Education Policy Commentator EducationNews.org

Whoa!Not so fast. The Texas State Board of Education is poised to sign off on new English / Language Arts / Reading standards (Grades K-12), but nobody has taken the time to make sure that the standards can be taught in a year's time.In other words, the standards, if approved in their present form, could set up an impossible mandate for Texas teachers and their students to meet.

A very heated debate has been occurring in Texas over the rewrite of the English / Language Arts / Reading standards (TEKS) for Grades K-12.Heretofore, two documents were being considered, the StandardsWork document and the Substitute Amendment.As of 3.19.08, a third document emerged called the TEKS ELAR Draft, and this is the one to which the public is to direct its comments at the public hearing in front of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) this Wednesday, March 26, at 1:00 P. M.

The problem is that the TEKS ELAR Draft is posted only in strands -- Reading, Writing, Research, Listening and Speaking, Oral and Written Conventions; but I know of no one (perhaps even the writers of the document themselves) who has taken the time to put the strands into a grade-level format to make sure that there are not too many requirements to be taught at each grade level.

After the SBOE casts its final votes on May 23, 2008, all Texas public school teachers will be mandated to follow the TEKS ELAR; and new TAKS tests, including end-of-course TAKS in high school, will be developed along with new textbooks.

Because of the far-reaching implications of this decision, it is vitally important that the SBOE members look carefully at how much material will be required to be taught/learned at each grade level.

The people who are to testify this Wednesday have not yet seen the TEKS ELAR Draft formatted into grade levels. This type of grade-level formatting will not occur until the document is published in the Texas Registry at the end of this week.

It took me hours to cut/copy/paste each element in each strand to a particular grade level, and I had to choose arbitrarily only Grades 1, 4, 7, 9, and 12 because of time constraints. However, by looking at these five grade levels, teachers as well as parents and their children can get a pretty good idea of the impossible mandate that this TEKS ELAR Draft represents.

My questions are these:

·                     How many students would be able to learn this much material in a year's time?

·                     Could teachers implement this much curriculum into their yearly lesson plans? 

·                     Are these requirements simply too numerous and time consuming to be taught to a typical classroom full of students during a school year? 

·                     If the TEKS ELAR (3.19.08) were adopted, would the state be setting up both students and their teachers for failure by requiring much too much to be taught/mastered in a year's time?

·                     If teachers must address each one of these numerous and very involved requirements during the school year, would teachers have time to teach skills to the mastery level; or would students simply be so rushed that they would end up with gaps in their learning experiences?

The SBOE must give careful consideration to the answers to my questions.

At the bottom of this article, I have posted the link to the TEKS ELAR (3.19.08) Draft, the link to the Substitute Amendment, the link to the Texas Education Agency's web site that gives procedures for the public hearing, and the timeline for the adoption of the final ELAR TEKS document.

Please go to EdNews.org to see the TEKS ELAR grade-level requirements:

http://ednews.org:80/articles/24113/1/quotAn-Impossible-Mandatequot/Page1.html

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