Imagine your child in class surrounded by peers eagerly recommending books to each other. Across the room, the teacher is working with a small group of student authors completing final edits on the poems they will share with the class tomorrow, and at the media station, another group huddles over its tablets creating a presentation to critique a new local policy.

Last year, a group of Texas educators dared to dream of joyful language arts classrooms with robust learning experiences beyond the STAAR tests, and then we got to work and made it real. Proudly, we presented the standards to the State Board of Education. Then the board took that dream away.

I was honored to be one of the educators asked to write the new English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR) state standards. For me, this was the culmination of 17 years in secondary and undergraduate classrooms, a doctorate in curriculum and instruction, and the experience of parenting two Texas public school graduates. When I met the other educators on the writing committee, I was impressed with their credentials. Surely, the state of Texas had brought forth its finest for this important work.

Passionate about how English Language Arts and Reading would shape the conversations and critical thinking of a whole generation of Texans, we imagined classes of students engaged in books they had selected on their own, composing carefully crafted writing patterned after professional and teacher-created models. We imagined student media presentations that utilized the mode appropriate to the topic. We envisioned critical class discussions of digital texts built on collaboration, where challenges were openly and respectfully considered. We imagined our students as future leaders who would need these skills to communicate in a changing world.

And that's what could have been. We could have had world-class standards.

Now, I wonder how and why the State Board of Education changed our work. The teacher writing teams met every month for nearly a year, and we reviewed our work between work sessions. Many of our sessions were held over long weekends. We all had to travel. We were not paid. (None of us expected to be paid.)

We started with the research-identified elements of successful standards, and then we reviewed the current Texas standards. Meticulously, we tracked our work. Though our discussions were rich, we returned again and again to the students who sit in our classrooms and how we could best support their future in a changing world.

Mostly, we broke into grade-level committees, and we gathered regularly in vertical, K-12 teams to assure that we were accurately representing the way students engage in literacy practices and that there weren't any gaps. We wanted to make sure the standards would provide reasonable and rigorous progression from grade to grade and would eventually meet the college-ready standards set by the Texas College and Career Readiness Board.

Grounded in research and best instructional practices, we rarely argued. Instead, we named the problems we encountered and worked together to find solutions, solutions that would support all learners in media-saturated environments while still appreciating the students' varied gifts, needs and experiences. We read and responded to all of the input from both the public and English teacher forums, and we documented our response to every comment.

The writing groups focused on the needs of our students. It was important to the team that Texas students were engaged in authentic literacy practices, and we intentionally included skills that would provide students with critical choices in what they would read, write and produce. In response to the pressure we often felt in our schools to conform to test-prep styled assignments, we created standards that would resist this type of conforming and help teachers advocate for engaging classes that resist test prep materials in favor of student-selected texts and products.

When the teachers' writing committee completed the standards, it handed them over to the expert team. This team was tasked with making minor changes for alignment or research. However, even though we were the educators the state board picked to serve on this committee, and we had faithfully attended the scheduled meetings and followed the directions to do this work and even sacrificed our weekends and worked for free, the state has allowed large sections of the educators' standards to be rewritten, out of sight of the public and without review or input from the teachers' writing committee or even the expert team. And despite the extreme hoops we jumped through to document our own changes, no documentation of these new changes has been shared. We cannot even confirm who is actually making the changes.

The results have been devastating. The final tweaking includes the loss of the collaboration strand, a set of specific skills that enhanced communication and distinguished collaboration from traditional "group work." Multimodal, digital texts and multimedia — gone. Connections between reading and writing have been pulled apart, so students will spend more time in rote drill-and-kill practice of discrete skills unnaturally separated from their authentic purpose in a text. And the crafting of writing built on high-quality models has been replaced with traditional writing modes without the flexibility found in authentic print and media texts.

We wrote standards for a future of possibilities, and those standards have been reduced to a relic of the past favoring compliance over critical thinking.

Connecting literacy skills to the authentic purposes of communication is not optional; it's a requirement if we want our children to be successful communicating in our dynamic world.

Please review the standards at the Texas Register (19 TAC Chapter 110). If you, too, would like to see the teachers' document become the new state standards, please contact your State Board of Education representative. The State Board of Education will meet to approve the first reading of these standards this week. Find your representative here. Please comment at the Texas Register and tell your SBOE board member you want Texas to use the "Teachers' Document" for the ELAR standards.

Carol Revelle is Dallas Morning News Voices columnist. Email: carol@revelleweb.com