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Longhorn-breeder wrote:

chasfm11 wrote:So here are some interesting questions not addressed in your OP

1. The charge per student ($7 per pupil per year) for the use of CSCOPE seem excessive. Why? Who agreed to allow Texas school districts to pay these charges across the State and what mechanism is available to determine the exact extent to which the CSCOPE materials are a success or a failure?.
en hard to come by before. .....
... Overall, we are spending a lot more money per student in the US than in other countries and the overall performance of the schools across the country is not improving. I think those who are calling for the schools to be run like businesses are tuned into that problem. The solution, like just about everything else that the government controls, is to throw more money at it. That isn't working any better than the proposed gun controls are going to work to solve gun crimes.

Really you think $7 per student per year is too much to spend on ciruclum? Seriously I agree it Adds up when multiplied by thousands but do you really believe hat your children's educational material as are overpriced at $7 per head?

This is NOT the total student cost. It is only for the CSCOPE materials. This is for the right to use the teacher prep items, slides, etc. that are part of the CSCOPE program. Think of it as an activity fee per student for each classroom where the materials are presented. Text books, tests, supplies and all of the other items that the students use are not part of the $7 charge. Nor is the calculation of time as a part of the the teacher salary and benefits, the school building, the administrative overhead, etc. No way is the total cost per student even close to $7 per student.
http://www.fastexas.org/study/exec/spending.php

I don't pretend to understand the exact relationship between CSCOPE and the standardized testing. No one outside of a select few is permitted to see any of that - a problem in and of itself. I will tell that that any Liberal bias aside, I have a problem with materials that are supposedly geared toward "teaching the test." The purpose of standardized testing is supposed to be the assessment of learning that is taking place as part of the overall curriculum. When you build the curriculum around the standardized test, you have, in my view, the "tail wagging the dog."

I only have seen the standardized testing results (not the questions - I'm not allowed to see those) that our granddaughter brought home from 3rd grade. I have a permanent teaching certificate in PA and have completed Masters level work in college. I could not have passed the 3rd grade test, based on the results that I saw. Why? Test results were so bizarre and completely unrelated to anything that I've ever studied that it would have been impossible to understand without coaching the intent of the responses that I would have been expected to supply.

As the OP said, this is a complex matter. It is too complex. In the morass of SCOPE and other programs, the goals of education are being lost. I personally believe that our schools are too college oriented but even that is failing. I'm not happy about the sensationalism in this article but it does speak to my fundamental concern
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/ ... -colleges/

When 80% of the HS graduates from an area don't understand the fundamentals that are part of the curriculum, there is a problem. I don't believe the phenomenon is isolated to NYC based on the students that I've talked to from some of my local schools.

There is a great need for transparency. This is not NASA and a space vehicle that the government doesn't want to fall into Russian hands. It is public education. I agree that I, as a citizen, have an obligation to help to pay for the education system. I want to see what is going on with it. I want to see how the schools are being measured and how they are achieving their results. I want the local school officials to have and to take ownership of the materials that are being used to achieve those results. A lot of the problems with CSCOPE and other programs would go away if that kind of sunlight were shining on them.

Edit: correct the CSCOPE term

So here are some interesting questions not addressed in your OP

1. The charge per student ($7 per pupil per year) for the use of CSCOPE seem excessive. Why? Who agreed to allow Texas school districts to pay these charges across the State and what mechanism is available to determine the exact extent to which the CSCOPE materials are a success or a failure?.
2. Why are there lengthy non-disclosure agreements with serious penalties attached to violations required to be signed by teachers over CSCOPE materials. I worked an in industry which had trade secrets which would have definitely given the competitors an advantage if those secrets had been revealed and we never had anything like these. What has CSCOPE to hide?
3. In that same vain, why did it take so long for the SBOE to get access to all the CSCOPE materials? Further, who in each of the school districts that is using CSCOPE has seen all of the 1,500 sets of materials and approved them for use in that district? If not, how can any administrative team authorize and pay for materials that they haven't reviewed and under whose counsel did they do that?
4. Why are their anecdotal stories about CSCOPE driving teachers from their positions? If the materials are as innocuous as you have stated, why would any teacher object to them?
5. CSCOPE and all of the other programs aside, do you not believe that there is a strong to rampant Liberal bias in the schools? Surely you don't contest that such a bias exists in our higher education system, including our major Texas colleges and universities. How is that bias not filtering down to the lowest levels in our public education system when the teachers who working them are products of the heavily biased teacher training. Why are there never stories about Conservative bias to at least mirror the Liberal ones when the media which would report those stories is heavily Liberal biased itself? For me, CSCOPE is just a means to an end and nothing would change if CSCOPE weren't used. From the ancedotes provided, it simply facilities the result. It does provide specific examples of some of the lessons that are being taught and those have been hard to come by before.

I'll freely admit that it is every difficult for those of us outside of the education community to understand what is related to what. TEKS, Common Core? As a concerned citizen, I'm denied access to all of that. I can only rely on those who have done investigative work and I know that I must discount much of that the same way as I discount just about everything that Alex Jones says, even though Matt Drudge picks some of it up from time to time.

My perspective is that the fundamental flaw in public education is that the Federal government is involved. They have used the purse strings to control the schools and, like the post office, the result has not been beneficial to the purpose of educating kids. I would strongly agree that there are teachers like yourself who are dedicated to teaching kids. I will also tell you that, like in the Chicago public schools, there are vast numbers of teachers who should never been in front of a class room. I saw some of that first hand in Philadelphia. The extent to which that same problem exists in the Texas schools is not clear to me.

I agree that it is a complex problem. There are clearly some ISDs who are well run and do a good job, sometimes in spite of the circumstances in which they operate. Overall, we are spending a lot more money per student in the US than in other countries and the overall performance of the schools across the country is not improving. I think those who are calling for the schools to be run like businesses are tuned into that problem. The solution, like just about everything else that the government controls, is to throw more money at it. That isn't working any better than the proposed gun controls are going to work to solve gun crimes.