A new study of the STAAR tests in Texas finds that the readability levels are far above the grade levels tested.
Professor Susan Szabo and Professor Becky Barton Sinclair of the Texas A&M at Commerce reviewed STAAR tests and report that readability levels were 1-3 years above the grade level tested.
Why is the state giving children tests that are above their grade levels?
Is it trying to fail children so that more public schools will be given low ratings and there will be more opportunities for privatization?
Or is it that the folks in charge of testing are not paying attention or don’t care?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Most likely, they don’t care.
yes; and the more that kids honestly cannot do well, the more the test-based “accountability” apparatus (which bases itself upon collecting data which endlessly proves that kids are not doing well) wins at a highly lucrative game
I don’t know why they won’t just tell parents and others that they’re raising the standard.
It’s such an incredibly dishonest “debate”. It’s as if they’re worried that if they tell us we’ll take that information and do something terrible with it.
They did the same thing with the Common Core. How is this in ANY WAY a joint effort if the public can’t even be trusted to the extent of telling them “this is a more difficult test, so the scores will be lower”. This stubborn insistence on comparing apples and oranges and then insisting the oranges are IN FACT apples is just silly. It discredits the measure.
Tell them- a group of experts decided that the standards were too low so we’re upping them. That’s the truth. Shrouding this whole thing in mystery and what is political rhetoric will end up with no one believing a word out of their mouths.
It’s as if they’re deathly afraid that a public school somewhere might possibly get credit for something. It’s REALLY manipulative management and disrespectful to the people who work in these schools. Surely THEY know the tests are more difficult. Who is fooled by this? Why bother with this elaborate charade?
This has been a common complaint of all the tests based on the CCSS. Even using different readability formulae, the testing committee found the STAAR tests were often written two to three years above grade level. As someone that is certified as a reading teacher in NYS, I know that this is the frustration level for most students. The tests based on the CCSS have never been validated or normed. While I would be thrilled to toss standardized tests out of the window, I believe that offering students a validated test is the least we can do to find any student’s reading level with any degree of accuracy. The CCSS tests are not designed to be fair and accurate. They are politically motivated to cast a wide net of failure in order to undermine public schools. This, I believe, represents the political will of Abbott and Patrick as well as many members of the Texas legislature.
The second scam of the CCSS testing, not mentioned in this study, is the wholly political cut scores. These cut scores are not based on normative results of testing. They are based on the politics du jour. In other words if the goal is to fail many students, raise the cut score, or lower cut scores to make more students “proficient.” The cut score as well as the term “proficiency levels” are not scientific. They are wholly arbitrary, and they can be manipulated by politicians and influential ideologues. The tests based on the CCSS are a gigantic scam in my view. Parents should opt their students out the testing, but most students in Texas will take likely the test because many schools are threatening students with retention if they fail to take the test.
My eldest son works for a tech company. Engineers have something called a “build board” where they are given a goal and deadline and they work toward that standard. But managers- the people who are not engineers but instead business managers- decided that giving them an unobtainable goal by arbitrarily raising and re-raising standards would make them more productive.
Except it didn’t. The engineers felt they were misled and lied to by people who didn’t understand the reality of their work and the managers ended up completely discrediting the build board and the goals. So now it’s useless. It’s a big lie that makes the managers look good and can be used as a blunt object to beat the employees with, but no one believes it or uses in any practical way. They ruined a useful tool. Turned it into a weapon.
Superb comparison, Chiara! The funny thing is that even after an innovation has been shown, in practice, not to work, people persist with it because they continue to believe that it’s SUPPOSED TO WORK as planned. This has clearly been the case with the standards-and-high-stakes-testing regime in the United States. It hasn’t improved educational outcomes as measured by the tests themselves. It hasn’t closed achievement gaps. It has led to lots of gaming the system, to dramatic distortions of curricula and pedagogy, to high levels of stress-related physical and mental illness among kids. There’s a whole field of study and practice among management consulting folks related to this very kind of thing–to the ways in which, for social reasons, innovations that are supposed to improve outcomes commonly don’t. Technocrats forget that they are dealing with people, not machines, and they tend to place too much faith in their disruptive innovations–to believe the hype. Well, we’ve seen this play out, now, for an entire generation. The standards-and-high-stakes-testing approach has been an UTTER FAILURE by the very measures (test scores) promoted by its proponents. Time to put a fork in it.
That field of study is Socio-technical Systems (STS). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system
You can add all the variations of so-called personalized learning to the mix. Despite negative feedback and dismal results, the techies are unphased and continue to peddle it as a superior way to deliver content.
Boeing’s 737 MAX’s CRASHES is what’s wrong with America.
And then there’s NEW HORIZONS…quite the opposite.
Of course, all these readability formulas must be taken with a grain of salt. Consider the following sentence:
Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.
It’s from Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” and has a Flesch-Kincaid reading level of Grade 2, but conceptually, it’s quite sophisticated.
I wish they were taken with a grain of salt, or just vanished.
Your example is a good one.
This post is about “grade level readability” as if the concept of “grade level” had some well established meaning when attached to any skill or subject or concept. No so.
“Is it trying to fail children so that more public schools will be given low ratings and there will be more opportunities for privatization?”
YES!
This whole rank-and-punish testing scheme was a SCAM from the start designed as a hidden weapon that helped the vultures destroy the real public schools and take from the working class taxpayers and give to the already wealthy that never have enough.
Amén, Lloyd. Love your comments.
We know Finland schools went from one of the worst to one of the best.
Go Finland!
That’s also a serious problem in NY. Parents have and continue to push back via opting out. What a huge emotional (for the students) and financial (for tax payers) WASTE.
After nearly two decades of this federally mandated hoax there is still no end in sight. We have been claiming tto have the magical ability to accurately quantify highly subjective language skills in m20+ million non-standardized children who’s brains are still under construction. And when the smoke clears, most 8th graders cannot even identify the verb or pronoun in a simple sentence, because it is not tested.
I fail to comprehend how we continue to pay the same for scoring the tests (our district-90k) despite 55% opt-outs.
Sound like an excellent point to male at a BOE meeting. And while your at it, explain to them how 55% opt rate completely corrupts the scores of the 45% who take the test. It is time for school district BOEs and superintendents to refuse the ELA exams. The argument is simple: 20 years and no ROI! And the harm is now palpable for any teacher who has experienced the before and after.
The demographics of the opt-outs tend to Invalidate the data even more.
Pardon the typos.