COMMENTS I MADE TO THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION IN FEBRUARY 1997:

 

Comments I made to the State Board of Education in February 1997

Members of the Board, Dr. Moses,

My name is Mary McGarr.  I live in Katy, Texas.  I represent myself.  I was a teacher in El Paso for nine years, in Houston for three years, and was a member of the Katy Independent School District Board for five years.  I am a wife and mother of two.  Today you are meeting to discuss the format of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.  Last month the Alternative Draft was presented to you.  Classroom teachers created that document, and it is logical, reveals intelligence and foresight in its content, and is obviously the format and instrument that people who care about an academic education would choose.  It is a document whose format should be used for all subject matter areas.

The fact that you are still debating this issue says much about your motives.  The TEKS are the final nail in the coffin of OBE that some of you have allowed to come to Texas.  Once approved, as intended and expected, OBE will become ensconced in Texas education.  Two governors, two commissioners of education, one state senator, one state representative, and the chairman of this Board [Jack Christie] have subscribed to the elitist idea that 80% of Texas' children should be dumbed down and trained, not educated, to become workers in service industries, in retail sales, on factory production lines, and in other menial jobs where they will earn subsistence wages.  The design of the proposed TEKS format ensures that only 20% of our children will be allowed to become educated and hold meaningful jobs, and government bureaucrats, like the ones sitting in this room, will be the ones deciding who those 20% will be!  Ladies and gentlemen, I find that thought chilling.

If the proposed TEA created TEKS format is adopted, those of you who are sitting here also need to ask yourselves which children will constitute the 20% who will be allowed by the government to become academically educated.  Will it be your children?  Will it be minority children who are already at a disadvantage in this state's educational system?  Will it be children of the wealthy?  Or will it perhaps be those whose intelligence quotient allows them to pass AP courses or whose parents are educating them at home to supplement the inferior education they receive at our public schools and who in spite of your TEKS will become successfully educated?

Look around you.  I see no great intellects in this room.  And I see a dearth of academic degrees among the seven people who are most responsible for bringing this non-academic socialist agenda to the TEKS and to this state.  When your children, without the benefit of a strong, traditional academic education, are working at McDonald's, or behind the perfume counter at Foley's, or cleaning rooms or taking reservations at the Holiday Inn, or standing at the back of the classroom as a low paid "facilitator" while a computer serves as the teacher, think of my children, who are not brilliant, but of above average intelligence, and who, because of some smart teachers  who taught them traditional academic knowledge, were able to earn electrical engineering degrees from Rice University. My sons are both gainfully employed and do not have to live under my roof and will be able to support their own family when the time comes.

The choice for your children as well as all the others in this state is at hand.  When you decide which format to choose, I hope you will not take from our children the freedom to direct their own lives.