s a recipe Texans can rally behind and trust they’ll get a return on their investment.

These proposals also do not provide transparency or accountability for parents, taxpayers or businesses that will employ future graduates. They turn state education accountability into participation trophies, allowing districts to pick and choose nonacademic measures on which to grade themselves. And they explicitly de-emphasize student learning in the fundamentals of reading and math. Employers care more about young people’s ability to read and do math than whether they were in chess club or on student council.

These proposals would include factors such as the number of children participating on a school sports team in the school accountability system, while also measuring extracurricular activities that many districts pay for with discretionary or outside funding. Instead of focusing on equity, the state would evaluate schools on fundamentally inequitable indicators that are biased toward affluent school districts. Simultaneously, this would de-emphasize the A-F school rating system’s focus on closing gaps in academic achievement between students of different racial or income backgrounds.

In the 1980s, Texas pioneered a rigorous accountability and assessment system that led to the state’s first improvement in college entrance exam scores in 30 years and led the nation in using data to improve the educational outcomes of underperforming minority and ethnic groups.

Beginning in the 2000s, our state gave in to demands for less rigorous accountability and assessment systems, planting the seeds for an academic free fall that state leaders have recently begun tackling head-on.

Now those proposals to water down standards are back.

Texas needs to hold the line on recent education reforms, invest more in the public school system, and continue to hold our students and schools to high standards. That’s a recipe Texans can rally behind and trust they’ll get a return on their investment.

Margaret Spellings is the former U.S. secretary of education and current CEO of Texas 2036, a nonprofit organization building long-term, data-driven strategies to secure Texas’ prosperity through our state’s bicentennial and beyond. This piece first appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.