With red pens in our hands and determination in our eyes, we Texas teachers in the summer of 1996 gathered around the kitchen table to do the impossible.
We were certain that we experienced classroom teachers could write a standards document for English/Language Arts/Reading that would make sense to every teacher, parent, and student and that would be superior to the broad, generic, Texas Education Agency-produced Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
Our document came to be known as the Texas Alternative Document (TAD). At the State Board of Education meeting on May 8, 1997, the members voted 7-7 (one member absent) in a preliminary vote to substitute the TAD for the TEKS. The TAD became such a threat that the Commissioner of Education and a governor’s aide flew around the state before the July board meeting to convince board members to vote against the TAD. Their mission was to make sure that no controversy raised its ugly head in Texas because of the governor’s possible future political aspirations. After all, it was the governor who had encouraged Texas to take the Goals 2000 funding that had paid for the TEKS process to the tune of $9,500 per page. It was an embarrassment that the TAD, which was acclaimed widely across the United States by education experts, cost less than $50 per page and was financed mostly out of the pockets of the educators who wrote it.
We TAD writers envisioned a set of curriculum requirements that would be built the same way a person builds a house—from the basement up rather than from the top down. We wanted our standards to be specific at each grade level so that teachers and students would be held accountable to measurable goals. We wanted the standards to spiral upward by having them increase in depth and complexity from one grade level to the next. We studied the empirical, peer-reviewed, replicated, scientific medical research from the National Institutes of Health and decided to contact acclaimed reading experts to ask for their help. To our delight, they agreed to donate their time and expertise just to get the research into the standards.
Because we dared to write our own document, we were maligned by the education bureaucracy; our TAD was marginalized for months by people who called it a product of the “religious right.” Of course, no one ever substantiated that charge because there is nothing “religious” about the TAD. It is simply a document written by people who believe that children should be taught explicit, knowledge-based, objectively scored, academic content.
Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr., author of the bestselling The Schools We Need & Why We Don’t Have Them, said this of the TAD: “You provide a grade-by-grade sequence for specific learnings. It is nonetheless enormously useful to have a well-tested and definite sequence laid out so that the wheel does not have to be reinvented in each school or classroom . . . You deserve enormous credit for overseeing the creation of this excellent guide.” Our TAD also has been acclaimed by such education experts as Chester Finn, Sandra Stotsky, and Robert Sweet, and by such newspaper columnists as Debra Saunders, Tommy Denton, and John Young.
What happened on July 11, 1997, when the final vote was taken by the Texas State Board of Education? Politics prevailed, and the board voted 9 to 6 for the TEKS. In the July 1997 Fordham Report entitled “State English Standards: An Appraisal of English Language-Arts/Reading Standards in 28 States,” Sandra Stotsky (a research associate with the Harvard Graduate School of Education) ranked Texas’ TEKS (on a scale of 0 to 100) as a 61; on a child’s report card that would be an F. Of the TAD she has said, “. . . a small group of dedicated teachers has compiled one of the best English-language standards documents in the country . . . a model for the rest of the country . . . Â This is exactly the kind of document that can help rebuild confidence in our public schools.”
Are Texans going to be satisfied with an F when they could have had an A? Only time will tell.
The TAD can be viewed and downloaded at our web site http://www.htcomp.net/tad, or a hard copy can be ordered by calling Kinko’s (open twenty four hours a day) in Waco at (254) 776-7763. The cost is $10.00 for duplication and $3.50 for shipping. The writers of the TAD claim no authorship or copyright privileges—any number of copies may be duplicated.