State of Texas: Low Pay and Greater Expectations Have Texas Teachers Singing the Blues

wanna know the truth, ask spouses of teachers. Low pay, unrealistic expectations, constant criticism. No teacher I know has time to fill out a survey.

Ha. Texas legislators are going to interpret the low response rate to the survey as an indication that teachers don’t care about helping state leaders in their effort to improve Texas public education, and that was the intention from the beginning. The fact is that the legislators have no empathy. They refuse to look at the situation of poor and failing Texas schools and low student state exam scores from the point of view of the teachers. The legislators refuse to examine their own education policies and statements to see if the problem lies there. As reported in the introductory paragraph, teachers indeed don’t trust state government and legislators with good reason. And indeed they are too busy to fill out a survey whose purpose was undoubtedly intended to further document how public schools are failing and how bad teachers are. Texas Republican leaders in the Legislature and the State Board of Education have adopted a continuing series of policies, legislation, and rules over the last fourteen years meant to damage and undermine public education in Texas. The purpose is to make public education look so bad that Texas citizens will finally agree to substitute private and parochial education for public education by instituting a state voucher system. If that happens, almost all of the charter schools will become private religious schools and many public school systems will be forced to close due to lack of funding.

Teaching in a public school is an incredibly difficult job, especially if you want to do it well and be successful. The job has an amazingly high burnout and turnover rate because there is little nurturing, empathy, or appreciation for teachers from other adults, including school administrators who should know better. Teachers are passionate about helping to improve students’ lives through education, but they face a barrage of political, ideological, and religious agendas intended to force them to teach a party line in science, health education, history, and government classes rather than accurate and reliable knowledge. In most cases, their school and district supervisors give them no protection from politically- and religiously-agitated parents and state education officials who try to keep the pressure on. Some state testing is necessary for accountability to document academic achievement, but for a while the intention was to overwhelm students and thus teachers with state tests. Class sizes are so large, students so typically disruptive, and there are so many time-wasting events and social distractions that detract from instruction and learning in typical Texas classrooms that teachers must rely on commonly-used grade inflation and social promotion to get students through the system and onto the graduation stage. Such cynical shortcuts and remedies cause enormous frustration and low job satisfaction.

Texas curriculum standards are inordinately long and complex, often filled with political, religious, and ideological mandates, and require extraordinary prepared classroom materials to deal with them. When Texas teachers prepared such excellent materials (CSCOPE) to be used inexpensively throughout Texas, they and the materials were attacked by rabid reactionary religious-right Tea Party Republican zealots, who very maliciously and unfairly disparaged these materials, causing them to become less popular despite their immense value. The same thing happened to moderate and simpler curriculum standards prepared by a multi-state consortium and a group of professional science organizations to be used throughout the country (Common Core State Curriculum Standards and Next Generation Science Standards). An overwhelming abundance of textbooks and classroom materials have been and are being prepared for these new standards. Because of the intended scale, they will be inexpensive and mostly digital since many states and organizations are working together on the effort along with mainstream and niche publishers. Perhaps the greatest benefit is that standardized exams based on these standards could legitimately compared across the country. Texas deliberately avoided both of these professional cooperative curriculum efforts to its immense loss. No wonder Texas teachers feel aggrieved. The state has been doing and continues to do everything it can to make Texas teachers’ jobs harder, not easier. For example, I think most teachers would be happy to accept their current low to moderate state-mandated salaries in return for a more-manageable smaller classroom size. Good instruction and learning does not flourish in crowded classrooms.

Public education in Texas will improve when the deliberate, blatant politicization of education stops and state government officials begin to nurture public schools and teachers rather than continually disparage and insult them. Invest money in public schools, not charter schools (which are supposed to be public but actually have their own private school agendas), virtual schools, and private schools. Stop trying to damage public education in Texas in order to encourage adoption of private school voucher schemes. Adopt the same science, math, social studies, and English standards that the majority of states plan to use and get the reprehensible Texas State Board of Education out of the curriculum standards-writing business in which every standard is an invitation to vote in some ideological, political, or religious mandate regardless of its educational advisability or even its veracity. Not only would these remedies improve public education in Texas, everything would be less expensive and teachers’ salaries could be raised to the national mean.