First the good news. School boards in Texas continue to pass a resolution opposing high-stakes testing. As of this date, 610 school boards representing more than 3.6 million students have passed the Texas resolution. That 59% of all school boards in the state, representing 74% of all students in Texas public schools.

Texas, as we know from its role in originating No Child Left Behind, is a state that is test-obsessed and test-centric. Its leaders assumed that testing would solve all problems, raise everyone’s performance, close the gaps between races and income levels, and maybe do the dishes as well. No one figured out that a standardized test by design is normed, meaning that half are above and half below average; no one realized that standardized tests accurately reflect poverty and affluence. Tests do not teach. Tests instead displace instruction and control and direct instruction into the path ordained by the tests.

Texas, be it noted, is paying $100 million a year to Pearson to design tests. Texas officials should be asking Pearson why New York pays only $32 million annually. Are the Pearson tests for Texas three times as good as Pearson’s tests for New York? Are the Texas officials being treated as dumb rubes who will buy just anything sold by someone with a British accent? As a Texan, I’d like to know why my state got sold something for triple the price of what they were selling to NY.

Now for the bad news.

Disappointed with the results of three decades of testing, disappointed with the poorly prepared students who enter college, Texas officials have just given a contract to the College Board to develop a new test! This would be a placement exam for all students entering any college or university in Texas.

Meanwhile, the cuts to public education are something like $4 billion in the past few years. Teachers, librarians, other have been laid off. Class sizes have gone up.

But there is always enough money for new tests.

All of U.S. education policy is now firmly hitched to standardized test scores.

Although the President said in his last State of the Union address that teachers should not teach to the test, he surely knows that federal policy demands teaching to the test.

Test scores determine teacher evaluation, teacher salary, teacher tenure, teacher bonuses. Test scores determine whether teachers and principals are fired. Test scores determine whether schools get closed or commended.

Test scores determine whether students are promoted or held back.

Today, the New York Times reported that a professor at the University of Texas has concluded that the standardized tests are not reliable or valid. He says they predict how students will do in the future in relation to how well they have done on the same standardized tests in the past. They do not show what students have learned.

The story begins:

“In 2006, a math pilot program for middle school students in a Dallas-area district returned surprising results.

“The students’ improved grasp of mathematical concepts stunned Walter Stroup, the University of Texas at Austin professor behind the program. But at the end of the year, students’ scores had increased only marginally on state standardized TAKS tests, unlike what Mr. Stroup had seen in the classroom.

“A similar dynamic showed up in a comparison of the students’ scores on midyear benchmark tests and what they received on their end-of-year exams. Standardized test scores the previous year were better predictors of their scores the next year than the benchmark test they had taken a few months earlier.

“Now, in studies that threaten to shake the foundation of high-stakes test-based accountability, Mr. Stroup and two other researchers said they believe they have found the reason: a glitch embedded in the DNA of the state exams that, as a result of a statistical method used to assemble them, suggests they are virtually useless at measuring the effects of classroom instruction.”

Read the whole story and re-read that last line: the tests are “virtually useless at measururing the effects of classroom instruction.”

Think of it: we have a multi-billion dollar industry that sucks resources out of the classroom, whose tests are best at predicting how students will perform on next year’s tests. The test measure each other. They are designed to do that. They demand teaching to the test.

I don’t know whether the professor’s concerns are right. Others with technical expertise will weigh in . But what was obvious before he spoke out is that these tests are not good enough to carry the weight of determining our social structure, let alone the lives of students and teachers and principals and the fate of their schools.

Let’s hear from the testing experts about this.