ATPE News

Winter 2014

ATPE News is the official publication of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, the largest educator association in Texas. The magazine addresses the most important issues affecting public education in the state. Learn more at ATPE.org.

Issue link: https://atpe.epubxp.com/i/435977

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 7 of 43

8 | atpe.org atpe news Texans on education by Michael Marder, professor of physics and co-director of UTeach at the University of Texas at Austin Texas Public Education: Better Than You Think Texas schools have made remarkable progress in very important areas, and everyone should know about it. Public education is often in the news, and the news is almost always bad. Criticism of public schools comes from the desire to make them better. Yet, so relentless is the emphasis on things going wrong that even those who work in schools can become discouraged and wonder if they are doing much good. Here is the reality. Texas schools have made remarkable progress in very important areas, and everyone should know about it. The Truth about Texas Schools Let's start with middle school mathematics. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2013, comparing all the states, Texas's low-income students are in a four-way tie for second place, dipping slightly from a frst-place showing in 2011. Texas's Hispanic students are in fourth place, as are our African American students. The results in other subjects are not as striking but still good: Texas's low-income eighth graders perform signifcantly higher than the national average in science and at the national average in reading. One aspect of these rankings can be puzzling. Texas students overall are in a four-way tie for 16th place in eighth-grade mathematics. Why do Texas students overall rank much lower than both the state's low-income students and its well-off students? The answer is that Texas has a particularly large share of low-income students, around 50 percent. Students across the country who are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch do worse on almost every academic measure than students who are not eligible. In judging the effectiveness of teachers and schools, it is only fair to take that into account, and the way to do that is to pay more attention to the rankings of subgroups such as low- income students than to overall rankings. Between 2005 (left) and 2013 (right), the percentage of Texas students not needing remedial mathematics after high school improved greatly. Every bubble is a school. The horizontal axis shows school poverty concentration, and the vertical axis shows percentage of kids with high enough test scores in mathematics to exempt them from remedial mathematics if they go to college.

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of ATPE News - Winter 2014