Bills approved in Texas House and Senate seek to fundamentally transform how classrooms are run, giving more power to the Texas Education Agency.
that are basically a list of things students are expected to know for standardized tests. Districts are free to decide what they will teach from that list, and how they will do it.
Proponents argue that the current lesson plans of many schools don’t sufficiently cover the state standards, leading to worse test scores. They also say ready-made lesson plans could make overworked teachers' lives easier, as they wouldn’t have to both craft a curriculum and then teach it. “As a whole, the Republican Party likes the idea that this would eliminate those woke teachers with purple hair and the ones who are trying to indoctrinate our kids because it would give them a canned, scripted lesson and it would keep them on the rails,” said Lynn Davenport, a conservative education advocate from Dallas who opposes the bill.
‘We’re trying to get kids away from the technology and off the technology which failed us during the pandemic. So why would we then push these bills which amplify, no pun intended, the need for technology devices?” Davenport said.In the classroom San Antonio ISD, which governs Lamar Elementary, currently pays Amplify for the curriculum. But under House Bill 1605, San Antonio ISD and other districts across the state would instead be paid an extra $40 per student by the state to pay for the lesson plans from companies like Amplify and Eureka.
A former teacher himself, Sparks said that he himself “would have bucked it at first,” feeling “my superpower is to source curriculum for my kids.Traditionally, teachers have had more freedom to source material from wherever they like, be it through the districts or finding it online, and then patching them together to create lesson plans that cover the standards.Teachers can access the electronic curricula online, and they can distribute them to students electronically or print them out.
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