The Texas Education Agency, or TEA, is investigating a dozen Texas school districts that have been reporting huge numbers of high school graduates who’ve enlisted or plan to enlist in the military.
School districts can greatly benefit from high rates of military enlistment. The Houston Chronicle’s Jacob Carpenter says their academic performance ratings can go up. But the problem is that some districts seem to be inflating their numbers – one has even reported 100% of gradates enlisted or planned to enlist.
“Texas has … an academic accountability system that takes a whole bunch of factors into play, many of which center around standardized test scores,” Carpenter says, “but part of which also looks at how prepared are students for life after high school.”
He says one measure of that preparation is students’ planned military service.
What you’ll hear in this segment:
– How military enlistment can significantly increase school districts’ ratings
– Which districts are being investigated by TEA
– How TEA plans to determine actual enlistment numbers
– What happens if TEA finds that districts intentionally inflated enlistment numbers
Written by Caroline Covington.
