School Accountability and School Finance
The State Board of Education met last week where Commissioner of Education, Michael Williams spoke to members addressing funding and accountability.
The highlights acknowledged an additional $2 billion in public education. TEA has asked for $64 million for reading academies in grades K-8. Senate Bill 2 contains a line item for $110 million for reading and math academies for grades K-3. Commissoner Williams will urge lawmakers to consider expanding the academies to 8th grade.
TEA asked for $4 million for training and appraising for teacher evaluation system and SB2 contains a grant for $4 million. Commissioner Williams updated the board on the waiver for NCLB, and made it clear that Texas has not been denied the waiver. The waiver was to allow a redesign of the teacher evaluation system. Texas wants the redesign to provide principals and teachers with more feedback about how they are doing, leading to improvement. The federal government believes the evaluation is to make decisions about personnel and compensation. TEA and stakeholders may not be interested in the federal requirements to pursue the waiver.
As publicized, STAAR Math tests were pushed back for three weeks to allow for more orderly instruction of the math TEKS. SBOE members asked Commissioner Williams to consider how the math test results would be treated this year.