Texas' Big Test

Jerry Jesness from the November 2000 issue

According to Gov. George W. Bush, his state has enjoyed a "Texas miracle" in education under his watch, a renaissance in learning that could sweep the United States if he’s elected president. With nonwhite students’ scores rising on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test sometimes called the nation’s report card, friendly pundits have declared Texas a scholarly Shangri-La for blacks and Hispanics. Douglas Carnine, a professor of education at the University of Oregon and a Bush adviser, has boasted, "If you’re a minority, move to Texas."

But as Bush touts this record and other states move to mimic his state’s approach, a closer look at test scores in Texas reveals a more enigmatic picture. According to the state’s own basic skills tests, young Texans have made tremendous academic gains in the past decade. Scores on college entrance exams, however, have stagnated during the same period. In SAT scores Texas outperforms only Georgia, the Carolinas, and the District of Columbia. ACT scores, while a bit better, are tied for 39th place–hardly an impressive showing. Texas SAT scores have risen slightly in the past decade, but not as much as the scores of the nation as a whole. And while fourth grade math scores and eighth grade writing scores are near the top of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, other NAEP results are middling or below average.

Heaven knows, things could be worse. When I began teaching in Texas in 1983, a large chunk of the population was simply written off as either unteachable or unworthy of an education. These "low-group" classes bore little resemblance to the academic-track classes just a few hallways over.

In the low-group ghetto, one of my colleagues showed popular movies four days a week. A class down the hall was constantly basing art projects on the works of literature the higher-track students were actually reading. Interruptions were frequent. The intercom blared constantly. Afternoon classes were dismissed for even junior varsity sports events, and large numbers would be excused to be practice heads for cosmetology class. Frequent absences were tolerated.

Back then, supposedly enlightened educators "understood" that the poor, the disadvantaged, and the culturally different learned in their own way and thus were to be held to a lower standard. Just as the legal system meted its weakest punishments to those who committed minority-on-minority crime, the state paid scant attention to minority administrators who mismanaged minority schools. Most important, the students themselves accepted, in fact sometimes demanded, inferior standards. Naively convinced that the purpose of study was to serve one’s time and receive a diploma, they were content to rot in undemanding corners.

That all changed in 1984, with the creation of the Texas Educational Assessment of Minimal Skills, which established a minimum standard for graduation. Soon thereafter, this was replaced with an only slightly more difficult test, the euphemistically-named Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. The state also separately monitored the scores of different ethnic and economic groups, creating a system that assured that all high school graduates would possess at least a solid elementary school education. For setting this minimum standard and holding even its worst students to it, Texas deserves to boast.

Unfortunately, this approach has fostered two less worthy phenomena: Many of our schools now devote extraordinary amounts of time to preparing for the TAAS. And some schools are now so focused on the formerly ignored groups that education for average and above-average students is suffering.

The amount of time spent on TAAS preparation varies from school to school, but few, if any, are untouched. In suburban districts, teachers complain of having to dedicate substantial blocks of time–maybe one or two days per week, maybe the first 20 minutes of each class–to TAAS. In inner city and rural schools with substantial minority enrollments, real textbooks are being crowded out by such titles as TAAS Coach, TAAS Master, TAASPrep, TAAS Student Strategy Guide, Breaking the TAAS Code, Step up to TAAS, and Book and Brain for TAAS. While some of this test preparation is genuinely academic, much simply reviews below-grade-level basics or, worse, imparts mere test-taking gimmicks.

The following "reading strategies" are among those that other teachers and I have "learned" from consultants and TAAS preparation materials over the past 10 years:

• Number every paragraph and line of a reading passage and then write the line and paragraph number where the answer is found next to each question.

• Highlight words in the text that match words in the
questions or the answer choices.

• Work backward, plugging each answer into the question if appropriate.

• Learn key phrases that in released TAAS exams indicate whether a question can be answered by matching words in the text with words in the answer choices. If so, highlight matching phrases. Unless there are contrary signals, assume that the matching choice is the correct answer.

• Ask yourself, "Could I be expected to know that?" If not, look for answers in the text.

At one workshop, a consultant showed us a practice passage for eighth grade students and asked us to apply the last strategy. The question related to the presidential election of 1864. Faced with such a question, we were told, students should understand that such knowledge would not be expected of them, so they should look for the answer in the passage. Sure enough, we found a table that showed that the winner was Abraham Lincoln.

Comments

قبلة الوداع|8.16.11 @ 10:29PM|#

thank u

قبلة الوداع|8.16.11 @ 11:04PM|#

ThaNk U