The Texas State Board of Education’s (SBOE) Committee on Instruction met on Thursday to take some housekeeping votes and receive a briefing from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) on “innovative courses” and the process by which they are approved.
Committee members first took up the issue of Texas high school graduates not having any distinction on their transcripts that they graduated early, voting unanimously to amend the Texas Administrative Code to require some indication on a student’s academic achievement record or transcript if they fulfill the requirements for the Texas First Early High School Completion Program.
The next item on the committee’s agenda concerned college and career readiness courses required in Texas middle schools. The state education code currently “requires each school district to ensure that at least once in Grade 7 or 8 each student receives instruction in high school, college, and career preparation.”
A proposal had been made to eliminate two existing courses and replace them with a single updated course called Flight Plans, but committee members paused before voting to take up the issue of its name.
“We did previously talk about changing the title of it because there was some confusion with it being titled Flight Plans … some people thought it was an aeronautics course of some kind,” said SBOE Member Audrey Young.
“Recall that this course takes a career planning and a college planning [course] and puts them together, so it would probably be warranted to name both. So if you wanted to say something like college and career planning, college and career preparation,” said TEA Associate Commissioner of Standards and Programs Monica Martinez.
Young pointed out that the acronym would then be CCP, jokingly referring to discussions that had previously been held about whether SBOE could ban organizations allegedly affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party from participating in curricula development, as reported by The Dallas Express.
“Let’s try to avoid acronyms,” Martinez said.
The committee members settled on “Career and College Exploration,” voted to amend the name of the course, and then passed the proposal unanimously.
They followed that vote up with another that modified language in the state administrative code to allow for additional career and technical education courses under review by SBOE.
The remainder of the meeting was spent discussing innovative courses, which are elective high school classes with content that falls outside the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the standards for what Texas students are supposed to learn.
“All innovative courses must be rigorous and meet a documented student need. … Perhaps a district or a private entity has identified a particular need, and they decide to submit an application [for a course],” said Shelly Ramos, TEA senior director for curriculum, standards, and student support.
Ramos went on to report that there were currently 200 approved innovative courses in operation, the majority of which were proposed by local school districts or charter networks. Some, however, were submitted by private entities. Amazon Web Services, Ramos noted, had successfully identified a student need and applied for an elective course to be adopted to meet it.
The subject of enrollment in innovative courses came up later in the briefing.
“We have courses that have zero enrollment. … That is something I wanted to point out to you,” Ramos said. She went on to note that some innovative courses have been very popular for years, with tens of thousands of students enrolled.
Young suggested SBEO explore instituting guidelines on course retirement.
“I do feel, based on the data, that some cleanup is needed and that we need to go ahead and take a look at that and maybe put some rules in place to get that done,” Young said.
Martinez cautioned committee members on pursuing retirement for some low-enrollment courses, pointing out that some students with special needs sometimes require very specific courses.
“We can do some thinking about some special circumstances you all might want to consider,” Martinez said.
