testing

As mistakes go, STAAR is a doozy

 

State Education Commissioner Mike Morath did the right thing by ruling that fifth and eighth graders who failed STAAR exams this year wouldn’t be held back a grade. He was reacting to problems with how STAAR exams have been handled by the testing vendor. But the commissioner still doesn’t get that the basic problem with STAAR is, well, STAAR.

“Kids in the classroom should never suffer from mistakes made by adults,” Morath announced.

That’s right, but the mistakes he was addressing – lost tests and other administrative snafus — are only symptoms of a much larger mistake – the entire STAAR testing regime and the high stakes it unnecessarily imposes on students and teachers. The entire scheme was concocted by adults, and children in classrooms will continue to suffer.

It’s time for Morath to tell the Legislature to listen to parents and educators and deep-six the entire testing program or, at least, scale it back significantly. But, despite being angered and embarrassed by problems with the testing vendor, Morath still supports the tests and would raise the stress level associated with them.

Remember, he has adopted a new teacher evaluation system tied to test scores, and, in a recent media interview, he claimed STAAR tests weren’t “overly burdensome.”

A study committee created by the Legislature – the Texas Commission on Next Generation Assessments and Accountability – has been studying STAAR and doesn’t appear ready to junk it yet either.

All of this makes it that much more important that educators, parents and others who have had it up to here with high-stakes testing accept the State Board of Education’s invitation to say what you think about it. Take the board’s survey at the link below.

Changing state laws – even unpopular ones – can be a long and frustrating process. But if you have a chance to tell elected state officials what you think, take it!

http://tea.texas.gov/About_TEA/News_and_Multimedia/Press_Releases/2016/State_Board_of_Education_seeks_public_input_about_assessments_and_accountability/

“Transformational education reform” gave us STAAR

 

Anytime anyone uses the words, “transformational” or “reform” in reference to education, beware. Be extra careful if both words are used, and if the word-dropper is someone like Rod Paige, duck and cover.

Some of you may not remember Rod Paige, but surely you know his legacy. It’s the standardized testing plague now known in Texas as STAAR. As U.S. Secretary of Education, Paige helped then-President George W. Bush concoct and market that mind-numbing Kool Aid that has done about as much to poison educational progress in Texas as the legislative majority’s budget cuts.

The testing regime, a requirement of the since-repealed No Child Left Behind Act and spread throughout the country under the false guise of education “reform,” has wasted countless days of valuable classroom instruction time and dulled the joy of learning for countless school children subjected to endless test preparation drills and worksheets.

The same Rod Paige’s name popped up this week on an oped, published in the Austin American-Statesman, calling for “transformational, top-to-bottom reforms” for school funding in Texas. The article, mercifully, didn’t propose more testing, but it didn’t call for an end to it either.

No, this time, Paige – with co-author David Dunn, executive director of the Texas Charter Schools Association – was talking about school finance, but only in a very limited sense that was not what most people would consider “transformational.” Instead of calling on the Legislature to raise funding overall for a woefully underfunded public education system, they mainly focused on seeking increased state funding for charter schools.

Public charter schools, they said, receive on average $1,000 less per student than traditional public schools and now serve more than 227,000 students.

Lost in the discussion, however, is the fact that charter schools on average do not perform any better or worse than traditional public schools, and they are a minor part of Texas’ school funding problem. (Besides, the disparity in state funding hasn’t stopped private, for-profit charter school operators from popping up all across Texas, eager to get their hands on school tax dollars.)

Charter students represent only a small percentage of Texas’ 5.2 million public school enrollment, and per-student funding for that total enrollment averages about $2,700 less than the national average, with many school districts spending even less than that.

First things first. Even though the Texas Supreme Court – in an opinion full of $100 words and empty political rhetoric – has washed its hands of school funding, the Legislature must do what’s right for all the school children of Texas, not just charter students. During next year’s session, lawmakers need to begin work on an adequate and fair funding plan and drastically reduce or eliminate STAAR testing. It’s time to invest, not test, to replace the Kool Aid with resources that all school children and educators really need.

 

 

 

 

Education commissioner doesn’t think STAAR is a problem

State Education Commissioner Mike Morath may have been embarrassed by the well-publicized glitches in the administration of many STAAR tests this spring, but he apparently still likes the wasteful testing regime.

In an interview with Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith this morning, Morath claimed the STAAR tests weren’t “overly burdensome” for students because they required only two or three days of testing at the end of the school year.

He didn’t acknowledge, however, the many other days of benchmark testing and other test preparations that take big chunks of time away from real learning opportunities for elementary and middle-school students.

It is difficult to believe that the commissioner is so shielded from the realities of these classrooms that he actually doesn’t realize how much time is being wasted on teaching to the test and how the STAAR stress being placed on school kids is destroying their ability to enjoy learning.

Has he actually taken the time to sit down with some real classroom teachers and real parents? If so, he would get an education into the real world of STAAR testing.

Instead, Morath wants to increase the stress level even more – for students and educators alike – by tying test scores to teacher evaluations. That issue, over which TSTA has sued the commissioner, didn’t come up during this morning’s interview.

But clearly the commissioner loves test scores. He repeatedly said he wanted to improve student “outcomes.” I assume he means more than STAAR scores, but time will tell.

 

 

 

What the real numbers experts say about teacher evaluations

 

The American Statistical Association (ASA), an organization of professionals whose jobs are to make sense of numbers, warned two years ago of the unfairness and inaccuracy inherent in using test scores to evaluate teachers, but some educational bureaucrats still refuse to listen.

I looked up the ASA report again after Education Commissioner Mike Morath approved a new teacher evaluation model under which school districts could base 20 percent or more of a teacher’s evaluation on “student growth measures,” including so-called value added measures (VAM).

A VAM model typically is based on a complicated formula that compares a group of students’ actual scores on standardized tests to scores predicted by an equation based on test scores of other, but similar student groups. It is an opaque process that is incomprehensible to most educated people, but the American Statistical Association has figured it out and raised warning flags that Morath has failed or refused to see.

TSTA believes that Morath also has exceeded his authority as education commissioner in proposing that element in his teacher evaluation plan, and we have sued him to try to keep it from going into effect.

In its assessment, released in April 2014, the American Statistical Association warned that using VAMs for teacher evaluations could be counterproductive because the practice could result in even more class time being spent on test preparation “at the exclusion of content that may lead to better long-term learning gains or motivation for students.”

ASA also noted that, based on most VAM studies, teachers account for only about 1 percent to 14 percent of their students’ variability in test scores.

“The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control, such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum and unmeasured influences,” the association wrote in its report.

Teachers welcome fair, productive evaluations that encourage professional development. They deserve to be evaluated on more than a numbers game, and the numbers experts agree.