Plan allows graduation with no math, science after second year

Students may cut high school load with early credits; experts fear plan is 'a step backward'

Houston ISD students could earn high school diplomas without taking a single math or science class after their sophomore year under a proposal that is drawing criticism from some national education experts.

Critics say the change will leave students unprepared for college and the workplace.

"I'm surprised they would be considering this move," said Anne Tweed, president of the 55,000-member National Science Teachers Association. "That's a step backward."

Superintendent Abe Saavedra wants to do away with a policy that mandates three years of math and science courses for all high school students. Instead, students who pass high school-level courses in the eighth grade would get credit toward a diploma. State law requires three math and science credits to graduate.

Saavedra's proposal, which is expected to win school board approval today, runs counter to a national trend of school systems requiring students to spend more time in math and science classes before they graduate. The decision is even more curious, some education experts said, given the fact that more than two-thirds of HISD's 2004 graduates who enrolled in local community colleges last fall were required to take remedial courses.

"That policy will result in more youngsters having to take remedial math when they go on for further study," said Gene Bottoms, senior vice president of the Southern Regional Education Board and director of the High Schools that Work program. "It will also mean more students will not be able to pass employer exams that have a math component."

Focusing less on TAKS Saavedra told school board trustees earlier this week that the three-year requirement is unnecessary. It was adopted in 2001, he said, because trustees wanted high school juniors taking math and science classes at the same time they take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam, which students must pass to graduate.

The current policy is based more on improving test performance than on academic quality, Saavedra said. What matters, he said, is that students take the necessary courses. "We absolutely are not lowering the standard," Saavedra said.

Still, Saavedra acknowledged that having high school students take more math and science classes would better prepare them for college. "If we required four years of math, it would work toward reducing the remedial requirement," he said. "I'm not telling you I won't come back with that kind of recommendation (in the future)."

Without the change, 38 HISD seniors will miss out on graduation ceremonies this year, Saavedra said. HISD typically graduates about 8,000 students a year.

Most trustees, including board President Dianne Johnson, have said they support Saavedra's proposal.

That's not necessarily so, said Brett Moulding, curriculum director for the Utah State Office of Education and a former president of the Council of State Science Supervisors.

"In eighth grade, the level of sophistication of science instruction is very different from the level that can occur in high school," Moulding said. "The students' ability to understand that information in the context of more advanced concepts is limited."

"My concern is to make sure we keep our high achievement levels in place and I definitely would not stand for any lowering of the standards," he said. "We need to focus on college readiness and if that means they need three years of math and science in high school, then we need to make sure we have that."

Georgia's DeKalb County Public Schools decided this year to require all eighth-graders to take Algebra I. High school students in that predominantly minority and low-income school system of 100,000 students near Atlanta must take math and science from their freshman through senior years.

"The colleges and universities are saying you shouldn't have students sitting out one year, much less two years," said Wanda Gilliard, a former HISD middle school math teacher who is now DeKalb County's executive director for curriculum and instruction. "We want them exposed to that rigor before they get into a college setting."

Rules vary across the state Graduation requirements vary in Texas. Dallas requires three years of science and math in high school. Cy-Fair requires three years of high school math, but allows students to earn science credit in middle school. Austin school officials are thinking of changing their policy that now allows students to graduate with just two years of math and science in high school.

The Houston school board meets at HISD headquarters, 3830 Richmond, at 3 p.m. today.

This has everything to do with teachers not equipped to teach math and science.

When the students can't pass mandated testing (even though time is set aside to teach to the test and it can be given many times) schools lose their rating, then students, then money. When it's revealed they can't turn out an acceptable product, teachers' unions suffer and that hits the Democratic Party where they live, cloaked in lies and flush with union money.

When schools get caught fudging the testing numbers, hiding students, allowing huge numbers to drop out and finally resort to cheating, but still are rated as failing, what is left?

Well, it appears grade inflation and bumper stickers can't cure their problems any more, so now they'll just drop core courses and keep on, keeping on.

So how stupid is that?

Look at the bright side of this: all these people will be out of school much sooner, and at least have some possibility of acquiring some useful skills and learning habits, now that the distractions of forced participation in the official indoctrination regimen are finished.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

An Angry Look At Modern Schooling
The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn and it isn’t supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, “the control of human behavior.”

Reforming education against all odds ***WASHINGTON -- Some critics of President Bush's policy regarding elementary and secondary education have an alternative. It is: Let's leave lots of children behind.

The No Child Left Behind Act was passed overwhelmingly by the House (381-41) and Senate (87-10), but now liberals see that NCLB expresses essentials of Bush's conservatism. Democratic presidential candidates have denounced it as a ``federal intrusion'' in state and local affairs -- everyone knows how much liberals dislike such intrusions. Howard Dean, that perfect indicator of liberal passions, seemed to think that if tests reveal that many schools are failing their children, then drastic changes must be made to the ... tests.

Yes, the tests can be improved, and schools should have somewhat more latitude regarding disabled students and those whose first language is not English. But many complaints about NCLB are not about marginal or easily adjustable matters.

Teachers unions recoil from accountability and resent evidence that all is not well, or that whatever is wrong cannot be cured by increased funding of current practices. But per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, is three times what it was 40 years ago, and the pupil-teacher ratio is 40 percent lower, yet reading scores are essentially unchanged.

Middle-class parents, who are often mistakenly complacent about the quality of their children's schools, dislike having their complacency disturbed. Twenty states denounce NCLB as, among other things, an ``unfunded mandate'' because they will need to spend money to rectify revealed shortcomings. But as they correctly insist, primary and secondary education -- and their shortcomings -- are primarily their responsibility: federal money is just 8 percent of total spending on grades K through 12. Besides, they can escape the NCLB intrusion if they are willing to forgo the federal intrusion they covet -- $24.3 billion that flows from Washington for NCLB.........***

To solve students' math problems, eucators go to school - Boosting teacher skills seen as key***MILFORD - Meagan Washington took just two math courses when she was studying to become a teacher, one in basic math and one in teaching methods. Now a fourth-grade teacher in Westborough, she sometimes feels overwhelmed trying to prepare 9- and 10-year-olds for state tests on everything from fractions and decimals to multiplication algorithms.

......The report also recommends that colleges and universities boost their math requirements for education majors. Many schools require no more than a single math course for future teachers. ``It's a vicious cycle,'' Fortmann said. ``People don't learn math very well in school, they avoid math in college, and the cycle continues. What we're hoping to do here is break the cycle.'' .........***

3 F's, they're out: Edison sees teacher shake-up***There are no waiting lists to teach at Edison Senior High. ''We've never been able to attract teachers,'' said Shawn DeNight, Florida's 1995 Teacher of the Year and a longtime Edison stalwart. ``We always just took whoever showed up.''

But after the state gave Edison its third consecutive F grade this summer, district officials made the drastic move of forcing out nearly a third of the school's faculty. DeNight and other veterans were among more than 30 teachers reassigned to other schools. ..............***

May 12, 2005, 12:13AM

Reform plan would let two principals stay

But up to half of teachers at Yates, Sam Houston may be replaced if it is approved today

By JASON SPENCER Houston Chronicle

The current principals of Sam Houston and Yates high schools would replace up to half their teaching staffs, yet retain control of the struggling campuses under a reform plan expected to win school board approval today.
But Superintendent Abe Saavedra is leaving open the possibility of bringing an outside school operator into Yates for the 2006-07 school year. He will give the Knowledge Is Power Program a year to rally community support for its offer to open charter schools inside Yates and the middle schools that feed into it. Parents could then choose whether their children learn under the direction of traditional Houston Independent School District educators or those hired and managed by the nonprofit group.

"We don't move forward if the community doesn't want it," Saavedra said.

Kashmere, the third Houston Independent School District high school that Saavedra identified in February as being in need of major reform, will have to wait a bit longer to learn its leadership fate. Saavedra said he needs more time to make a recommendation for Kashmere because the school's principal, Stanton Lawrence, recently resigned from the post.

All three high schools have been rated "unacceptable" by the state for consecutive years. Six non-HISD groups initially offered up proposals for the schools, but two of them withdrew from consideration before making presentations to an advisory panel made up of parents, teachers and community leaders.

Trustees representing the areas that include Yates and Kashmere have gone on record saying they would oppose any plan to turn the schools over to outsiders.

Saavedra's recommendation lets him avoid prolonging his fight with those in the Yates and Kashmere community who loudly protested privatizing the schools. But in doing so, he may have started another fight with the teachers union.
"He just picked a labor war," said Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. "What they've had is a series of bad principals in there prior to these principals. They left them there for years, and now it's all the teachers' fault."

The deadline for HISD to notify teachers that their employment contracts won't be renewed passed last month, Fallon said.

"They're getting paid," Fallon said. "They have contracts."
Yates parent Arva Howard, who served on the advisory committee, said she wasn't impressed with KIPP's offer.
"We thought that was the worst one we read," she said. "It was just no substance; grand statements supported by no one but themselves."

KIPP wants to open charter schools on the campuses that feed into Yates beginning with a class of sixth-graders in the 2006-07 school year. A charter school within Yates would open when those sixth-graders become freshmen.
The Houston-based YES College Preparatory Academy has proposed a similar plan for Kashmere, beginning with a class of fifth-graders that same year.
Howard said she favors keeping current Yates Principal George August and contracting with Kaplan K12 Education Services to provide teacher training and college entrance-exam preparation for students.

"This is a proven company versus someone who is trying to become a player," she said.

KIPP has earned a reputation for improving test scores among poor and minority students in elementary and middle school with a program that employs strict discipline and an extended school year that includes weekend classes. KIPP's first high school opened this year with 59 students in southwest Houston.

KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg could not be reached Wednesday for comment.

Sam Houston parent Maria Garcia, who also served on the advisory panel, said she is happy with Saavedra's recommendation.

"Now, we can put our full attention on strengthening and the evolution of Sam Houston High School," she said.
Principal Aida Tello has told Saavedra she wants to replace about 80 teachers, roughly half of Sam Houston's staff, Saavedra said.

"All the employees in the school will apply back for their jobs," Saavedra said. "The principal will decide who will stay."

August has said he plans to replace up to 40 percent of his teachers, Saavedra said.

The school board is scheduled to vote on the proposal today at 3 p.m. at HISD headquarters, 3830 Richmond.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3178407

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