Donna Bahorich, the Texas State Board of Education member representing Houston District 6, spoke to the Downtown Pachyderms at Spaghetti Warehouse last Thursday. Donna gave a very informative overview of the duties and responsibilities of the Texas SBOE.
The four priorities of the Texas SBOE, as outlined by Donna are:
- fiduciary responsibility for the $26 billion PFS Permanent School Fund, kept constitutionally under the SBOE
- establishing policies governing the curriculum standards & services provided by Texas public school
- designation of the standards to be adopted in the textbooks
- approving the establishment of charter schools
Some of the most salient points about the four priorities Donna shared pertained to transparency and the ability of Texans to give public testimony at SBOE hearings. The SBOE issues a proclamation to textbook publishers, the publishers bring the books to the SBOE for review, teams review the textbook contents and an environment is provided to facilitate public testimony/ feedback.
Donna explained Senate Bill 6 now allows local school districts to chose the hardware, software and textbooks desired by each ISD but mentioned the bill contained no legal requirement for local ISD’s to implement the same rigorous review of hardware, software and textbooks performed by the SBOE. I have a beef with Fort Bend ISD using my tax dollars to buy IPads for kids (silly Yvonne thinks purchasing IPads for children is the responsibility of the parent, not the taxpayer) but that’s a story for another time.
This is the conundrum I now see many parents & community members facing. In the quest for more local oversight & local control over facets of public education, it will be interesting to monitor the ISD Board Trustee meetings minutes to learn which ISD’s voluntarily implement a reviewer, public testimony process and which ISD’s don’t (or have not) and then how many parents or outside entities really do get involved in the review process & provide for public feedback. Call me a cynic, but the scarcity of campaign signs promoting upcoming ISD Board Trustee elections in relation to the number of people who vote in or have interest in their ISD’s seem correlated to each other.
Donna citied a statistic that 5 million students attend Texas public schools, representing 10{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of all public school students nationwide. No doubt what the Texas SBOE implements is & has been controversial, but I’m making a lifelong commitment to learn how Big Education works in Texas. Thanks Donna!
Find your SBOE elected member here and the SBOE District map here.