Recently, a political operative masquerading as an expert on education unleashed the following in the social-mediaverse…

“Today, 606,000 Texas children will sit in D and F rating (sic) schools, were (sic) they are not learning to read or do math at grade level. Is this fair to them? Do they deserve a choice? 1,279 schools rated D or F.”

There are a host of problems when you seek the truth behind the above statement.

The Texas A-F rating system has a .4 correlation to the poverty rate of the student body. This means that what the A-F system measures best is community wealth and poverty rates.

The share of state funding for schools has declined dramatically over the past 20 years.  This means if your community is poor, you have to rely on your poor community to fund your school, because the state (by political intent and design) is shirking its responsibility.

To serve a poor student in an educational setting requires more resources than serving an affluent student, especially in terms of meeting arbitrary state minimum performance standards.

So, if the question is, “Is it fair to purposely underfund and create structural barriers to schools that serve poor communities?”

I would say that it isn’t. And the people responsible for this should be held accountable. And by people, I mean the politicians that have enacted these policies and the operatives that serve them.

Do these students deserve a choice? Sure they do, except they are too young to vote. Which is why politicians find it so easy to victimize them. But I get to vote. This election, you can consider me the Politician A-F Accountability System.

Beware of Lies, Damn Lies and Anti-Public School Political BS.

Your turn…

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