Steve Schafersman, Texas State Board of Education District 15

District 15 for the Texas State Board of Education covers 77 counties in Texas’s northern Panhandle.  It’s oil (Midland), cotton, Texas prairie and small towns, and lots of schools, and some surprisingly good colleges and universities.

Texas State Board of Education District 15, TFN image – “District Overview
District 15 is huge, covering all of northwestern Texas. It is also arguably the most Republican SBOE district, giving more than 74 percent of the vote to Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential election and more than 70 percent to Gov. Rick Perry in the 2010 gubernatorial race.”

It’s a district where science plays a big role, and should play a bigger one.  The 15th includes those lands in Texas where the Dust Bowl got started, where unwise plowing based on inaccurate readings of climate contributed to one of the greatest man-made natural resources disasters in all of history.  It’s the home of Texas Tech University, where members of the chemistry faculty created a wine industry based on the chemistry of grape selection and fermentation, and where geologists learn how to find oil.

This area leads Texas in wind power generation, a considerable factor in the state that leads the nation in wind power generation.

In short, science, engineering and other technical disciplines keep this area economically alive, and vital at times.

Of the two candidates, Democrat Steve Schafersman is a scientist, and a long-time, staunch defender of science education (what we now cutely call “STEM” subjects:  Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).  If the race were decided by a test in STEM subjects, Schafersman would be the winner.  Schafersman lives in Midland.

The GOP candidate in the race is religiously anti-science, Marty Rowley of Amarillo.  As a good-ol’-boy, former pastor, he’s got a lot of support from the usual suspects.  Rowley’s views on science, technology, engineering and mathematics run contrary to the business and farming interests of his entire district.  Do his supporters look to the future?

Do you vote in Midland, Lubbock, Amarillo, Dalhart, Abilene, San Angelo, Dallam County, Tom Greene County, Cooke County or Montague County?  You need to vote for Steve Shafersman.  Do your children a favor, do your schools a favor, and do your region of Texas a favor, and vote for the guy who works to make education good.

Shafersman is the better-qualified candidate, and probably among the top two or three people with experience making the SBOE work well, in the nation.  He deserves the seat, and Texas needs him.

More:

• Texas SBOE 2012 Election: Schafersman v. Rowley (sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com)
• Texas Freedom Network Insider, “Texas Ed Board candidate advocates teaching creationism in science classrooms”
• Texas GOP candidates support creationism, posting of Ten Commandments in school rooms, contrary to law, science, and reality
• Shake-up possible for state board (mywesttexas.com)
• Evolution tops State Board of Education debate topics (amarillo.com)
• Providing accurate science, history information top priority for state education candidate (mywesttexas.com)
• Potential new faces on the Texas education board (star-telegram.com)
• Ideas for school vouchers are up in the air (gosanangelo.com)
• Democratic candidates Sadler, Schafersman in Abilene today (reporternews.com)
• Views vary for State Board of Education candidates (mywesttexas.com)

Steve Schafersman campaign flier:

Schafersman for Texas State Board of Education District 15 – click image for larger version

Test “priming”: Malcolm Gladwell on how to push test results, and why tests might not work

Who is the interviewer, Allan Gregg?

From the YouTube site:

Malcolm Gladwell in an interview about Blink explains priming, and re-states some of the examples of priming from Blink with CC (closed captions)

Here’s a longer excerpt of the interview; from TVO (TVOntario)?

Discussion:  Gladwell appears to confirm, for testing results, the old aphorism attributed to Henry Ford:  “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right.”  Gladwell seems to be saying that the student’s view of his or her abilities at the moment the test starts rules in a significant way how the student performs — worse, for teachers, it’s the student’s unconscious view of his or her abilities.  As a final shot in class, I have often had students predict their performance on state tests.   I have them write what they think they will scores.  Then I ask them to predict what they would have scored, had they applied themselves seriously to study of history — and of course, almost always the students have a fit of honesty and predict their scores would have been higher.  Then I ask them to pretend they had studied, and cross out the lower predicted score and replace it with the higher predicted score.  At the schools where I’ve taught, we do not administer the tests to our own students, and such exercises are prohibited on the day of the test.  Too bad, you think?

Another exercise I’ve found useful for boosting scores is to give the students one class period, just over an hour, to take the entire day-long TAKS social studies test, in the on-line version offered by the Texas Education Agency.  Originally I wanted students to get scared about what they didn’t know, and to get attuned to the questions they had no clue about so they’d pick it up in class.  What I discovered was that, in an hour, clearly with the pressure off (we weren’t taking it all that seriously, after all, allowing just an hour), students perform better than they expected.  So I ask them to pass a judgment on how difficult the test is, and what they should be scoring — almost unanimously they say they find the test not too difficult on the whole, and definitely conquerable by them.

What else could we do with students, if we knew how to prime them for tests, or for writing papers, or for any other piece of performance on which they would be graded?

With one exception, my administrators in Dallas ISD have been wholly inuninterested in such ideas, and such results — there is no checkbox on the teacher evaluation form for using online learning tools to advance test scores, and administrators do not regard that as teaching.  The one exception was Dorothy Gomez, our principal for two years, who had what I regarded as a bad habit of getting on the intercom almost every morning to cheer on students for learning what they would be tested on.  My post-test surveys of students showed those pep talks had been taken to heart, and we got much better performance out of lower-performing groups and entire classes during Gomez’s tenure (she has since left the district).

Also, if psychological tricks can significantly affect test scores, surely that invalidates the idea that we can use any test score to evaluate teacher effectiveness, unless immediate testing results is all we want teachers to achieve.  Gladwell said in this clip:

To me that completely undermines this notion, this naive notion that many educators have that you can reduce someone’s intelligence to a score on a test.  You can’t.

More:

• Did Malcolm Gladwell Cause The Recession? Ctd (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• The Secret of Malcolm Gladwell’s Success (bigthink.com)
• BlackBerry World: Q&A with Malcolm Gladwell (blogs.blackberry.com)
• Jumping to conclusions, Malcom Gladwell edition (blogs.reuters.com)
• Malcolm Gladwell Responds To Accusations That He Caused The Financial Crisis (businessinsider.com)
• Malcolm Gladwell writing book on underdogs (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Thank God, and the Courts, for Charles Darwin

Rev. Michael Dowd has a book out, ThankGod for Evolution, and he wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News on July 1 (as I understand it — wasn’t in Dallas that day).

I don’t vouch for the book — yet, at least. I’ve not read it. I find the study of science, and especially of evolution, offers no barrier to my faith, nor does my faith offer any barrier to my study of science. My faith, which requires an ethical life, offers barriers to creationism — a subject of other posts. But thank God for Charles Darwin? Sure.

We also need to thank the federal courts, where the First Amendment is enforced, keeping unreasonable fables from diluting science education in public schools.

Which gets us to this: Chris Comer, the former science curriculum expert for the Texas Education Agency (TEA) who was fired for sending out an e-mail seen as supportive of evolution, is suing TEA, to get her job back (it’s illegal to fire public employees for bad religious reasons).

Watch that suit.

Rev. Dowd’s essay, courtesy of Sam Hodges and the Dallas Morning News Religion Blog, below the fold.

Texas creationism scandal only one of many

McBlogger has an interesting, Texas-based take on the scandals at the Texas Education Agency: It’s a hallmark of Republicans in Texas government.

In other words, other agencies are similarly screwed up, and the common thread is Republican appointees out of their depth and unaware of it.

(Do short posts make this place start to look like Instapundit? Looks only — check the substance.)

Tip of the old scrub brush to Bluedaze.

Unintelligent designs in Texas

The Texas Education Agency has lost its mind.  Again, or still.

P.Z. has details. I’m off to discuss economics with economics teachers.  Talk among yourselves until I get back later tonight.

If someone organizes a march on the TEA with torches and other farm implements, somebody text message me, please.

Robert Scott named to head Texas Education Agency

Texas Gov. Rick Perry named Acting Education Commissioner Robert Scott to head the Texas Education Agency yesterday. The Houston Chronicle carried the Associated Press story.

Some Texas educators are disappointed that no one like Mike Moses got the job. Moses is a long-time public school educator who was a very popular and knowledgeable. But disappointment was tempered by relief for what might have happened. Gov. Perry earlier in 2007 named a creationist and hard-back conservative to chair the State Board of Education. Scott is not thought to be that deep into right-wing political ideology.

Scott is a policy wonk, coming out of legislative staff to staff TEA. This is the second time he was acting commissioner. Oddly, he is so little known that it is unclear whether he is the Robert Scott who appears to have acted contrary to ethics and law in an earlier TEA contract problem, or whether it was another TEA employee also named Robert Scott. People who would usually know the difference in such situations, appear not to know in this one.

Were there a stock market in state educational attainment, Texas’s stock would have dropped 8% yesterday, with analysts saying it was better than the expected 12% decrease.

Can teachers alone save Texas’s education system? It’s a risky experiment.

(Text of TEA press release below the fold.)