There are less than two weeks to go until the donation period closes on an opportunity to contribute to George Scott’s project to restore real accountability to your school district’s real board—the students, parents and taxpayers. My friend George Scott, a veteran public policy researcher, has put together what he calls a Shadow School Board designed to “document that the State of Texas with the Texas Education Agency have spent the last 26 years since the development of the TAAS testing program (through today’s STAAR test) grossly misrepresenting what Texas students’ true academic skills are relative to actual grade level.”
The Shadow School Board is a project leveraging open records requests to gather data on student academic performance and school employee accountability with the goal of providing YOU—the real school board—a how-to guide for examining the activities of your own school district using Katy ISD as the prototype.
And George needs to raise $13,000 to get this project off the ground.
Here’s George describing Shadow School Board in his own words:
“I am going to stop telling and start showing.
- I have assembled my own team and we are forming a Shadow School Board.
- We are going to focus our efforts on the iconic school district of Katy I.S.D. Despite its reputation, everything that has gone wrong in public education has gone wrong in Katy I.S.D. The problem is that the accountability system in Texas is so dishonest that many of the problems are disguised.
- Don’t be misguided. As a strategical methodology, we are targeting one school district so we don’t spread our resources too thin to be effective. Everything we do in Katy can be extrapolated to your district because the common denominators of every school district in Texas are the same reporting systems and the same dishonest accountability system.
- We are going to obtain extensive information; we are going analyze that information; we are going to develop policy votes on accountability standards. And, we are going to document everything we do. And when we do it in Katy, we will show you how to do it from border to border throughout Texas.
- We are going to obtain and analyze contracts and job descriptions and job performance standards of administrators. And, we are going to evaluate how those documents correlate to improved student academic performance – or do not.
In summary, our Shadow School Board will do in the shadows of government what your real school board should be doing in the sunshine.”
George has published lots more information about the project on his website “George Scott Reports” including a video, a link to the donation page and his extensive qualifications to lead this project.
I’d hate to think you missed out on a great opportunity to fund a project that could have true statewide impact on the educational future of all Texas children.
*Disclosure: I contributed.