COMMENTS I MADE TO THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION IN FEBRUARY
1997:
Comments I made to the State Board of Education in February 1997
Members of the Board, Dr. Moses,
My name is Mary McGarr. I live in Katy, Texas. I represent myself.
I was a teacher in El Paso for nine years, in Houston for three years, and was a member of
the Katy Independent School District Board for five years. I am a wife and mother of
two. Today you are meeting to discuss the format of the Texas Essential Knowledge
and Skills. Last month the Alternative Draft was presented to you. Classroom
teachers created that document, and it is logical, reveals intelligence and foresight in
its content, and is obviously the format and instrument that people who care about
an academic education would choose. It is a document whose format should be used for
all subject matter areas.
The fact that you are still debating this issue says much about your motives.
The TEKS are the final nail in the coffin of OBE that some of you have allowed to come to
Texas. Once approved, as intended and expected, OBE will become ensconced in Texas
education. Two governors, two commissioners of education, one state senator, one
state representative, and the chairman of this Board [Jack Christie] have subscribed to the elitist idea
that 80% of Texas' children should be dumbed down and trained, not educated, to become
workers in service industries, in retail sales, on factory production lines, and in other
menial jobs where they will earn subsistence wages. The design of the proposed TEKS
format ensures that only 20% of our children will be allowed to become educated and hold
meaningful jobs, and government bureaucrats, like the ones sitting in this room, will be
the ones deciding who those 20% will be! Ladies and gentlemen, I find that thought
chilling.
If the proposed TEA created TEKS format is adopted, those of you who are sitting here
also need to ask yourselves which children will constitute the 20% who will be allowed by
the government to become academically educated. Will it be your children? Will
it be minority children who are already at a disadvantage in this state's educational
system? Will it be children of the wealthy? Or will it perhaps be those whose
intelligence quotient allows them to pass AP courses or whose parents are educating them
at home to supplement the inferior education they receive at our public schools and who in
spite of your TEKS will become successfully educated?
Look around you. I see no great intellects in this room. And I see a
dearth of academic degrees among the seven people who are most responsible for bringing
this non-academic socialist agenda to the TEKS and to this state. When your
children, without the benefit of a strong, traditional academic education, are working at
McDonald's, or behind the perfume counter at Foley's, or
cleaning rooms or taking reservations at the Holiday Inn, or standing at the back of the
classroom as a low paid "facilitator" while a computer serves as the teacher, think of my
children, who are not brilliant, but of above average intelligence, and who, because of some
smart teachers who taught them traditional
academic knowledge, were able to earn electrical engineering degrees from Rice University.
My sons are both gainfully employed and do not have to live under my roof and will be able
to support their own family when the time comes.
The choice for your children as well as all the others in this
state is at hand. When you decide which format to choose, I hope you will not take
from our children the freedom to direct their own lives.