After Vilification of Public schools and Vouchers shift, Republicans move away from testing and higher standards. Big Business Blindsided, Betrayed and Apoplectic.

Wanna know how sincere Republicans are about improving education, now they've bashed public schools and sold for-profit private voucher schools?

After strapping public schools with a heavy load of testing under NCLB, which turned a big profit for closely tied Republican businesses that wrote the tests (all in an effort to fail public schools), they’re now reversing course.

Since Republicans have successfully shifted taxpayer dollars to private schools through dozens of voucher schemes, Texas politicians are now lowering standards.

Ed Week: Leading Texas lawmakers are working to rewrite the state's high school graduation requirements with plans to change the default course of study and lower from 15 to five the number of end-of-course exams most students must pass to earn a diploma. Proponents call the legislative effort a reasonable approach to reduce testing and give students more flexibility in selecting high school courses.

You can just hear the Republicans now saying, “Suckers!”

Some observers say the plans would take Texas in the opposite direction of states that have worked to ratchet up their graduation requirements and embrace end-of-course exams.

The legislation, in a landslide vote, would replace the state's "recommended" high school pathway known as "4x4" (where) students must successfully complete four years of coursework in English, mathematics, science, and social studies … the measure would create a new "foundation" diploma, with fewer specific course requirements. Students would able to earn specified "endorsements" for such areas as STEM and business/industry if they wished. Students also would have to pass far fewer end-of-course exams. Among those no longer required would be Algebra 2, chemistry, physics, and English 3.

Keep in mind, Democrats have always argued for more flexibility to improve and change education for the better, and with fewer tests, but Republicans had a different more destructive idea; vouchers and the end of public schools.

Republicans screw over big business:

Sixteen business groups and large companies, including the Texas Association of Business, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, ExxonMobil, and Texas Instruments, sharply criticized the measures in a letter to state lawmakers last month. "We have been a national leader in promoting higher expectations for all students, and our young people have reaped big rewards," they wrote. "Now is not the time to reverse progress when Texas needs a more skilled workforce to meet the demands of the 21st-century economy."

Ideology of smaller government trumps everything. And all those Republican tough on education tests? Now they're saying "overboard" and "gone wild:"

Catherine Clark, the government-relations director for the Texas Association of School Boards, called the changes a common-sense approach to rein in state requirements that have gone too far. "What we have done to change public education in the last four or five years has gone overboard," she said, "requiring students to take 15 end-of-course tests that count for graduation. That is just high-stakes testing gone wild."

Ya think?

La Raza and the Education Trust, in a letter last month to Texas lawmakers call the legislation a "retreat from progress Texas has made" in recent years. "The proposed changes would take Texas back to the bad old days of pervasive tracking…”

Just in time for vouchers…?