Who Lost Bill Ratliff?
April 16, 2007 10:58 AM
Bill Ratliff was the Texas state senate education chair back in the days when that state’s accountability regime was being constructed. As we all know, that regime became a model for NCLB. He is one of the main architects of the Texas approach to school accountability. This from a 2001 NCSL magazine profile:
In 1995, on his notebook computer, Ratliff rewrote all 1,100 pages of the state's education code except the financing section he'd written in 1993. He kept a no-pass, no-play requirement for school extracurricular activities, and a requirement the state maintain class sizes no larger than 22 students per teacher, but threw out most requirements about how teachers should teach. He replaced them with tests designed to see what students had learned.
"We removed all the methodology dictates and said, 'You go teach,'" Ratliff says. "All we want to do is say, 'This is what they need to know, and we're going to check to see if they know it.'"
A few days back Ratliff testified in front of the Texas house education committee. He said that the system has become so complex and unfair that Texas should "not try to fix it one piece at a time" but instead should "wipe the slate clean and start over." According to my friends in Texas, the goal, he said, should be a system that is "understandable to parents, meaningful to educators, and consistent with national requirements." Ratliff stressed that the proposed overhaul is "not about dismantling accountability" but about undoing the contradictions and complexities in the state system that have resulted from add-ons and from the additional layering of “NCLB on top of it." Ratliff actually described the system as having "gone berserk." He noted "as the father of the system," that "it was designed as a pretty simple system that tested math, English, and reading. It was mostly diagnostic and served as a report card to the community as to how schools were performing." In his testimony Ratliff decried a system that has gone from diagnostic to “"too complex for parents and educators to understand and too punitive to produce constructive results." The Austin American Statesman took up his call. Ratliff is working with a group of business leaders under banner of Raise Your Hand Texas. Their goal is to repeal the current accountability system and start over.
Comments
As a Texas educator currently suffering through a week of TAKS testing madness, I wholeheartedly agree that the system must be scrapped. But Mr. Ratliff, whose expertise is in government--as in government controlling the lives of those it can--is missing the point. To be fair, I appreciate his genuine concern for Texas teachers and students, but in order to buy the idea that only a state mandated "accountability" regime of any kind can ensure that children are being educated is a sure recipe for failure and governmental expansion and bloat. No matter what scheme Mr. Ratliff comes up with, and the current scheme is for "end of course exams," which would inevitably evolve into another state mandated, one-size-fits-all multi-million dollar boondoggle benefiting only educrats and their vendors, in order to buy into it, you have to honestly believe that:
1) Local school districts are fundamentally untrustworthy and if left to their own devices, would happily deny competent educations to children;
2) Without the data provided by state mandated tests, local teachers can't possibly know how well their students are doing, nor can they identify weaknesses and correct them;
3) Without the data provided by state mandated tests, parents can't possibly know how well their children are learning (remember, they can't trust teachers to tell them, and apparently, they have so little contact with their offspring that they can't tell either);
4) No mechanisms for correcting any problem in education exist outside of Austin and the Legislature and/or education bureaucracy.
You want to find out what you can do Mr. Ratliff? Give me a ring. I actually work in the field. But no. Why would you want you want to listen to a teacher? After all, I can't be trusted.
Posted by: Mike | April 18, 2007 08:11 PM