Early STAAR Results Are as Expected, TEA Says
The Texas Education Agency on Friday said that students working on a ninth-grade level performed as expected on the new assessment tests, which some parents, teachers and school administrators have criticized as being too tough.
Early results from the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, released Friday by the TEA shows varying passing rates for each subject test, from 55 percent in English writing to 83 percent in algebra I and 87 percent in biology.
“While we know there is always an adjustment period for students and teachers in a new testing program, results from the ...
Comments (10)
Debra Haas via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The results are not surprising. What is astonishing is that anyone thinks we can help students and increase achievement by cutting the resources needed to do just that. You get what you pay for, and to date the Texas Legislature is unwilling to pay the price to achieve positive results in our schools.
Fernando Perez via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I second it !
Kim Blowers Midkiff via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Why Bill Hammond thinks that a certain score on any high-stakes, mandated, state-wide test equals readiness for college or for a career baffles me. You'd think, that since he is the president of the Texas Association of Business, that he would be able to apply some critical thinking skills to this situation. The only thing that a certain score means is how limited a scope teachers taught- you want a good score on a test, you only teach the tested items.
Miki Henderson
Bill Hammond I have to tell you that tests do not prepare students for college. Teachers prepare students for college. We need to stop testing our students to death and start really evaluating schools, principals and teachers. That is accountability that can work! I'm not talking about another test for them either. We need real evaluations that assess needs, strengths and areas of development. We need to take a hard look at who we have in positions of authority and teaching and help them grow and develop into innovators and critical thinkers who can meet the needs of all students. A test cannot do that!
David Spratt
To some the answer to every problem is simply more money. If we would just spend twice as much then the other half would come up to par.
To others the answer would just be lower the standards,,, after all ,,, does not every child deserve a trophy or a ribbon regardless of whether they won or not ?
Neither address the need for personal responsibility of the students nor the responsibility of the parents. If children are sent to school hungry , then do not hold the parents accountable,,, lets just buy food for them and hire more people to feed them 3 meals at school. Now we PAY THEM to go to school.There are new cars,,, and real money being given out to entice them into the classroom.
Your reward for attending school and applying yourself is the ability to feed, house and clothe yourself without relying on others to do it for you. The rewards are freedom to decide your own path through life without being told what to do or being restricted by lack of experience, education or knowledge. The real rewards are intangible but beyond value regardless. We the taxpayers provide all of this free of charge and at great personal sacrifice to ourselves generally at the rate of several thousand $ per year in property taxes, yet the thanks we get is constant complaints and being told we are just not paying enough !!!! I understand the value to society in general that requires everyone to contribute to education, but the limit has been reached in education as in many other areas of government run programs. More money, hiring more teachers, adjusting standards will do nothing to improve education. Simply testing people on what they have been able to memorize what they read from a book will not make them productive citizens. Common sense , critical thinking and the ability to be versatile and adaptive to conditions and situations are more important to ones survival than memorizing useless information you will never use and making a high score because of it on a test. More emphasis needs to be placed on the purpose and the reasons for the end result rather than the process of education.
Frances Demps via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Teachers did not focus on the state curriculum. Teachers focused on the test! Kim, you're absolutely right. Neither the STAAR nor Hammond use critical thinking.
Walter Stroup
The tests as they are currently developed are a system for assigning students the same relative position (i.e., rank order), year in and year out, compared to other students. That’s how the items are chosen.
Using this approach, where the “cut score” (passing) is set ends up being relatively arbitrary. If you control the cut score slider, you control the results … and that’s what we’ll be seeing happening, for better or worse, as the “Phase Standard” turns into the “Recommended Standard” over the next few years.
(Note: This isn’t really how the new era of “criterion referenced” testing was supposed to work … or so we were told.)
How the cut score then relates to the actual percent of items correct depends on a statistical analysis of the likelihood of getting an item correct as a function of students’ ability (as determined, in a relatively vicious circle, based on their past ability to get these sorts of questions correct).
Confused yet …?!?
We need to ask ourselves, is this the transparency we want/need to make sure we’re getting the most we can out of our schools?
A certain amount of this kind of statistical hokum might be tolerable if, at the end of the day, the tests could be shown to be sensitive — at scale — to precisely the kinds of “input factors” that an educational system can be held accountable for.
We want an Algebra test that tells us how well Algebra is being taught in school Q and/or by teacher X.
What we are getting instead, are tests that, at scale, are far more sensitive to a kind of tricky-multiple-choice, test-taking ability that predicts on the order of 72% of the variance in kid scores year to year, than they are to anything else.
This means that as the students show up for the first day of school, most of their scores on the “end of course” exam are already determined. The amount a teacher can change these scores is relatively small. And this means these tests are all but useless for evaluating what is happening in a given year or what really matters in teaching the material at hand.
In addition, by focusing on “passing rate” and not percent correct or some other more meaningful metric, small changes in the number of items correct can result in (seemingly) dramatic changes in the percent passing. Not only is this not real accountability (on any tests, 31% correct in Austin or 37% correct Statewide sure sounds not-so-good to most taxpayers and parents), but it distracts us from the larger pattern: Using the current vendor’s tests, with their built in test-taking profile determining most of the score, the kids stay in the same relative order year-in and year-out.
Any information that we might want to use to evaluate approaches to teaching, or a given set of schools, is so overwhelmed by the test taking profile that we might as well scrap the tests altogether and start over. This is certainly not “college and career readiness” in any meaningful sense … it is pure psychometric hokum, through and through.
We are not getting what we are paying for with STAAR and the changes we need to make are a lot more significant than a little tweaking here and there in the “implementation” will do.
And this is the final point, lest our friends in the marketing department of the vendor try to tell us this is the best there can be. Nope. It might be the best they can produce, but that’s because they need to find a way to keep us buying into their proprietary ranking system.
There are alternatives. They can be administered at scale. They do not depend on a self-replicating profiling system and the results would tell Texans a whole lot more about how well our schools are working than the misleading hokum the vendor and the high-end lobbyists working for the vendor have been selling the State of Texas for far too long.
And the alternatives would cost a lot less than the near half-a billion dollars the STAAR tests will end up costing the taxpayers of Texas (and these are only the “up front” costs of the STAAR tests … try visiting a school sometime if you want to start to get a real sense of the “total cost” these largely broken tests are having for kids, teachers, parents, and administrators in our school systems).
In short, we need more of a change than STAAR represents if we are to get the kind of accountability our children and our children’s futures deserve. WE CAN DO BETTER!
>Note: This is an updated version of a post appearing recently on the Austin Statesman education blog regarding the Statewide STAAR results<
GS Crispus
Walter, I think the simpler question to ask why we should even expect our high schools to be designed only for college readiness? We certainly have no plans to make college more accessible, and if anything, over the last fourty years, we've cut funding to college.
There are other factors to consider, though. Do we truely want that one metric to be fully implemented? Where the tests "held the line" in English, even excellent public schools had 20% failure rates. Do we want to hold 20% to 50% of students back in one course at that rate? Do we have the will to fund the strain such testing will put on the system? Assuming an incoming class of ~1000 freshman, do we really have the will and desire to fund the remediation of 200 students per subject? What of class scheduling? There are costs to other programs and other subjects.
The simple answer is we won't and the reality is that testing is a measure for politicians to show they're putting effort into education. It never has and never will make a difference in the classroom.
Dave S
Well said Walter about the massive amounts of bs that go into STARR scores. The system is completely opaque, and until we make it transparent, it cannot possibly do anything useful.
Mia Francis
I do not know why everyone thinks we teach to a test. No one even knew what the questions would be like for the STAAR test. Teachers taught to a curriculum developed by the district. I know our team followed the district's required prototype and our scores were fine. We will know next year by having a look at the test the type rigor the state is asking of us.