Recently I attended a working meeting of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) to hear three well-known national experts discuss with board members the foundational elements of reading and the language arts, particularly as they pertain to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), which for the past ten years has been the foundation for the current model for K-12 curriculum standards and accountability. Over the years, in one capacity or another, I have attended and participated in numerous public policy deliberations, and I must say that this meeting was one of the most productive in my memory. In about four hours of give and take, one could actually see ideas and concepts explored and consensus advanced. The bottom line—Texas has an urgent need to revisit and completely overhaul major elements of the TEKS.By way of background, the TEKS document was adopted under the direction of the Texas Education Agency in 1997 and ostensibly developed to establish benchmarks for what a student should know in each subject matter area at each grade level in order to advance to the next level. This document is the basis on which the entire edifice is built—the curriculum, the assessments, the teacher preparation, the accountability, and the incentive system—in short, the foundation for the Texas model of standards and accountability.
As with most education policy in Texas, the TEKS was the product of the efforts of a large number of education “stakeholders”—those members of the education establishment and other experts who are qualified by experience and training to know such things as what a student should know and when he or she should know it, and who, by and large, would be responsible for the implementation and success of the product. It was a consensus document and, not surprisingly, there were a number of competing approaches to its development, most prominently in the reading and language arts disciplines, and more than a few minority views that differed greatly from the final product. As it is now apparent, the grounds for much of this opposition and subsequent criticism of TEKS—its vagueness, subjectivity, lack of specificity of objective knowledge, overlap from grade to grade, and lack of sufficient rigor—seem to have been borne out by our experience in student achievement in the ensuing ten years of its use. So, we live and learn.
The critical need now is to use this learning experience to move urgently and deliberately to the task of rewriting the standards to correct the identified deficiencies, and there is scarcely a higher priority for education policy makers. The SBOE now seems to agree, and it is incumbent on the State’s opinion leaders to insist that they get on with it.