BY: Anne and George Scott
From the first paragraph of our launch of Middle School Up Literacy, we want to make the following very clear.
The Texas Education Agency is primarily responsible for manipulating the public education system’s testing and accountability systems for some three decades in ways that have created monumental problems at the district and campus level statewide. To be certain: the TEA is our focal point of criticism for this and what we will present and analyze going forward about the consequences of that state agency – NOT Katy ISD at either the district administrative or campus level.
As we go forward publishing our data and analysis and programs, NOTHING should be interpreted as saying or implying that anyone but the TEA institutionally is responsible for creating the problems we will identify and address in terms of student academic performance. From financial and operational matters across the board, the TEA has too often sabotaged the ability of school districts and campus officials including classroom teachers to be able to take the kinds of actions that are needed to fully protect and serve the academic needs of the full range of children.
Particularly at the campus level, we have enormous respect for the professionalism and dedication of the Katy ISD employees. State government is responsible for so many of the more dire problems. Nothing we write subtracts from that profound belief.
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Now let’s go to bullet points with our ‘bottom line” prime motivations and actions that will guide this website.
- Help parents help their middle school children advance academically regardless of where their starting point is.
- Provide parents with a wide range of instructional support particularly in English, grammar, usage, mechanics AND literature and reading comprehension that they can use in the privacy of their homes to support their children’s instructional needs. We’ve started that process today by highlighting a couple of dozen links to such instructional courses from Anne’s almost three decades of classroom teaching. We have also currently made available at ELA/Math Assessments on the home page our middle school ELA diagnostic test. A math test will follow soon.
- Provide parents with official student academic performance data at Katy ISD campuses in middle and high schools to show them the scope of the challenges which confront their children now and going forward. We’ll start providing campus-specific data by student demographics about a week or so after our launch ‘settles in.’
- Help parents understand the 3-decades of Texas Education Agency’s institutional deception through 3 testing schemes including today’s STAAR about establishing performance standards that do not tell the whole truth parents about the academic strengths and weaknesses of their children.
- To that end, today in the KISD/TEA News Update section we provide the most recent 2024-25 STAAR performance standards. Tables show the low standards for passing the various tests as well as the so-called “Grade Level” performance standards. Additionally, We provide some of our tables produced from such official documents involving STAAR back to 2018-19.
- Give parents a brutal but very factual (much pulled from actual public record) ‘history’ lesson and analysis (a one and done treatment) in an extended monograph that documents the path of academic deception that the TEA has pursued for over 30 years in misrepresenting academic performance standards as grade level credible. If you want to spend an hour or two of your life to genuinely understand how the Texas Public Education System has reached its current crisis, this is a must-read. It will give you the context to understand the present reality. It is in the History Texas Testing section on the home page.
We will start some media marketing next week. We’ll leave the current content ‘steady’ for at least a week while we introduce ourselves. You may send inquiries to this email address; contact@middleschoolupliteracy.com