I was proud to represent Texas charter schools before the Texas Education Agency last Friday. TEA invited me to speak on behalf of the Texas Charter Schools Association about the Agency’s Performance Based Management Analysis System (PMBAS). I was at TEA headquarters, along with nine dynamic charter school leaders who traveled to Austin from their respective school locations in Lewisville, Austin, Lubbock, Richardson, Irving, Dallas, San Antonio, and Greenville. Each one of us had thoughtfully prepared ideas for improvements to PBMAS. We each took our turn, sharing hard facts about the successes of students in open-enrollment charter schools, and urging the Agency to adjust certain PBMAS standards and filters to accurately measure student success and improvement, particularly for charter schools in the alternative accountability system. One dropout recovery high school shared that they had graduated over 500 students, but only got credit in the current PBMAS system for 200 of those students.
Unfortunately, the Agency was not there to hear us. Even though the Agency had invited TCSA to provide testimony and had published the PBMAS hearing in the Texas Register presumably to invite members of the public, we left feeling like no one listened. The Agency sent an announcer and a recorder. The announcer opened the hearing and kept watch on each speaker’s three-minute time clock.
The live PMBAS hearing took only 45 minutes. Surely someone in a policymaking role at the Agency could have spared this time. At a minimum, an Agency leader should have walked into the hearing room to shake our hands, to look us in the eye, to thank the charter operators for their hard work on behalf of the students in their care, and to welcome us into the dialogue for improving PBMAS and for curbing the staggering high school dropout rate in our state.
Charter school operators were there—ready to dialogue, ready to shape public policy for the benefit Texas’ students and for Texas’ future and ready to propose constructive solutions. Charters school leaders cannot help to shape and improve public education in Texas if the lead conversation partner is missing. We live and we learn; we will keep marching forward for meaningful education improvements.
- Denise Pierce