OPPOSING WAIVERS:

Sometimes one is successful and sometimes not.

As a board member I strenuously opposed the use of "waivers" whenever they came up.

A "waiver" is a technique used by school boards and the superintendents who lead them around by the nose to get around some law or policy that the superintendent does not want to follow.

The waivers that griped me the most were the ones to get around the fact that some grades in elementary schools must have 22 students or less.  Katy ISD often and regularly violates that law.  Parents should always ask their kids to count the number of students in their class and report back that number to the parent.  If it's over 22, complain. The State Legislature passes laws for a reason.  Passing them is hard to do.  To have underlings then create waivers to get around the law is just wrong.  Why does the Legislature let them do that?

Another proposed waiver that came up in 1995 was one to allow algebra to be taught to some students over a two year period instead of just one. I was REALLY opposed to this one. There was a reason why they needed this waiver, and the superintendent and the rest of the Board refused to address that reason!

Below is the Katy Times article (written by Dave Mundy) about that subject:

Trustees Question Waivers

December 10, 1995

Katy Independent School District trustees discussed a wide variety of issues during their special meeting Wednesday, with questions being raised about what some board members perceive as "watering down" some courses.

The district is asking the board to approve waiver requests to the Texas Education Association [sic] to allow some students to take a one-year high-school algebra class over a two-year period, and for turning a one-semester Advanced Placement course into a one year course.

Trustee Mary McGarr said she wonders that such an extension smacks of the "no deadline" style advocated by Outcome Based Education proponents, and seems to be saying that a large proportion of the district's students enter high school unprepared to handle high school-level math.

McGarr said the board was told that perhaps 40 percent of KISD high-schoolers might be affected by such a course extension, but that administrators will bring more exact figures to the board before the waiver approval is voted on.

"If we're even close to 40 percent, I'm very concerned," McGarr said.  "Algebra is the easiest math course in high school, and if we have kids who are not ready to take that, we have to take a look at what our math program is doing before high school."

Board president Larry Moore said several trustees have voiced concern about the district's math progress, but noted that "even if you turn a one-year course into a two-year course, there will still be some students who struggle because they don't like math, or whatever.  I think there are still some questions to be answered as to what is the best way to deal with this."

As an example, Moore mentioned that one idea which had been suggested was to allow a two-hour instructional period, as opposed to the traditional one-hour period.

Also considered by the board was a re-write of the board policy, technically titled three-week progress reports, which McGarr also introduced.  She told the board that she's been contacted by some parents who have informed her that some students are not receiving their tests back from teachers.

"The board voted on this in August, 1993, and the intent of the board was very clear at that time, that all tests will be returned to the students," she said.  That's apparently not happening."

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I lost the algebra fight.  I think they still let students take a two year algebra course.  That's ridiculous.  The reason they have to take two years to learn algebra is that they teach Common Core math in elementary school, so students cannot add, multiply, subtract, and divide in their heads.  They cannot work with fractions, decimals or square roots, and they cannot do long division. When they cannot do those things by the end of the fifth grade, they are lost in high school mathematics classes  The Board could fix it, but we have no board members who are willing to fight the good fight to return the math curriculum back to the one that worked for hundreds of years!

In the same vein and brought up in the same article, there was the "return all tests to the students who took them" argument. Below is the letter that the chairman of the English department at Taylor wrote to the board (thus it is a public document.)  You can see the flawed thinking of this teacher. She was truly representative of most of the other teachers at the time and to this day. You will soon realize that I had suggested that teachers did not want to return tests because they didn't want to go to the trouble to make "new" tests every year. If I didn't say the word "lazy," I surely looked like I was thinking it. What actually bugged me, because I have been a high school English teacher of 11th and 12th grade students myself, was that I NEVER gave the same test twice. I had a different test for every class all day long, and if one had to take a "make-up" test it wasn't the same either and was always somewhat more difficult. If one is smart enough to be a good teacher, one does not have trouble making up different tests.  And no matter how many old copies of a test might be out there, my students always got something a bit different with every test I gave.  Surely no good teacher teaches her classes the same way every year!  I sure didn't.  I covered pretty much the same material, but it was NEVER the same. As is obvious I was pretty ticked that two years after the Board voted to return tests to students (a decisions I HAD won), that was not what was being done in our schools. THAT was the superintendent's fault.

To:  Board of Education

       Katy Independent School District

From:  Julie Coolidge

           Chair, English Department

           Taylor High School

RE:  Establishing a policy regarding returning tests to students

Date:  March 2, 1993

Since my presentation to the Board at the meeting of February 22, 1993, I have decided that it might be helpful to provide you with a written summary of my remarks.

As the parent of a college student, as a professional educator, and as a representative of teachers, I feel that it is my obligation to speak against the issue of requiring teachers to routinely return tests to students.  Although teachers work long hours preparing lessons, teaching and reteaching [sic], writing, grading, and recording tests, we are not opposed to returning tests because it is too much work to write new ones every year.  The reasons we oppose sending tests home are much more compelling.

First, test validity and reliability are crucial measures of a good test.  Validity, the measure of whether or not a test really measures what it is intended to measure, and reliability, the consistency of a test in measuring over multiple administrations, can only be achieved when test are given a number of times.  If tests must be rewritten every year because copies of the test are readily available to students, validity and reliability will suffer. Teachers who now conduct  informal and formal item analyses of tests will no longer be able to do so.  Because the tests will be "new" every year, test times will be "raw"--teachers will not have the opportunity to polish, refine, or rewrite test items to better evaluate learning.

A second concern is that using old tests to prepare for mid-term and final exams promotes rote memorization.  As teachers, we have been trained to try to formulate test questions that require both factual knowledge and higher-level thinking skills [see Outcome Based Education elsewhere on this web site to see the meaning of the terms in this paragraph that are in parentheses].  Re-studying test items reduces test preparation to memorization.  We are trying to teach students to think: to be able to look at textbook information and notes and grasp how detailed information forms larger concepts (synthesis), or conversely, to be able to comprehend how large concepts are composed of specific information (analysis and classfication [sic]).  We feel that given the opportunity, students will tend to concentrate on memorizing old test items rather than truly learning the material. By teaching thinking and study skills, we are trying to prepare students for our tests and for tests in their futures:  the SAT, ACT, and college tests.

An additional aspect of this problem is that of KISD's reputation.  Currently, Taylor High School students can take pride in having graduated from a school with a demanding, thorough curriculum. [Of note is the fact that my two sons, who took Honors English, made "A's, and graduated in the top 5% of their class at Taylor had to take remedial English at Rice when they got there.MM] This reputation increases their chances for being accepted into quality colleges.  If it became known that THS students have ready access to tests, their grades might be seen as "inflated," jeopardizing this reputation and weakening their chances of being accepted into the colleges of their choice.  Even if this [sic] did occur, a more serious side effect would be that THS/KISD students would simply not be as well prepared for college -- they will not know how to study for mid-terms or final exams unless old tests are made available to them.  We feel it is far better for them to acquire these skills now.  [At Rice, as in many "quality" colleges, old tests are available to students in the library! MM]

It is most important to note that we fully understand and strongly support parents who feel that their children require their parents' assistance.  As educators, we suggest that his help take several forms:

*  encouraging students' responsibility in taking and studying notes daily

*  encouraging students to listen carefully in class when teachers review tests

*  showing students how to read over notes and recall what was stressed by the teacher in class, or, if recollection is not possible, making judgments about what is important, in the context of the material covered in the notes and in the text.

  *  sharing study tips that parents found successful in high school and college.

If necessary, we are available to go over tests with both students and parents at the parents' convenience.

If the Board of Education forms a study group on this question, we would like to recommend that this group include administrators, teachers, board members, parents of current students, parents of students who have graduated and attended college, and possibly even THS/KISD graduates who are now in college.

We sincerely appreciate your willingness to listen to our concerns as professional educators and hope that we can be of assistance in finding the solution that best helps our students now and in the future.

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I don't have time to refute this argument point by point.  Hopefully the reader was discerning enough to do so as he read the letter!

I was disappointed that Larry Moore, the Board president, offered up the weak and hackneyed point that "some kids just don't like math."  Some kids just don't like math because they had sorry math teachers and/or a sorry math curriculum!