OPINION
When it comes to educating kids, Americans are just so confused.
They don’t really want to do it themselves, and they don’t really want anyone else to do it either.
This is a problem for teachers, and it always has been.
From its inception, public education in America faced opposition from many groups, but I think most will agree, the debates and controversies surrounding the teaching of children have never actually helped any teachers do a better job.
The common school movement championed by educators like Horace Mann faced opposition from taxpayers, private school advocates and various Protestant and Catholic factions, who objected to state-funded, secular, or generalized moral instruction in schools.
U.S. school history is full of strange chapters, like the time the Ku Klux Klan targeted private and Catholic schools as they worked to implement a nationalist curriculum, causing legislation like Oregon’s 1922 Compulsory Education Act. (Struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1925.)
(Yes, it’s true. The Klan also successfully ran candidates for school boards across the Midwest, West and — of course — the South, where they were able to control hiring practices, ensuring only white, Protestant teachers were employed.)
Then came the anti-science crusades.
On the heels of passing laws in many states requiring daily Bible reading in public schools, which critics say was intended to solidify Protestant cultural hegemony, newly accepted theories of in science in textbooks turned into a conflagration as prominent political figures like William Jennings Bryan and groups like the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association launched a massive campaign to ban the teaching of Darwinian evolution.
The Butler Act, passed by Tennessee in 1925, made it illegal for public schools “to teach any theory that denied the divine creation of man,” leading directly to the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial.
Similar laws or textbook restrictions were adopted in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and Oklahoma around that same time.
(Darwinian evolution had been accepted by naturalists and biologists as perfectly scientific not long after being introduced in 1859. It still is.)
Then the Great Depression almost killed public education in a few desperate years.
After being elected in a landslide, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration began rescuing collapsing local school systems in 1933, paying teachers, and building or modernizing thousands of educational facilities as state and local governments faced severe budget cuts. (They also provided school lunches in some places, which improved test scores.)
You can read more about that here.
Following the New Deal and World War II, the Second Red Scare brought renewed classroom interference orchestrated by the American Legion and Daughters of the American Revolution, who took it upon themselves to aggressively monitor schools in an effort to ferret out perceived communist, socialist, or “un-American” influences.
The First Red Scare, from 1917-1921, following revolution in Russia, made big waves in public schools, but that was just a dress rehearsal for the Cold War.
According to school historians, these groups kept textbook review committees for decades and successfully forced publishers to change or remove content they deemed insufficiently patriotic or too critical of America’s Founding Fathers.
DAR members were sent out as a “committee of one” to “oppose communist influence in schools,” with state branches Texas and other states organizing systematic classroom visits and history class audits to check for “unpatriotic lessons.”
According to a report on teacher harassment by Slate.com in 2022, in 1951, the DAR of Texas claimed its members organized 1,695 separate visits to high school history classes.
Teacher loyalty oaths, required in some places beginning in the 1920s, made a significant comeback, as groups successfully lobbied state legislatures to make public school teachers sign legally-binding oaths to the U.S. Constitution, disavowing any socialist or communist affiliations as a condition of employment.
Loyalty oaths became a mandatory almost everywhere for public school teachers and university professors.
These oaths were required of public school teachers in Texas through the late 1960s.
What Else Can We Throw At ‘Em?
Following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, opposition to public schooling skyrocketed in the South, as those states launched massive resistance campaigns against racial integration, closing public schools, funding private “segregation academies” and working to launch the first “voucher” programs to aid in that effort.
(The aftereffects of those decisions were still being felt in San Angelo until fairly recently.)
Then, in the late 1960s, news stories began to appear addressing falling American test scores, most notably with the 1966 Coleman Report and subsequently, a highly-publicized drop in standardized college entrance exam scores in 1967.
Politicians zeroed in on education as a perfect whipping boy.
Fast forward a few years, and suddenly education is a great distraction for a country in economic turmoil from an OPEC oil embargo and sky-high inflation.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought a major conservative shift to public schools, with the Republicans criticizing federal involvement in education.
In 1983, a newly reinvented Department of Education published “Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” decrying a “rising tide of mediocrity” that sparked a wave of state-level demands for core academics, higher standards, and, of course, increased testing.
The following year, right-wing pundit and author Samuel L. Blumenfeld published a book titled “NEA: The Trojan Horse in American Education,” attacking school teachers and the National Education Association as a dangerous Trojan Horse designed to “smuggle radical left-wing ideology and secular humanism” into impressionable American minds.
This era initiated what became a decades-long contraction of federal financial support for schools.
Experts pointed to a multi-decade downward slide in aggregate SAT scores between 1963 and 1980, explicitly blaming public schools for the loss of American economic dominance to international competitors like Japan.
Those assumptions about test scores later turned out to be erroneous, suffering from a major statistical flaw known as Simpson’s Paradox.
According to experts, test scores declined because more low-income and minority students were now taking the exams, not because education was worsening.
But the idea of “failing schools” was not going to go away.
As the 1980s became the 1990s, state officials and corporate leaders doubled-down on testing to measure public education productivity as the business world complained schools couldn’t produce workers capable of maintaining America’s competitive edge, paving the way for the “standards-based” education reform.
Another significant factor these government reports and educational reforms completely fail account for was simple economics.
School test scores began to decline as soon as wages began to stagnate, in the late 1960s.
(When did it become common to hear of someone’s parent working a second job? That was an indicator.)
At the same time, for a wide variety of reasons we won’t go into here, college was radically transformed from a very affordable public resource into a financial racket that excluded a good-sized percentage of the population based on the increased borrowing costs alone.
As a result, fewer college-eligible students attended, opting instead to enter into the job market right away.
By the time they had children of their own, they weren’t too keen on having to take out loans to put their kids through college either, so for many families, if you couldn’t get a scholarship, higher education was out of reach — or it was going to take you six or eight years to do what others did in four.
Either way, the days when one person earned a living for the whole household were gone, and it didn’t take a genius to see that getting good grades in high school was no longer a guarantee of success in this country.
Reckon that had any effect on education?
…Didn’t stop America from doubling down on the methodology.
Standardized Tests in Texas
Select districts in Texas began giving a battery of exams known as the Iowa Tests to their students in the mid-to-late 1970s.
Originally created in 1935 as a tool for improving student instruction, the tests were taken in kindergarten through eighth grade as part of that Iowa’s educational program.
Lone Star educators were working on something similar.
So, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills taken by the parents of one generation, were replaced by the state-mandated Texas Assessment of Basic Skills, or TABS tests, given to students in grades 3, 5, and 9 to assess reading, math and writing in 1981.
Schools did that for about five years before changing things up a bit with the Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) in 1986, which expanded testing (grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11), and marked the first time students were required to pass an exam in the 11th grade to earn a high school diploma.
That was good for four years, then we introduced the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), which we used for a dozen years, until it was replaced by the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) in 2003, intended to broaden the focus from minimum skills to look at critical thinking.
Then, in 2012, the TEA introduced the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR tests that included legislative updates in 2019 (HB 3906) and 2021 (HB 3261) transitioning the test to a fully-online format, Texas capped multiple-choice questions at 75 percent, and added automated scoring for written responses.
How Much Does All of This Cost?
According to reports from state agencies, Texas poured at least $1.5 billion into developing and administering its state standardized tests over the last two decades.
The only problem is that tests don’t really help the children learn, and they’re not really for the children. They’re for the politicans.
So, that’s money that could have been spent on things that actually help students learn.
Standardized testing at the state level is managed through multi-year contracts with third-party testing corporations handling development, online hosting, scoring, and data reporting, on top of core vendor contracts.
Texas spends an estimated $76 million to $90 million annually on STAAR-related expenses.
According to state records, these contracts include more than $1.5 million a year for educator travel and meetings in conjunction with testing, in addition to $1.6 million for “software configurations,” and a high daily honorarium rate set for out-of-state technical advisors.
Key Contract and Spending Breakdown
- The Pearson Era (Early 2000s–2015):London-based Pearson Education historically held Texas’s largest education contracts over a 15-year period leading up to 2015. Texas paid Pearson $1.18 billion to develop and run state assessments including the state’s final five-year, $468 million contract.
- Texas shifted the bulk of its testing to Educational Testing Service in 2016(ETS) under a four-year deal valued between $280 million and $340 million agreement.
- Recent STAAR Contracts (2021–2025):In 2021, the The Texas Education Agency (TEA) awarded $388 million in four-year contracts split between two vendors, with Pearson receiving $126 million specifically for test development and construction, while a company known as Cambium Assessment received $262 million to manage the online testing platform, scoring, and reporting.
Texas passed House Bill 8, which mandates phasing out the high-stakes STAAR test starting in the 2027–2028 school year. It will be replaced by a multi-part evaluation system called the Student Success Tool. This structural transition is estimated to cost taxpayers an additional $12.7 million in 2026, $32.9 million in 2027, and $16.3 million in 2028, with a recurring annual system maintenance cost of roughly $13 million moving forward.
Parting Shot
The fastest way to improve schools is to create an economy that works for everyone at every level. When a high school diploma actually leads to places young people want to go, they will be more interested than they are right now.
The other big secret is to get all the well-intentioned politicians out of the classroom and let teachers actually just do their jobs, which are difficult enough as it is for the reasons outlined above.
Most human beings are naturally inclined to learn, but we’re all a little different, and schools should provide plenty of opportunities for students to find areas where they enjoy learning and doing.
If I teach you a subject, especially one you’re not particularly interested in, with a focus of you being able to pass an exam at a later time, your brain will know that fact, and you will not retain the information in the same way you would if I had taught you in a way that built new concepts upon foundations laid down in earlier grades.
Even if you pass the test, in 10 years, it’s likely you won’t even remember half the stuff we taught you, because your brain rightly assessed everything you learned for that test was discardable information.
Teachers actually go to college where they are taught how young brains learn. It’s called pedagogy. Teachers know a lot about education, as it happens, and if everyone will just leave them alone, they will have a much better chance of doing their job successfully.
If they’re trying to indoctrinate you kids about something, it’s wearing deodorant, and following through on stuff. They’re not trying to sell them on communism.
That has always been B.S., especially here in Texas.
But too many people are working all of the time and barely making ends meet.
Many of them, seeking out government assistance, find out they make $50 or $100 too much, or that they only qualify for $30 of assistance a week for a family for four.
The idea that’s it’s even possible to have wildly successful schools seems pretty ludicrous under the present circumstances.
Fix everything else and the schools with probably follow right along.
