Evaluating the ResearchHow are our kids measured?
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What evidence supports the importance and value of TEKS/TAAS?
If the test questions are consistently of the same difficulty level from year to year, and the percent of students with passing scores continues to increase from year to year, one might surmise that students who are trained to take the TAAS are learning more foundation skills today than they were learning six years ago.
"...the improving TAAS scores are good news- and not simply because students are scoring higher on standardized tests. More importantly, let us hope, they reflect improvements in our public education system. If this is the case, students, teachers, principals, parents -- and even some politicians -- deserve credit" (Robinson).
In support of the TAAS:
If students must pass the test in order to graduate, there is a greater possibility that students who receive high school diplomas in Texas will be capable of foundation skills. In Maintaining Progress Through Systemic Education Reform, author Mark Ouellette states that systemic reform improves education by sending clear messages to students, parents and teachers that certain subjects must be mastered in order to graduate from high school. This approach involves aligning numerous educational policies, practices, and strategies. This includes content standards which reflect subject matter benchmarks, performance standards that clarify the benchmarks, student assessments that measure performance against the content standards and an accountability system that monitors student performance. He also includes these items as important in reforming education: preparing teachers by requiring licensure that permits someone to teach, professional learning development activities that provide learning opportunities, governance structure that defines how decisions are made and public support to help the public understand the reforms (Ouellette).
Guidelines from the Texas Workforce Commission encourage schools to increase the use of authentic assessment while decreasing the use of standardized, norm-referenced tests. But Dr. E.D. Hirsch, a notable educational expert, disagrees. He supports standardized tests because he feels authentic assessment to be an "ineradicably subjective and arbitrary" method of grading (Hirsch).
Chris Patterson gives this list of reforms needed in schools
- Academic achievement should be established as the primary goal of public education.
- State curriculum guidelines should be "knowledge-based."
- All students should be provided a foundation of liberal arts instruction and the opportunity to choose supplemental vocational or collegiate instruction.
- Career and technology education should be improved to prepare students for employment.
- Instructional practices should be based upon scientific research and support high academic achievement.
- Promotion must be linked to achievement, and remediation must be provided for failure.
- Higher educational expectations and more rigorous curriculum standards must be established which are comparable to states and nations with the highest academic achievement.
- Nationally norm-referenced standardized tests must be introduced.
- Individual achievement and accountability must be restored.
- True local control of public education must be established.
and discourages
- "Authentic Assessment",
- Group Grading-complete or incomplete,
- Cooperative learning groups,
- Mixed ability classes with no advanced or enriched instruction,
- "Acceleration" (promotion despite failure),
- Thematic or interdisciplinary courses,
- Mixed age groups,
- and Block scheduling (Patterson)
What evidence suggests against the importance and value of TEKS/TAAS?
While statistical evidence points out that more Texas students are passing the exit TAAS, it does not show WHICH children. Chris Patterson, Director of Education Policy of the Texas Public Policy Foundation says that "while test scores on the lower range of academic achievement rise, scores at the top remain frozen at pre-1970 achievement. This phenomena indicates that education is directed toward and improving low-performing students while neglecting the intellectual development of the brightest students in our state and nation" (Hirsch). Are we not doing a disservice to our brightest students by drilling them on information they already know rather than introducing them to new ideas and broadening their knowledge?
Isn't this a form of "keeping behind" the advanced students instead of "leaving behind" the less advanced students? It seems that McNeil and Valenzuela agree. McNeil and Valenzuela state that their investigations which span a ten-year period present strong assessment that the high stakes TAAS system in Texas is reducing the quality and quantity of education offered to the Texas students. They also point out that teachers' and administrators' job rewards under the present testing system foster an "artificial curriculum" by explaining that time is taken away from "real teaching and learning" and instead spent on instructing students on how to bubble in the answers, weed out obvious wrong answers and become accustomed to multiple-choice, computer scored formats. Their paper, "The Harmful Impact of the TAAS System of Testing in Texas: Beneath the Accountability Rhetoric," states that judgments about personnel and the quality of schooling hinge on one indicator, the TAAS. The same paper forewarns that a single indicator to assess learning or a complex system like educating children violates the ethics of the testing profession (McNeil).
The authors of "Statewide Mathematics Assessment in Texas" state that not only is the content of the math/algebra tests weak, but some of the more difficult content areas have simpler alternative solutions available for students to employ. They site an example where merely viewing the graph will eliminate three choices leaving the student with the correct answer without deriving the solution for calculating or application of geometry theories. They also point out that the content is weak, especially in comparison to similar age testing of mathematics in Japan (Clopton).
According to Ouellette, the next step is to aim to maintain the progress. Let's just say, for the time being, that the TAAS has raised test scores on the lower range of academic achievement. If so, now that progress has been made, it is time to progress from continuing to test the same skills to increasing skills, and to placing the control for success closer to home. "States should shift the role of the state education agency from an enforcer of regulation to a facilitator of change; provide additional resources to help educators use technology; and link higher education to systemic reform" (Ouellette). Chris Patterson also champions this idea of more local control. Additionally, he says more remediation for failure to achieve educational goals is needed.
Others also believed that the state must now focus on maintaining the progress shown, if TAAS does, indeed, show progress is being made. It is important in this democratic society to prepare the leaders of tomorrow to fulfill their role as participants. Having the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics is only part of that important foundation needed to actively participate. Students need to learn to think critically, to apply new skills and to broaden their knowledge from five areas (reading, writing, math, science, and social studies) to a world of information.
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