SBOE Member Cargill Wants More Tests
Through circuitous routes SBOE member Barbara Cargill’s mass e-mail to “friends and supporters” titled ACTION ALERT came to ETN’s attention.
In Cargill’s e-mail she admitted to a previous message that stated, “The best celebration of all will be the day that our teachers actually have the new and improved standards (TEKS) in their hands and can start using clear, concise, measurable, non-repetitive standards with their students!”
That statement does not jibe with the fact that on March 26, sixty-four teachers, professors, and educators spoke in favor of the revision of TEKS done by the teachers’ work groups, yet Cargill voted against that document. Those who testified represented every ELA/R teacher organization local, state, and national plus several from our great Texas universities.
One educator speculated that Cargill was anticipating a “celebration” of the TEKS she and her cronies McLeroy, Mercer, Leo, Bradley, Dunbar, and Lowe wanted. “It seems Cargill fully intended to deceive ‘our teachers’ with words such as clear and concise to suggest easier, knowing all the while a word like measurable means MORE TESTS and non-repetitive means SCRIPTS and even MORE TESTS!” another educator said.
Exactly who are Cargill’s “our teachers”? The professionals who testified on March 26 aren’t Cargill’s “our teachers.” Those who testified asked for professional respect not mandates. They asked for guidelines not methodology. They asked for TRUTH. Repeatedly. Sixty-eight times.
Educators claim that Cargill was neither truthful nor honest when she stated in her e-mail that the present TEKS are “fuzzy.” While any document can be improved, they state that there is nothing “fuzzy” about inference, main idea, sequence, and so forth. Nor is there anything “fuzzy” about “Write a composition about….”
Cargill’s maintains that “our teachers’” understanding of these major concepts, concepts known to all professionals in the field of ELA/R, are “fuzzy.”
Cargill holds that “our teachers” want more worksheets, proponents hold this is so they don’t have to really teach. They can pass out the worksheets, collect them, grade them, and then pass out more worksheets until the TEST! “That’s measurable," says Cargill. Brain researchers say, “The approach of workheets, and drill are easy for teachers but deadly for students." Peter Russell, brain researcher states emphatically that any teacher worth his or her salt knows that embedding concepts in a context makes for better learning and a deeper understanding of many concepts.
Test makers suspect that Cargill’s “our teachers” will be in for a big surprise when they discover that what she described in the old TEKS as “an impossible number of concepts to teach to mastery” will actually INCREASE when grammar is taught in isolation and tested in isolation.
Insiders tell ETN that the word measurable when used by the radical conservatives is code for more tests. Recent parental surveys indicate that parents and students are tired of all the testing. One parent said, “The way they are testing now my kids spend all their time in test preparation. I don’t see much teaching or learning going on.”
Many educators and moderate SBOE members believe Cargill wants education in Texas to take giant steps backward. Research proves that kids who identified parts of speech in the 40s and 50s had no better handle on grammar than kids have now. Studies conducted in the business world show older Americans actually have poorer grammar skills than younger Americans.
In Cargill’s ACTION ALERT, she offers no real proof of declining grammar. One of Cargill’s “friends and supporters” said, “These are just the old Cargill generalities framed in what appears as statistics. It’s her old tired ploy. She doesn’t realize the world today is too sophisticated for that.”