TX: Replacing Tests With More Tests

Nobody likes the Big Standardized Test (well, except test manufacturers making a living from it), and periodically, someone comes up wioth a clever idea for addressing that dissatisfaction. Texas has come up with a particularly bad one.

Texas's Big Standardized Test is the STAAR (which does not stand for Some Tests Are Always Ridiculous or maybe Should Throw Away Any Results or even Stupid Tests' Asses Are Raggedy). And the STAAR has a troubled history including technical glitches and questions without correct answers and just losing crates of answer sheets and just not working. Or is not aligned with state standards. And after many years, still glitch like crazy.

A big STAAR highlight is covered in this piece by poet Sara Holbrook, a poet who discovered that A) her own work was being used on the STAAR test and B) she couldn't answer some of the questions about her own work.

After several years of struggling, STAAR went fully on line, which didn't help anything. As usual with the move to an online model, nobody seems to have paused to consider whether or not adding a computer interface to the test might add one more problem.

Now here comes SB 9 (and its companion, HB 8). It reimagines the Big Standardized Test as the Instructional Supportive Assessment Program and declares that the "primary purpose" of the program will be "to benefit the students of this state." And if that were true, it would be a smart move, because one of the problems with the BS Test has always been that it ignores the fact that a test can only really serve the single purpose for which it is designed. Instead states use the test for a multitude of purposes, so if the new law would really have the common sense to do that then... well, never mind.

The new program is supposed to "provide information regarding student academic achievement and learning progress" to be used--

--by public schools to improve instruction

--by students, parents and teachers "for the purpose of improving student instruction"

--by researchers to study and compare achievement level and learning progress at state and national level

--by state ed agency for school accountability and recognition purposes

--to evaluate achievement level and learning progress of individual students

--to identify students strengths and weaknesses to determine readiness for grade promotion and graduation

--to assess whether or not education goals and curriculum standards are being met on local and state level

--to evauate and develop education policies and programs

--and to "provide instructional staff with immediate, actionable, and useful information regarding student achievement of standards and benchmarks that may be used to improve the staff ’s delivery of student instruction"

So, factoring in that some of these are actually several different combined purposes, I get about seventeen various purposes for this test program. Chances that the testing program will be useful for all 17 goals? Zero.

But the real kicker is this-- there must be a beginning-of-year, middle-of-year, and end-of-year assessment. Yes, the single STAAR test will be replaced with three tests. 

The press coverage keeps saying that the three tests will be shorter than the STAAR, and the bill promises that "The agency shall adopt procedures to reduce total administration time." and that the tests "must be designed to minimize the impact on student instructional time." In fact the bill requires the adition of language arts as a tested area, including testing writing. The bill says that most students should beable to finish the beginning and middle tests in 75 minutes and the end-of-year test in 85 minutes. that's 235 minutes, which is just under four hours. The curent guidance on STAAR testing is that it should take three to four hours.

So by the time you factor in the starting and stopping administrative stuff, it sure looks like the new system will be even more time-wasting than the STAAR. And that's before we even get to the question of whether or not you can effectively test the many subject areas (for the 17 purposes) in 75 minutes. I don't think you can-- but if you can, then why have Texas students been sitting through a three-to-four hour test previously?

The bill also requires results in two business days after the testing window closes, which strikes me as impossible. The state is also supposed to issue diagnostic reports for each student, with "practical and useful instructional strategies" for parents and teachers to use. The bill seems to call for norm-referenced testing, and without getting too far into the weeds, a norm-referenced test is like grading on the curve-- you can't do it until all the scores are in and someone has decided where to draw the line between, say, the A and B grades.

The bill calls for increasing "rigor" in A-F system used to grade schools, as part of an aspirational goal of having Texas rank among the top five states within 15 years. Also, because they are tired of the lawsuits over STAAR and letter grades, lawmakers would like to outlaw "taxpayer-funded" lawsuits over school assessment, which would presumably mean no more lawsuits brought by school districts. 

The only positive point in this bill is that it prohibits "benchmark" aka "practice" tests in grades that already have to deal with the STAAR.  But overall, this is a big baloney sandwich that simply extends the test's toxic influence over the school year, while increasing the likelihood that alreadyuseless results will be even more useless. There's still a chance that it could die somewhere in the legislature, and that's by far the best Texas families could hope for.