Equity, Testing Madness, and the Ongoing School Wars
Posted: 11/18/2013 8:08 pm
At the Save Texas Schools rally in March 2011 on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol, I was fortunate to be in Austin and present to see Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent John Kuhn's passionate speech against the billions of dollars in proposed cuts to education and the simultaneously increases in the testing regimes that were being imposed upon schools, teachers, and students by the Texas Legislature. I was impressed by his willingness to break out of the silence and speak out for the poorest and most disadvantaged children in schools in Texas. And, as an advocate for children, I am even more pleased to see his passion is as strong as ever in his new book, Test and Punish: How the Texas Education Model Gave America Accountability Without Equity.
The book is a tale that goes back to the original battle in 1968 in which a parent, Demetrio Rodriguez, who had a child in the underfunded Edgewood school system sued seven other school districts and the State of Texas (San Antonio Independent School District vs. Rodriguez) to require a more equitable funding system to improve the opportunity and life chances of the poorest and most disadvantaged children who should not be left behind just because of their zip code. Although the district court found in favor of Rodriguez's suit, the defendants appealed to the United States Supreme Court and won a narrow 5-4 decision in March 1973 but the battle was far from over and continues to this day.
As a child, I attended school in what was then the sixth poorest city in the country, El Paso, Texas, during the 1970s and 1980s and had parents, who were educators in those schools. Everybody did the best they could with inadequate resources, but it was difficult to not see the massive inequities. While we sat in classrooms in sweltering heat without air