Education in Texas

Identify the origins of Public Education in Texas. How has it evolved over the past 150 years?

Texas has been one of the major states where education sector has flourished for the last 150 years and in contemporary scenario as well, education reforms have sustained in Texas yielding a high percentage of university grauduates each year. In Texas, public educators were entitled to receive generous benefits, for a long time including “defined-benefit” pensions that do not require any contribution from the teachers (Evertson, 2008).

What are some of the major milestones of the system?

During the 1990s, Texas was at the forefront of the high-stakes testing movement. At the time, the state had been using the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS)—a standardized criterion-referenced test to evaluate teachers' and students' progress. It was a high-stakes test because students could be held back and teachers could be evaluated. At the time, increases in TAAS scores were billed as “evidence” that high-stakes testing was working. But just like the problems from the 1980s with the ITBS, researchers questioned the validity of this claim because of skepticism that students did not learn more, but instead just got better at taking the test (Evertson, 2008).

What major reforms has it experienced?

Texas has created the Safe Schools Act to comply with a federal mandate. In 1995, the 74th Texas Legislature enacted the Safe Schools Act, Chapter 37, Law and Order of the Texas Education Code. The new discipline code included a section on the student code of conduct; a section on guns, knives, and other weapons; and a section on drugs. The Texas Safe Schools Act did not use the phrase zero tolerance, but it did emulate many of the zero tolerance policy requirements, including: (1) a non-discretional enforcement policy, (2) the highly prescriptive, non-negotiable requirements of zero ...