Background:
Prior to 2023, about 90% of state funding for Texas's 50 community colleges was based on student credit/contact hours, with only ~10% tied to outcomes.

HB 8, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, restructured this to allocate ~$683 million more over two years (totaling over $2.2 billion for 202425).

HB 8 Funding Tiers:

• Base Tier: Covers operational costs, adjusted for factors like serving low-income or adult students.
• Performance Tier: Rewards colleges for "credentials of value" (those leading to wages above high school graduates and recouping costs within 10 years), timely completions, and equity-focused outcomes (e.g., success for underserved groups).

(Summary abstracted from Grok.)

The problem:
Talking tonight with a good friend tonight teaching math at one of the Community Colleges. The faculty are getting pressure from the administration to....

...find a way to pass as many students as possible because the administration wants that performance tier money, so kids "must" pass classes and "complete".

• Going to "penalize" profs that don't pass enough students.
• Want higher grades to raise GPAs.
• Also, faculty have been asked to think about changing grading scales. For instance, perhaps 85-100 should be an "A", etc.

And she teaches at the campus with the highest minority enrollment (underserved) so more pressure.

Simultaneous with this, COVID has had a lasting affect on learning. Newer kids are much worse than the ones graduating even a couple of years ago. No surprise that Seniors in HS were hurt a lot less by missing a year than Freshmen. And their next three years of HS was watered down.

I am getting really tired of Republican politicians caring more about virtue signaling than intelligently addressing problems. If I wanted virtue signaling, I would have voted for the other side.
ETA- sorry for the length.

Anything with the word equity in it needs to be discarded as a guide.

DallasAg 94 said:

---

You don't have any better answers.

There are no good answers in education right now.

We are conditioned on what to think... not how to think.

My kids were raised to think for themselves and our education system punished them and discouraged them from learning. But, they can't help but learn.

---

I accept your challenge. To be a teacher in Texas, you have to pass a subject area test. In that vein:

For community college establish a base curriculum of say 24-30 hours. English, Math, Am History, Govt.. To get the performance money, X pct need to be able to pass the test.

And while we are at it, put real rewards/penalties on the HS exit tests, too.

Rewarding educators for passing kids is the height of idiocy. Because they will.

All colleges have an income incentive to pass students. Especially as this next generation is smaller than the last: they need prospective students to expect enrollment will lead to credential and they need to maximize the current student spend (4+ years).

Get Off My Lawn said:

---

All colleges have an income incentive to pass students. Especially as this next generation is smaller than the last: they need prospective students to expect enrollment will lead to credential and they need to maximize the current student spend (4+ years).

---

Absolutely correct. And colleges are faced with deepening distrust that College is "the way to get ahead" particularly males. Who are discriminated against in many college settings. So declining enrollment on that front, too.

All the more reason why HB 8 is a really bad bill.

We are incenting colleges to keep and graduate bad students, as opposed to becoming more selective. This bill increases our education spend and decreases our outcomes. Again so republicans can virtue signal. No doubt this was backed by many dems too, but the buck stops with Abbott and the reps.

titan said:

---

Anything with the word equity in it needs to be discarded as a guide.

---

Yes definitely, we need the opposite of that.

That isn't a Republican thing. That's a bureaucrat thing. When these people are rewarded based on the documented outcome, that becomes more important than actually doing the job. There needs to be an incentive change so that the "journey" is just as valuable as the "destination", so to speak. They need to actually do the job instead of just checking boxes.

When forcing outcomes in education is made a goal it is ruinous. Equity in education context is almost always bad.