Tracy Fisher, candidate for State Board of Education, District 14, visited voters at the Erath and Comanche County Democratic Conventions, on Saturday, March 19.
Fisher is a strong advocate for public education. She has served on the Coppell ISD School Board for ten years. School board service made clear to Fisher that the education system, as it stands in the State of Texas, inadequately serves our public schools.
Retaining teachers and support staff is the first of Fisher’s three main reasons for wanting to serve on the SBOE. “Teachers are running from the profession,” said Fisher, citing poor pay, COVID, and general disrespect for teachers as reasons. She told voters that paraprofessionals and specialists are leaving public schools as well. College graduates are hesitant to enter the profession.
“We need to rethink public education standards,” Fisher listed as another reason for her SBOE run. Right now, teachers are expected to meet a list of teaching goals each year, which are impossible to achieve. The Coppell school system recognized this, and asked their curriculum team to identify the concepts students really needed to learn. The result was that Coppell schools concentrate on teaching about 20% of the original list from the state. Fisher said their students “do great on standardized tests.”
A retired teacher brought up the need for age-appropriate teaching, saying that kindergarten and pre-k students learn best by playing. “Making four-year-olds look at flashcards is not ageappropriate,” she said. She also asked for more vocational classes in rural schools. Fisher agreed, and said she would like to see more vocational classes in suburban and urban school, too.
Finally, Fisher seeks to restore relationships between schools and students’ parents, after the COVID pandemic disrupted pretty much everything in the world of education. She said schools rely on parents to support students in many in-school and extracurricular activities.
Fisher wants to stop the privatization of education in Texas. Charter schools drain money from publicly-funded education to our detriment, she said. Though charter schools are supposed to be held to the same standards as public schools, the standards are not enforced. For instance, many charters require teachers only to have a high school education.
The State of Texas pays charter schools about $1,100 more per student per year than to public schools, without charter schools having to provide special education or other services required of public schools. Another common activity of charter school companies is to purchase real estate, using taxpayer dollars to pay off their loans. Oddly, when the loan is paid, the taxpayerfunded building belongs to the charter school company, and not to the taxpayers. Among other reasons, this is why Fisher wants to keep public education public.
On March 20, Tracy Fisher tweeted a lighthearted plug for public education: “Who doesn’t love kids and Friday Night Lights?” Underlying that is the serious requirement of the United States of America to provide a free public education to all children in the U. S., and this requirement is protected by the Constitution.