GoArts News: June 15, 2009
81st Legislative Session Review

The 81st Texas legislative session came to a close at midnight on June 1. The legislature has left town until Governor Perry announces the date for the special session. Veteran lobbyists say that if you don’t lose any ground, you have had a successful session. I am pleased to report, however, that through a unique turn of events in the session’s final days, fine arts education actually secured a stronger presence in Texas schools.

Raising the Bar for Fine Arts Education
Months before the 81st session began, we set a goal not just to fight off threats to fine arts, but to do what we could to elevate the presence of arts education in the overall Texas educational process. Below is a summary of our legislative agenda and the outcome of our efforts.

Joint Senate-House Briefing—On January 26, Senator Florence Shapiro (R-Plano) and Representative Rob Eissler (R-The Woodlands) hosted a presentation in the Senate Chamber featuring Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind—Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Pink’s central message was that the key to the 21st century workforce will be right brain creative thinkers who gain much of those skills through the study of the arts. At this briefing, he was joined by an IBM master inventor, an AT&T vice-president, and a NASA systems engineer who endorsed Pink’s message from their unique viewpoints. Pink’s message resonated throughout the Capitol during the session and played a role in raising awareness of the importance of the arts in our schools—a message that will continue to help us in future sessions.

House Bill 3 (School Accountability)
In 2007, the 80th Legislature passed legislation to create a Select Committee on Public School Accountability. Committee members traveled the state and solicited input from parents, teachers, business and community leaders, and school administrators about what was broken in the current accountability plan and what a new accountability plan should include. Virtually all testimony recommended a diffusion of the emphasis on high stakes testing. To what degree HB 3 will accomplish that is yet to be determined, especially in grades 3–8.

Some critics of the new plan recently passed by the legislature believe it did not go far enough to minimize the number of tests. Others believe it is too lenient in supporting social promotion, and for this reason there were rumors early on that the Governor might veto it. Hopefully his concerns have been addressed in the compromise conference committee report.

Distinction Tier—TMEA started working last fall to ensure fine arts would be represented in the new accountability plan. Through communication with committee members and co-chairs Rob Eissler and Florence Shapiro, we were successful in getting fine arts included in the distinction tier designation. Campuses will have the opportunity to receive a distinction designation for fine arts if they meet a set of indicators (to be ­determined). The Commissioner of Education will guide the process, and hopefully arts educators and administrators will help develop the indicators. With this opportunity, community leaders and parents can communicate to campus administrators and school board members that they want the fine arts program supported in a manner to earn the distinction recognition.

High School Graduation Plans—The original version of HB 3 included a new definition of the Recommended Program, commonly referred to as the 4×4+2. This plan would require students to successfully complete four credits of math, science, English language arts, and social studies and two credits of foreign language. Students would then take eight academic electives to complete the 26-credit requirement. For the first time in over twenty years, one credit of fine arts would no longer be required for graduation. Please understand that this was not meant to be an anti-fine arts plan. Requirements in P.E., health, speech, and technology applications would also be removed. The underlying philosophy of the plan was flexibility—giving the student and parents the opportunity to choose electives in which the student had an interest and to take courses that would prepare them for college or the workforce.

This initial 4×4+2 plan certainly has its merits. The more serious fine arts students would have the opportunity to take more fine arts courses in high school, and schools with strong music programs would more than likely be helped by such flexibility. The counter-position is that if the arts are important for every child, eliminating the fine arts requirement could be a step backward. After grade five, there would be no requirement to study fine arts until a student pursued a baccalaureate degree at a state university where three credit hours are required. Districts could use this deletion by the legislature as a reason to cut budgets and programs that do not directly contribute to TAKS performance.

Final Bill Language—Ultimately a decision had to be made based on whether the benefits of student flexibility with eight electives outweighed the risks of programs being diminished with no high school fine arts requirement. Input from teachers and fine arts administrators convinced us to support keeping the one fine arts credit in high school. In the eleventh hour, Senator Shapiro, Senate Education Committee Chair, championed arts education on the Senate floor and restored one credit of fine arts (and one credit of P.E.) to the plan. After several days of debate in conference committee, Chair Rob Eissler and other House conferees agreed to support the fine arts and P.E. inclusion, and thus a “4×4+4” is the plan moving forward to the Governor.

While HB 3 does not include alternative options to meet the fine arts requirement in law, it does instruct the Texas Education Agency to establish a pilot program to offer fine arts experiences not provided by the school district that could satisfy the one-credit fine arts requirement. There is very little detail at this time about the structure of such a program. The results of this pilot must be reported to the legislature by December 2010.
The bill contains the following language relative to a fine arts credit option:
The agency shall establish a pilot program allowing a student attending school in a county with a population of more than one million and in which more than 80 percent of the population resides in a single municipality to satisfy the fine arts credit required under Subsection (b-1)(3)(A) by participating in a fine arts program not provided by the school district in which the student is enrolled. The fine arts program may be provided on or off a school campus and outside the regular school day. Not later than December 1, 2010, the agency shall provide to the legislature a report regarding the pilot program, including the feasibility of expanding the pilot program statewide.

It should be noted that the final bill language of the one-credit high school fine arts requirement is included in all three graduation plans (the current minimum plan has no fine arts requirement). HB 3 graduation plan changes go into effect with students who just completed the sixth grade and will graduate in 2015.

Middle School Fine Arts Requirement—During the last three weeks of the session, Senator Shapiro amended the Senate version of the accountability bill to require four semesters of fine arts in grades six, seven, and eight. School districts and professional education associations opposed this amendment citing difficulties with implementation, and while we supported a compromise to a two-semester requirement, we were told the requirement would be removed altogether in conference.

Thus when the conference committee report was released on the evening of May 29, we were surprised that the bill included a mandate that the State Board of Education develop rules to require students to take a minimum of one fine arts course during middle school (grades six, seven, and eight).

The Texas Association of School Boards and the Texas Association of School Administrators, who opposed this requirement, stated that such a policy “will significantly curtail the time available for districts to provide ‘double doses’ of instruction to at-risk students in core subjects.” I believe, however, these are the very students who need our classes the most, and this middle school requirement will strengthen programs and serve students well throughout the state.

SB 1364 (TAKS Pull-out Relief)
After swiftly being voted out of the Senate and both committees and getting to the House calendar on May 22, the TAKS pull-out bill was killed (along with hundreds of other Senate bills) by the process called “chubbing.” From that Friday afternoon throughout the Memorial Day weekend, the Democrats talked Senate “local and consent” bills to the ten-minute maximum to prevent the voter ID bill from coming up for debate. Consequently, hundreds of bills died on midnight May 26 due to House rules. SB 1364 was a victim of that tactic. We frantically tried to find another vehicle or bill on which to amend it, but to no avail.

Hopefully the legislative intent of this bill will be communicated to school districts in other ways with the support of Senator Shapiro and Representative Eissler, the bill sponsors. This bill called for local boards of trustees to establish and strictly enforce a policy limiting TAKS pull-out. We plan to meet with the staffs of the principals associations to see if they will join us in educating administrators about the negative impact of TAKS pull-out. We will keep you informed on our progress.

HB 4294 (Textbook Funding)
This highly controversial bill that was passed and sent to Governor Perry provides more flexibility for school districts and open-enrollment charter schools to use electronic textbooks, instructional materials, and technological equipment. The bill provides funds to purchase the technology and establishes a process for approving and recommending effective electronic educational material. TMEA carefully monitored this bill to make sure that money for enrichment subject instructional materials could not be diverted to buy hardware, e.g., laptops.

Professional Development Funds
In addition to chairing the Senate Education Committee, Senator Shapiro, who championed the cause of arts education throughout the session, also served on the Senate Finance Committee. As a member of that committee, she inserted one million dollars into the state budget for professional development to train teachers how to integrate the arts into other subjects of the required curriculum, specifically math and science.

SB 890
(Middle School Physical Activity Expansion)
SB 890 to expand the physical activity requirement from four semesters to six in grades 6, 7, and 8 did not receive a hearing in committee and therefore never advanced through the ­process.

What We Learned

We should not consider the outcome of this session solely as a fine arts victory, but as a wake-up call for arts educators to take a hard look at our programs and how we serve students in Texas schools. We must respond to the outcome of this session as if we lost all requirements.

We should review the relevancy of our programs to our students; communicate to students, parents, and counselors why the arts are important in the overall educational process in Texas; and determine how to better serve students who aren’t members of traditional ensembles but who have to complete the fine arts requirement. We must also consider how the arts fit into an individual’s education, appreciate student’s other academic demands, and respect their time and commitment to family and non-academic interests.

In the coming months, the TMEA Executive Board will make this dialogue of serving students in a more meaningful way a priority in magazine articles, a major topic during the summer dialogue session, and a focus in the clinic selection process for the 2010 convention.

As fine arts programs nationwide are experiencing major cuts, our success during this session to preserve fine arts education in Texas is critically important. An efficiency consulting firm recently recommended to the Austin ISD that they could save up to $15.3 million per year by cutting elementary art, music, and physical education specialists. While such a scenario is highly unlikely, it is clear that the future of our programs and the education of our students are continually in jeopardy; therefore, we must respond to our success in this session with a renewed commitment to music education.

As we plan for the 2011 session, we are exploring the possibility of requesting an interim fine arts legislative study to continue to elevate the role of the arts in the educational system and perhaps to consider a move to the Foundation Curriculum.