Fort Worth ISD's state-appointed board will consider more job cuts at a meeting Tuesday night — as well as the possible closure of a school for refugee and immigrant students.
This comes after the district announced staff cuts as part of a restructuring at 25 schools. The district is also trying to recruit new teachers and is raising teacher pay by 5% next year.
Ale Checka is a teacher in Fort Worth ISD who’s been vocal about academic issues in the district, and she joined KERA's Miranda Suarez to give her take on what the state takeover should look like.
KERA News reached out to Fort Worth ISD to request an interview with the state-appointed superintendent Peter Licata but did not hear back by our deadline.
These interview highlights have been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full conversation with Ale Checka by clicking the 'listen' button above.
Staff cuts
We have gotten a lot of statements from leadership saying that the problem is not curriculum, it's not leadership, it's just teachers. I just find it super, super statistically unlikely that by coincidence, every single one of these teachers individually did a bad job of implementing the curriculum that they were given and I find it a lot more statistically likely that there's a common denominator here — curriculum and professional development.
I don't dispute that you need restructuring at the classroom level. There are people in classrooms that shouldn't be in classrooms. It just really raises a lot of red flags to me. If your intention here was to improve academics and literacy specifically, that you didn't start there.
Systemic issues
Like many teachers in Fort Worth ISD, we've been through the wringer. This is our fourth superintendent in four years. We went through COVID, we went through book bannings, all kinds of things. So when we're told, 'hey, this is the literacy year' for multiple successive years, I guess the things that I'm looking for is like, where's my army of dyslexia specialists? Where's the army of librarians, so that we have print rich culture in all the schools? Where's the budget for teachers? Where are the books? And I do mean where are the literal, physical books in classrooms, in libraries, in the curriculum. Where's the help?
Instead, what we're getting is, 'hey, our plan is to do exactly what we are already doing,' which is the scripted curriculum. That is a year old strategy from [the Texas Education Agency]. The scripted curriculum that we were made to implement by directors from TEA was AI slop.
I would completely revamp the professional development so that it wasn't focused on memorizing scripts, but rich training on poetry, plays, novels. If I was in charge, the very, very first thing that I would do is give public reassurance to parents, teachers, students, everyone that the selling point of the curriculum is not that it's scripted, but that it's high quality and coherent. We just haven't seen any of that.
"AI slop" curriculum
It literally is timed by the minute. Every teacher in every classroom, regardless of the needs of their students, is on the same slide at the same minute. This is an approach that is not uncommon in large urban districts. The problem is the implementation.
If you are putting all of your eggs in the scripted basket, you need to finish that script before the school year starts, you need to edit it, and you need to make sure that the content is factually correct. So if you're going to put material in front of a teacher and say they can't deviate from it by one word, all of those words need to be correct.
What we have been told repeatedly by these statements to the media is that anybody who questions or complains or is disobedient to this, it's because they're uncomfortable or, as the superintendent said, mediocre. So when I hear officials say, well, 'we're not doing the Houston model, we're doing the Fort Worth model,' I guess my confusion is just, in what way? Because that could be positive. It could be that they have learned from what happened in Houston, but it could be negative. I just would like to know, and it's very opaque.
Miranda Suarez is a cohost of KERA's forthcoming talk show, NTX Now. Got a tip? Email her at msuarez@kera.org.
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