Texas Public School Enrollment Rising, Support for Teachers Urgent

Every year, the Texas Education Agency produces a report that spotlights enrollment data for students attending Texas public schools in the previous school year. It also provides updates on many 10-year trends in state enrollment.

The “Enrollment in Texas Public Schools 2014-15” report is now available on the agency website. Beyond providing a snapshot of what the student numbers looked like last school year, this report also gives an overview on the shifts we have seen in classrooms across our state. These shifts are reflective of the opportunities and challenges faced by our teachers on every public school campus.

For example, student enrollment numbers continue to grow. Just a decade ago (in the 2004-05 school year), 4.4 million students were enrolled in Texas public schools. By 2014-15, enrollment had risen to more than 5.2 million. Over that 10-year period, total enrollment increased by 18.9 percent (or 831,421 students).

According to national figures, public school enrollment in Texas increased by 19.2 percent between 2002 and 2012. This was nearly six times the increase in the United States (3.3 percent) over the same time period.

As the Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath has stated it's vital we use this information to make good decision for improving our schools and students performance. "Support for our teachers has taken on a greater urgency if we are to keep our commitment to educating every child in our state". The Commissioner is going to have to step up the support of teachers in many different ways. Salary is a primary for all professionals but along those lines is the everyday assault on the reputation of the public school teacher. There are many great teachers in our schools across Texas but the media focuses on the few that are not. 

The recent events of a teacher in Aldine ISD who was engaging  in sex with a 13 year old boy is tragic and is given National and World wide coverage. This incident is a disgrace and violates the trust parents give educators with their children. However, there are also many teachers in Aldine doing an outstanding job and go beyond the call of duty to help children learn and grow and they will never be discussed in the media. The Commissioner and the leaders of Texas Public Education would do a great service by helping to regain the respect and faith parents once had for Teachers. There is going to have to be a focus placed on teachers who are successful and teachers who go well beyond the call of duty to serve their communities and children of Texas. Paying teachers the salary of a normal professional would go a long way in showing the value of teachers but there still needs to be a campaign to promote, celebrate and publicize the many great teachers in Texas.  It has to go beyond the one teacher who gets teacher of the year. There are several teachers of the year at all the schools I have been a part of and TEA and Commissioner Morath need to celebrate the efforts of these teachers. Einstein said, for every negative, you need 100,000 positives, if the Commissioner is going to support teachers he and the leaders are going to have to launch a campaign to regain the confidence parents once had in the Public Education Teacher and one way would be to show the public the many amazing teachers we have in the State of Texas.

To view the full “Enrollment in Texas Public Schools 2014-15” report (as well as view reports from previous school years), visit the Enrollment Trends page on the TEA website athttp://tea.texas.gov/acctres/enroll_index.html.

The Problem with Public Education

The title can be completed by the statement, "determining what is success"!.  Currently the politicians and experts say that comes from a test students take and how well they do as a group and subgroups. It's so ridiculously simplified into if 90=% pass the test, the teacher is doing a decent job, unless a particular subgroup makes up the majority of that 10% that didn't pass.  It's just not that simple  to define whether or not learning and success has taken place with students over a years time. There are many factors that determine success that are completely out of a teacher or a schools control. Such as druge use. NFL players want us to believe it's healthy for them to smoke. That maybe true for a pro football player but a student smoking weed the day of a test will not benefit from the medicinal qualities of THC. Other factors are teen pregnancy, difficult enough for an adult women to manage through pregnancy. Teen jobs, yes, its common for a teen to work until 10 pm  or even as late as 12 am at night. Once again, not a conducive environment for a students learning when he/she works after school from 4 pm until 10 pm at the local burger shop. Family life for teens can be very stressful today. I come in contact with many teens who will live in several different homes throughout the year due to the fact they aren't living with their parents or get kicked out of the house of a parent. Which, this leads us to the most important factor we all know but yet the politicians and experts will not factor it in, parental involvement and parent's being held accountable. 

There are many factors that affect students academic life. It would be difficult to take in all those factors but the one thought that has begun to develop within the education community that I believe is closing in on the right track and that is throwing away the testing and comparing of groups and subgroups and start looking at the "growth" of the individual student. This is how it's done in sports.  Each player is looked at based on his growth. The player and coach are held accountable for the growth of each player. I believe the quicker we move academics toward this type of determining success, we will begin to get on the right track in determining the success of teachers and administrators and fairly holding them accountable for ther job they do. .  

http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Policies/Measuring-student-growth-At-a-glance/Measuring-student-growth-A-guide-to-informed-decision-making.html