Floor Pass

A week after the Senate voted to reduce standardized testing in high school, the Senate Education Committee took up a proposal to eliminate the STAAR writing test for 4th and 7th graders as well.

They also hinted at an interim study on the state’s process for developing the standards those tests are based on.

Most witnesses supported House Bill 2836 and said lawmakers should scale back testing even further, to decrease stress on kids and give teachers more time to get into detailed lessons. The bill also limits the time dedicated to the tests, and the number of benchmark tests schools can be give before the state test.

Laura Yeager, a parent and member of Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, said the writing test isn’t an accurate measure of students’ writing skills, and used her son as an example. He’s in the top of his high school class, she said, but scored low on the writing test. Yeager said the test developer, Pearson, told her good writers often do poorly because they write more than the 26-line limit.

“We don’t think extra tests mean extra teaching,” Yeager said. “They lead to formulaic writing.”

Bill Hammond, president and CEO of the Texas Association of Business, disagreed, as he has all session, arguing state tests are an important way to evaluate what students are learning across the state.

In a twist, Hammond agreed when Sen. Leticia Van de Putte (D-San Antonio) suggested that lawmakers should study the TEKS, the state standards the tests are based on, after the legislative session wraps up. Hammond said teachers are spread thin trying to cover too many TEKS before the tests, and worried about the state’s process for adopting the standards.

“Let’s solve these problems, not eliminate the tests,” Hammond said.

Developing the TEKS is the State Board of Education’s biggest responsibility, and their once-a-decade revisions are typically a contentious process. Van de Putte said she expected a “very vivd interim” discussing the TEKS, and committee chair Dan Patrick (R-Houston) agreed it could mean “a battle royale” over the process.

Highland Park ISD Superintendent Dawson Orr said that both testing and the vast number of TEKS teachers must cover create problems. “There’s simply too many standards to be addressed in a reasonable way in-depth,” he said.

Orr said teachers don’t know which TEKS to focus on because they don’t know which ones will actually be tested, a problem across many subjects, not just writing. He recalled the case of a teacher who said she felt pressure to cover all the TEKS, leaving little time for students to work through the concepts in detail.

“She essentially taught the lunar phase in one day, as opposed to student keeping journals, observing, using the scientific process to draw conclusions,” Orr said. “It was force-fed in one day.”

The Senate Education committee left the bill pending.

The Lead:

The Legislature went after mucus yesterday.

That would be Michael Quinn Sullivan (often referred to as MQS—or mucus) who leads the tea party group Empower Texans dedicated to electing more conservative Republicans to office. Sullivan, who fashions himself as a Texas version of Grover Norquist, and his group have poured money into campaigns of tea party challengers to Republican incumbents, including Speaker Joe Straus and his leadership team.

The Texas House took on Sullivan yesterday, giving initial approval to SB 346 that would require politically active nonprofits to disclose donors who give $1,000 or more. The bill would increase transparency for all political nonprofits, but there’s no doubt who House members had in mind—bill sponsor Charlie Geren even mentioned Sullivan by name during the floor debate.  True to form, Sullivan responded on Twitter.

As the Observer‘s Liz Farmer reports, Geren managed to fend off all amendments. Keeping the bill “clean” would steer it away from the Senate, where Sen. Dan Patrick famously tried to have a do-over after the Senate passed the bill earlier in the session and tried to take the bill back from the House (and the House refused).

If Geren can keep the bill identical to the Senate’s version, it would go straight to Gov. Rick Perry. The House must pass the measure on third reading today. Then the attention shifts to Perry, who’s been close with Sullivan. We could soon find out exactly how much pull Sullivan has with the governor.

Yesterday’s Headlines:

1. The House approved the Michael Morton Act and a companion bill aimed at reducing wrongful convictions and holding prosecutors accountable for misconduct. The package was backed by Morton, who spent 25 years in prison wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. The Tribune‘s Brandi Grissom has more.

2. Budget conferees agreed yesterday to restore funding for CPRIT, the troubled cancer-fighting agency, which has proved that in Texas even cancer research isn’t immune from cronyism. The Statesman has the story (you need a subscription now).

3. Speaking of the budget conference committee, the Tribune reports that conferees could include a rider in the budget that would lay out a framework for Medicaid expansion.

Line of the Day:

“I think that’s what the problem is when you’ve got people running around giving millions of dollars, spending millions of dollars and keeping their contributors a secret.” —Rep. Charlie Geren during yesterday’s debate on SB 346 that would force political nonprofits to disclose major donors.

What We’re Watching Today:

1. The House will vote on several high-profile bills on third reading, including the Michael Morton Act to prevent wrongful convictions and SB 346, MQS’s favorite transparency bill.

2. The Senate Criminal Justice Committee will hear HB 166, which would establish the Tim Cole Exoneration Review Committee to investigate wrongful convictions.

The House gave initial approval to a bill on Monday aimed at tea party activist Michael Quinn Sullivan.

The measure would require politically active nonprofits, like the one Sullivan heads, to disclose their political contributions. It was a win for bill sponsor Charlie Geren (R-Fort Worth), who successfully defeated all amendments, keeping the bill “clean.”

Geren wanted to keep the language of Senate Bill 346 the same as the version passed by the Senate. If the Senate and House pass identical versions, the bill would go straight to Gov. Rick Perry, instead of back to the Senate or to a conference committee, where the bill would face an uncertain future.  That’s because the Senate approved the legislation but soon after the vote, some senators, namely Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston), said they’d made a mistake and tried to reverse the vote. At that point the legislation had already been handed over to the House. It’s not clear whether Perry would sign the bill or veto it.

Sullivan is known as a Republican enforcer and no friend of House Speaker Joe Straus. Sullivan heads Empower Texans, a nonprofit devoted to electing more conservative Republicans to office and challenging members of Straus’ leadership team. In the past several sessions, he has hassled GOP lawmakers, especially through social media, for not being conservative enough, routinely threatening lawmakers with election challenges.

It’s hard to know who exactly is funding Sullivan’s cause—and that of other political nonprofits—because they haven’t had to disclose their donors. But under the bill, 501(c)(4) nonprofits would be required to report political contributions of more than $1,000.

“If someone wants to hide, my suggestion would be don’t get into the political realm,” Geren said after calling out Sullivan on the floor (which Sullivan thanked him for on Twitter). “If you want to play, play by the same rules everyone else does.”

Geren said there are people who are impacting what the Legislature does and aren’t reporting how their doing it or what politicians are receiving that funding.

“I think that’s what the problem is when you’ve got people running around giving millions of dollars, spending millions of dollars and keeping their contributors a secret,” Geren said.

The major issue some representatives had with the bill is language regarding unions because they aren’t held to the same reporting standards as the non-profit corporations. Geren told representatives he would try to better tailor the language once it passed, but if any amendments were added to clarify it now then the bill would die once back in the Senate. Rep. Richard Peña Raymond (D-Laredo) pressed Rep. Phil King, who introduced an amendment on unions, to confess that he was trying to kill the bill.

“Just say it,” Raymond said. “This is about transparency. Let’s be transparent. Just say ‘I Phil King am trying to kill this bill instead of letting the people of Texas know which rich folk, which big money is going in to big government, going in to buy big government. That’s what this bill is about. People want to know. People want to know who’s pouring in millions of dollars and trying to buy politicians.”

Geren and his supporters convinced enough of the House to put aside all of the proposed amendments and initially approve the bill on a vote of 99-46. The House will take a final vote on the bill today. If it passes unchanged, the bill goes to Perry’s desk.