July 12, 1998
Today is the official release date for my book on the debate over "education reform" in Texas at long last! and if there's anything I hope folks glean from it, it's the fact that it's not a battle which can be fought on the local level.
The book is called Duh! Texas: A Case Study in Educational Takeover (Abique Books), runs 165 pages in hardback, and retails for $15.95. Katy Budget Books and Barnes and Noble/West Oaks are supposed to be stocking it. Enough shameless self-marketing.
The battle against "education reform" isn't a local battle because the school board members and local administrators whether in Katy or elsewhere are trained to ignore any evidence which doesn't come from within the education establishment. We can argue 'til we're blue in the face, and they won't listen until a directive from above comes down telling them to do what we've been saying all along.
A prime example would be the debate over the teaching of reading in Texas during 1996-97.
Those of us battling "education reform" call us traditionalists, conservatives, "social conservatives," the Religious Right, wacko kooks, whatever spent most of 1996 trying to hammer home the message that the Whole Language methodology used by most school districts in Texas at the time didn't work, citing the studies by the National Institutes of Health and the report by University of Houston researcher Dr. Barbara Foorman.
The local activists from Katy, if you'll remember, even staged a series of "education summits," bringing in experts from across the state and the country to make the point that phonemic awareness followed by systematic instruction in phonics did a far better job of teaching kids to read than the hit-and-miss Whole Language idea.
A number of KISD administrators attended those summits. Yet over and over again, in virtually every story we did on how KISD taught beginning reading, you saw the phrase: "We use an integrated approach," combining the two methodologies, effectively rejecting phonics-only as too old-fashioned. We have bound issues of the paper here at the office, if you want to look it up, and I have reams of other documents to illustrate the point.
Lo and behold, March, 1997 rolls around, and what have we here? The Texas Reading Initiative is unveiled by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Moses, a powerful phonics-first approach being spearheaded by the Katy school district, citing the very sources we'd been citing all along. Hello! A couple of months later, the state's new curriculum guideline while filled with mush does at least put phonics first, however meekly.
I'd like to think that our local folks were listening to us all along, passing our information up the chain of command instead of merely awaiting marching orders from Big Brother in Austin. I know I'd feel a tad queasy about acknowledging that I accepted advice on how to write better columns from a service-station attendant, but I'd certainly crow if someone like Lynn Ashby offered a tip or two.
On the other hand, there's a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that educational administrators here or elsewhere tend to limit their sources of information. Recall the quote from Dr. Nancy McLaran Oelkhaus (who worked on the state's curriculum guidelines and was disappointed that more real research didn't go into it), who noted that education isn't a business which is readily open to new ideas, and tends to follow fads.
For all that I've warned and warned about buying in to federalized education, for example, I've still seen KISD administrators running around school board meetings with material from the National Education Goals Panel material underwritten by the National Center on Education and the Economy, the biggest snake-oil marketer of outcome-based education in the world, right alongside Willard Daggett and his 21st Century Schools Network hogwash.
Even where KISD does something I really like, I sometimes have to cringe when I see where it comes from. At the most recent Board of Trustees meeting, for example, curriculum specialists made a great little presentation on reading strategies being taught for use in helping students tackle tough texts in science and social studies. It made sense. It sounded great, and I couldn't find the least bit of fault with it. Great idea!
The presentation closed with a quote
from you guessed it Willard Daggett.