ADVOCACY: FAMILY
It probably seems like the world is stacked against you if you have a student who is struggling at school. While the world may not be stacked against you, sadly, the public education accountability system in Texas may well be and is adding to the pressures you confront.
The educational bureaucracy often has all the right answers to all the wrong questions which actually aren’t the questions you might need to be asking. Decades of experience tell us that the education bureaucracy often just doesn’t want to hear the right questions. What do you do: double down and ask the right questions.
But you need the right data in the context of understanding in understanding – too often – what the bureaucracy’s top interests is.
One thing we’d like for you to consider is that no matter what the pressure or problem might be, it is rarely true that your child’s classroom teacher is the problem. Today’s classroom teacher operates in a pervasive, top-down, autocratic system which often makes their professional lives way more challenging and limited than it should ever be. Classroom teachers – in so many tragic ways – are unwilling victims of the system. We encourage you to keep that in mind.
We make three points below that we hope gives you some guidance in what we hope our website will help you accomplish if your child needs two kinds of help:
- Help to get past current academic skill gaps that may be holding them back and are not helpful in their academic futures.
- Help to solidify strong skills and advance even more.
Should the circumstance arise where you believe you need independent help, perhaps AEA can assist you in that process.
Here are three major components of our website are explicitly designed to help you be a more effective and forceful advocate for your child’s educational needs:
- Explaining how the current testing system is designed and implemented to NOT tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about your child’s genuine academic skills and actual instructional needs. Through its structural misrepresentations of academic grade level and deeply flawed passing standards of the various STAAR tests, parents are not treated as genuine partners in the public education system. So much of the system is designed to protect the interests of the TEA – not your child.
- By providing you with an independent opportunity to assess what skill gaps your child might have, you can become a more effective advocate for your child.
- By providing you with targeted instructional support and resources, you can become a more knowledgeable advocate for your child.