The Dallas Morning News published an editorial praising high-stakes testing. The News thinks the tests are necessary and valuable, even though parents don’t.
You can tell that no one on the editorial board has children in public schools, because they can’t understand why parents object to the state’s obsession with standardized testing. They congratulate patents got not opting out. They say nothing about the billions of dollars cut from Texas schools in 2011.
They just love that data. The kids, not so much.
They write:
“Dallas Morning News education writer Corbett Smith reports that only about 2,000 Texas families refused the test in 2015-16. That number is tiny compared with New York, where 240,000 opted out of the assessment, or Colorado, where 100,000 didn’t take it.
“Opting out of STAAR tests isn’t easy in Texas — but it is possible. So the low number leads us to hope that, despite the massive dislike of accountability exams, parents recognize STAAR’s importance.
“This newspaper shares that belief. That’s why our goals for 2016 include advocating for accountability and making a renewed case for the importance of testing, despite the system’s flaws. We have pledged to listen carefully to critics and bone up on best practices so we can urge reform that works.
“The first cleanup falls squarely on the state’s new testing vendor. New Jersey-based Educational Testing Services, which won a $280 million contract from the state, has left campuses mired in computer glitches and exam flaws. Just Thursday, it was accused of losing all the elementary and middle school tests in a small Central Texas school district.
“Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath assessed the mess this way: Those problems are “unacceptable” and must be fixed.
“But the solution isn’t to throw out the whole system, and it’s encouraging to see that most families and school districts get that.
“Families deserve to know how their students are progressing against the state standard; without a consistent scorecard, too much is left to chance. That can be a special problem as children move into the later years of elementary school and into middle school, where students most often slip.
“Likewise, school districts need to know not only how their students are performing, but how to evaluate teachers and help them grow to be the best possible educators.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Opting out of STAAR tests isn’t easy in Texas — but it is possible. So the low number leads us to hope that, despite the massive dislike of accountability exams, parents recognize STAAR’s importance.”
Now that’s an amazing logic. It’s like “Escaping from the Jewish camps was not easy but it was possible. So the low number of escapees indicate, most Jewish families recognize the importance of these camps.”
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“That’s why our goals for 2016 include advocating for accountability and making a renewed case for the importance of testing, despite the system’s flaws” struck me the same way.
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This news article is illogic.
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Meant illogical. I find most news reporters who try to write something about education don’t make sense. They are writing in a vacuum.,
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I had a different reaction. There is a pervasive logic in play right now that makes it difficult to hold elections, make statements of disagreement that are substantive, or get money from companies that owe it.
In voting, picture ID is the thing that creates difficulty. If the probability is that more of your voters will not vote, I win by supporting picture ID. If you are a teacher who does not like a standard, there is a long process to go through to change it and a short one to validate it. Doctors and patients have to go through a long process to get funding for medical procedures.
If the process for refusing to take the test is difficult, then more will take the test. This has become rule one of the playbook for some of our politicians. Contrast that with the rule used in more distant history to establish counties. In Tennessee history, an effort was made to make sure that all citizens lived within one days travel of the county seat so that it would be possible to organize legal matters. Note that the idea was to make it easier for people to do things that had to do.
Are we not moving away from our foundation principles when we make it hard for people to do the right thing legally?
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Enter your 13 digit identification code ,press one for yes and two for no.When you get fed up you may hang up at any time .
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It was actually U Texas -Austin researchers who first pointed out that the male Hispanic dropout rate soared when high stakes testing NCLB was initiated. Brilliant but maybe cheap labor was the point?
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I think the best thing the opt-out folks have done is get people to question some of this. I never doubted or even thought much about the validity of standardized tests when I was in school and then later never questioned ACT or SAT measures.
For probably 50 years the vast majority of people were probably just reciting these scores as “the” measure that mattered (especially true for SAT and ACT) and it’s probably a good and healthy thing that not everyone is buying it anymore. It’s not true that people (the general public) use a “broad and nuanced” measure- in my experience as a public school parent most of the public recite an ACT or SAT score as a completely predictive measure.
The testing enthusiasts should have to defend their work to the public, since the public is so profoundly affected by their work. I’ve learned a lot listening to the arguments of the opt-outers and I don’t think it would hurt most people to consider their arguments either.
Good for them for opening this up. A 50 year lock on “valid” is too long to go without a real re-evaluation.
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Now that I think about: the whole recent standardized testing madness has a positive side effect: it makes people question other standardized tests as well, like SAT and ACT.
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I wish there was more discussion of this:
“One three-hour exam decides the fate of many Massachusetts college students. It isn’t the much-feared SAT exam, but it’s proving to be nearly as controversial.
Called the Accuplacer, the test is taken by many of the 35,000 students who enter public colleges and universities each year — and critics are questioning whether it is, in fact, what its name suggests: an accurate way to place students into the proper college courses.”
I actually hear this complaint from people who go to community college here. They’re convinced they are being pushed into remedial courses and that costs them time and money. There are now several studies I have seen that say that high school grades are a better indicator of college “success” than these tests.
I’m afraid “ed reform” doesn’t question remedial rates because remedial rates are such a powerful POLITICAL argument for ed reform. They can recite that ‘40%!” number over and over (and over) and sell their argument that all public schools are failing.
I’d love to see a politician ask why they’re all swallowing the results of the tests that slot kids into college courses. Why is the entire focus on K-12? Is it even POSSIBLE that colleges are pushing too many people into remedial courses?
It concerns me that the ed reform POLITICAL “narrative” trumps any real analysis by skewing WHAT they look at- by omission.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/08/07/college-placement-test-comes-under-scrutiny/30OEdpY54TFNSBkxhlF2EM/story.html
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Texas is currently exploring ways to punish students whose parents choose to opt-out. Many people in states in the south have an authoritarian mentality so some people are conditioned to obey. Standardized tests are useless, but they may give parents a guide to see how their children perform. They also have a more harmful impact on the poor.
The last paragraph shows that Texas intends to attach high stakes to the tests to determine “teacher performance and accountability.” As we know, this is a misuse of testing. It is a false assumption that teachers can be rated this way, and it has been proven to be an inaccurate measure of a teacher’s performance. Test scores tell us more about the students than the teacher. Both the governor and lieutenant governor of Texas are totally captured by privatization. The actual goal of the testing is to turn over schools that are “failing” to outside operators.
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“Texas is currently exploring ways to punish students whose parents choose to opt-out.”
Our poor children. The only way to avoid incurring anyone’s wrath is to take the test AND do well.
Thanks for the heads up on this, retired teacher. I will be paying attention. I opted my daughter out of STAAR this year by withdrawing her from school during the week of testing; the school and district administration were surprisingly calm about it (perhaps because they knew there wasn’t technically anything they could do about it… yet!) They did, however, warn me that next year she MUST take it to pass to the next grade and failure to take and pass these tests at the high school level could prevent her from receiving a diploma. Whatever.
This upcoming school year, I will have 2 children who should take STAAR, but won’t (I will withdraw them both). Although we can afford private school, I’d like to continue to support my neighborhood public school. The state of Texas, however, is making it very hard to do so.
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I have a grandson that just finished kindergarten in a Texas public school. I know the punitive testing regimen is in the future. As long as test and punish are the plan, I will encourage my daughter to opt-out my grandson.
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I would urge readers of this blog to go to the DMN website and read the readers comments.
I am strongly encouraged that the overwhelming majority of comments took a strong position against this article. I couldn’t say it any better.
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Former Dallas ISD Superintendent, Dr. James Hughey, has an endorsement at the Edusoft site. Edusoft’s founder is a co-founder of Bridge International Academies. Edusoft’s site, states, “support for Common Core”. ETS’ website identifies Edusoft Ltd.
as a foreign subsidiary.
From the Harvard Business Review, about BIA, “While, (the founder) knew that the company’s social mission was attractive, he also knew that the ROI, about 20% annualized, would be quite attractive to investors.” BIA investors include Bill Gates, Mark Z-berg, Pearson,….
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