Ex-TEA chiefs concede too must testing
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Texas Tribune editor-in-chief Evan Smith gets ready to interview former state education commissioners Mike Moses, Jim Nelson, Shirley Neeley and Robert Scott on Feb. 25, 2012 at Rice University.
It was the first time these four men and woman had shared a single stage, at least in recent years. The Texas Tribune billed the event as “Ex-Commissioner Confidential.” Four of the five most recent commissioners of the Texas Education Agency had agreed to appear together for an in-public, on-the-record interview that no doubt would include questions about the most controversial topics in education.
There wasn’t much they kept confidential.
Unleashed from the politics of their public office, former commissioners Mike Moses, Jim Nelson, Shirley Neeley and Robert Scott acknowledged that the Texas education system they had overseen had gone too far with high-stakes testing. They didn’t settle on the appropriate number of tests, but agreed that the 15 end-of-course exams most Texas high school students now must pass to graduate was too many.
On a separate panel, Margaret Spellings, a Texan and former U.S. Secretary of Education, staunchly defended the need for testing but conceded that 15 exams seemed a bit much. Some follow-up reporting revealed that Gov.