STAAR Struck

Every public school in the state of Texas is rapidly approaching STAAR test administrations.  STAAR is the acronym (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) for the high stakes, standardized state test administered from grades 3 through 11, perhaps 12.  If you would like a headache, check out the Texas Education Agency page on STAAR resources:  http://www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/staar/

There are several things I wish school boards, legislators, parents, business and community members (perhaps educators!) knew about the STAAR tests:

In no way are these tests administered to help students, teachers, or to improve instruction.  The tests are administered for the sole purpose of judging teachers, principals, schools, superintendents and school districts.  I could live with these tests if they in fact helped kids.  They do not.  Teachers and kids receive the test results so far after the test administration that there is little likelihood of using the data to improve, to change or to modify instruction.  It is a terminal test, meant to measure what kids know near the end of a course of study.  It is a final exam, more for teachers than for kids.

The STAAR test does not, in fact, measure the effectiveness of a teacher, a school, a school district.  We already know what the test results will prove in terms of judgment:  Rich kids will outperform poor kids, property rich districts will outperform property poor school districts, and Anglo kids will outperform Black kids.  What else do we need to know to improve public education?  I know in my heart of hearts that given these outcomes which are repeated over and over again every time we give a standardized test that the answer to improved student outcomes is less the result of instruction and more the result of the wealth and the demographics of the community.  We cannot change the demographics.  We can change the wealth.  We have not been willing to do so.  The test results, in my humble opinion, confirm the failure of the legislature and other lay bodies to support public education based on the data they require us to provide.  If we want scores to improve we must spend more money on the low performing.  Sanctions for low performing kids, schools, and staff is merely punishing the victims of the current state school finance system, a student’s zip code, and the wisdom the students applied when choosing their parents.  Promoting charter schools and vouchers only takes more money away from public schools.  In other words, the very folks who require the tests, use them to judge schools, are the folks least likely to learn from the test results.  That is academically unacceptable.

STAAR is the latest iteration of a series of state standardized high stakes tests.  We have morphed from TABS to TEAMS to TAAS to TAKS to STAAR.  If the TABS test was good enough to judge teachers, schools, etc. and determine whether kids were promoted or graduated, and determine sanctions for schools and school districts, why did we change the test?  We began TABS testing in the fall of 1980 and continued using that instrument until 1985.  Why did we stop?  Why did we quit TABS and start TEAMS?  Schools and kids got too good at doing well on the test.  The Legislature has no interest in verifying that all schools are doing well.  They do not believe that is possible.  Nor do they believe that all kids should be able to pass the test.  As any one set of standardized test data begins to indicate that schools are improving because kids are improving, the state has changed the test.  Each successive test has become more “rigorous”.  That means each successive acronym for standardized tests has become more and more difficult, more and more challenging.  (For the statistically inclined, that means that none of these tests were truly criterion referenced.  They were all designed to create a distribution.  They were and are normed tests.  When the test began to fail to produce a distribution, a new test was developed to do so.)  Each successive test has demonstrated what we already know as listed above, but reduced the number of schools and school districts who were doing well.  I would wish that governing bodies would promote school success and use data toward that end, rather than vice-versa.  When we are all doing well on STAAR, there will be another standardized test.  Perhaps we will simply call it GOTCHA (Go On, Try to Teach Children How to Achieve).

The school reform belief that data from such tests is meaningful is a private sector application to a public service sector institution, and therefore, not appropriate.  There are a variety of public sector functions where we collect data:  law enforcement, Child Protective Services, state mental health services, state prison systems, public drinking water, etc., etc.  In none of these areas are those data used to judge the provider of the service.  They are used to monitor the population served.  If the crime rate increases in a given community it is hardly argued that we must hold the police force more accountable and possibly reduce their funding and create alternative choices to public police departments.  We do the opposite.  We seek to find the cause and pour money into an improvement effort.  Not in schools.  As our “crime” rate increases, we blame the officers, cut their funding, create alternatives, and assign sanctions.  It is, in fact, crazy.  If collecting such data and using it as a basis for judging public schools is in fact logical for a public sector service provider, then let us do so across the board and respond in similar ways.

The institution of high stakes standardized testing has made many private sector operations millions of dollars.  Pearson develops the tests and scores the tests.  They make a ton of money.  They will make more money if the tests constantly change and will make more money if Pearson instructional products are purchased by schools to improve outcomes.  Charter school enterprises make a fortune off public tax dollars.  They exist to provide parents “choice.”  We do not need choice unless we have data to show that public schools are not doing well.  On and on it goes.  Public tax dollars earmarked for public schools continue to be diverted to private sector enterprises based on false conclusions from high stakes standardized tests.

We believe that standardized measures are descriptive of the performance of kids, teachers and schools.  They are not.  It is from the likes of Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Broad Foundation, and others who have convinced legislatures that such tests have meaning.  Such folks totally miss the point.  Yes, data is important for decision making.  Every time a teacher asks a question in class he or she is collecting student performance data.  Every time students have an assignment, a performance, a test, a project we are collecting student performance data.  We remediate instruction based on those data.  Teachers get better, schools get better.  However, to develop an external test and use it to judge schools and kids really means little, especially if the nature of the test is kept hidden from the teachers.  Those results mean little unless the entire instructional effort is devoted to improving test scores rather than instruction.  If all schools do that, then test results may let us know which efforts to improve scores work better than other efforts, but tell us little about what kids know.  And, that is teaching to the test, which the same lay people argue is not what we should do. 

For those who believe the STAAR results have meaning, are descriptive, are appropriate data by which we can judge kids, teachers, schools and school systems there is a continue to push to raise the scores.  Schools will go to extreme lengths to increase the odds of better student performance.  Schedules will be altered, kids will be pulled from electives, teachers will be reassigned to tutor and coach, and sessions will be conducted before and after school and even on Saturdays.  All of this to improve outcomes on a test that means little.  Sadly, if every school system in the state engages in similar practices, a school that chooses not to do so will look worse on the distribution scores that year.  In short, it is time to simply say that the scores on a standardized test may be interesting and may inform and improve instruction for the next school year, but in no way should they be used to judge kids, teachers, schools, etc.  If the data from the tests mean anything they mean that we must put more money into the learning of our poorest kids and our poorest districts.  That is the one thing we have not done and is the most obvious of all the results from the tests.

Schools are highly complex organizations.  The variables in any one classroom are astronomical.  Each kid and all that he or she knows, has experienced, believes about themselves, their family, their values, etc. is a list longer than can be identified.  Each teacher brings his or her own best talents, knowledge, experience, expertise and values to the huge array of kid variables.  In no way can one simple standardized test on one day in a school year be descriptive of what is happening for those kids in that room with that teacher for the entire year, not to mention for years to come. 

We forgive weather prognosticators for errors in their predictions.  Weather people have constant data, satellite, radar, ground station data collectors, etc. etc.  All those data are constantly flowing in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still the predictions are wrong.  We forgive them because we know the variables are very complex.  I would argue that the variables in any given classroom are more complex than the weather variables for any given day.  I would argue that the variables for all the classrooms in Texas are dramatically more complex than the weather variables for Texas on any given day.  Using one test to make judgments about kids, teachers, principals, schools, districts, superintendents is the equivalent of giving a meteorologist one snapshot of radar, satellite, and ground station data on one day and asking him or her to forecast the weather for an entire year.  If that feels ridiculous, then know that high stakes standardized test data feels the same way to educators.

Meanwhile, the tests are just around the corner and every educator in the state is concerned with the outcomes.  Educators are jumping through hoops to improve outcomes on a test that should not matter.  Until our lay community, parents, businesses and our local and state leaders really understand what they are doing to kids, teachers and schools, we will remain STAAR struck.  In fact, STAAR is already GOTCHA.

That is not a good thing.