TAAS tests and promotion
 

In Texas Classrooms, the TAAS test may be given too much weight for evaluating students and schools. The TAAS test is used not only for student assessment and school evaluation, but is also used to decide if students are ready to graduate. A proposal put forward by the Governor's office in 1997 required that third, fifth, and eighth graders in Texas Classrooms pass the TAAS test before they can be promoted to the next grade. According to this proposal, students who fail portions of the test would have to attend summer school at state expense and re-take the test before being promoted to the next grade. This plan could discourage social promotion, a practice that promotes children to the next grade even when they have not yet mastered the material from the previous grade.

However, others argue that the TAAS test is not proven to measure the academic proficiency of young students in Texas Classrooms and could cause large numbers of students to have to attend summer school unnecessarily. Although an increasing number of students in Texas Classrooms are passing the TAAS test, there is still substantial need for improvement. Fair learning standards should be based on a realistic assessment of the skills and knowledge that a student will need in college or the workplace. Even though most public schools are focused on academic standards, research shows that many employers and college professors believe that a high school diploma is still no guarantee that a student has learned the basic skills. All students must be given a fair chance to acquire the skills they need to continue learning throughout their lifetimes.

This sounds a lot like the Florida FCAT, which in my mind is a disaster. This concept looks great on paper, but there are some flaws with it.

1. Students on every level have bad days. There are times they don't feel good, didn't get enough sleep, or for some reason don't perform up to par. It would really suck if a good student got retained because they had a bad day.

2. How would any of us feel, if our promotion at work was determined solely on one day or one week? That would be a lot of pressure. I don't think students, who already have enough pressure, need more.

3. Teachers begin to teach the test, and don't look for more creative teaching methods. I taught in private school, and when a new parent would come in from the public school that was the main complaint. You will have some that won't of course, but a lot of teachers will feel like they have to focus on the test.

4. Some students just don't test well. I knew a girl in high school, who was one of our five valedictorians, and was very smart. She just didn't test well. She never got over an 18 on her ACTs. (She's now a doctor, and I think she was a Chi-O). How unfair is it to someone who just doesn't test well.

While it's important to measure proficiency, I think it would be better done by training our teachers better. It would also be valuable to have teachers put together portfolios of each student's work over the year, and have someone in the administration review it, so they can see the progression of the student. Then they could make a joint decision on each student. This would take some of the "teacher's pet" and the "passing just to get them out of here" out of the equation. Would this take time and money, of course. Students today are already going to school in an over processed environment, where very little is customized to meet each students individual need because of lack of time and resources... Why add to that? :(

It is actually the TAKS and please don't SPAM

Right.

Political spam?

I personally think (and all the teachers can be mad at me) that high stakes testing has been great for our school systems and students.

At least locally, this high stakes testing has caused a HUGE shakeup in our schools -- and that's a good thing.

I think it's been directly responsible for the rise of the KIP acadamies and other high quality charter schools in the urban areas where before, the alternative was out-of-district transfers and long bus (public transportation) rides to class.

While our traditional schools have continued to do poorly (and many will probably eventually be shut down due to their poor performance), charter schools have really moved in and taken over and the results have been great. It seems that contrary to the belief of many of our traditional public school administrators, people of lower socio-economic means can perform as well (or better) than their suburban counterparts. The aforementioned KIP Academy, located in, and primarily serving an almost exclusive minority population in probably the worst part of town (I believe the school is something on the order of 96% minority) actually tested higher than any other middle school in the state of Oklahoma -- that includes both OKC and Tulsa's magnet schools which are supposed to be where the best and brightest are supposed to go.

At any rate, I think that these high stakes tests and the extreme difference in pass/fail rates has finally given parents and students the ability to really see a tangible difference in the different options available to their kids. That may or may not have been the aim of that legislation, but that was the outcome.

These state tests, in my opinion, aren't a bad deal at all if they can produce the same sorts of results.

I remember having a teacher who used to judge his performance on the absence of C grades. He said that A students are always going to be A students, and F students are always going to be F students, but C students are those who could have gotten A's & B's if the material was presented right. I don't know how much merit there is to that, but it's an interesting concept.

you know, i can agree with that.

but isnt it legit that C students could just as well get D's and F's if they really didnt give a damn?

and yeah, how bout an award for weirdest SPAM?

Well, the thing about his class, was that he had a "if you don't do the homework, you can't pass, and if you do the homework, you can't fail" policy. Homework was to complete the study guide for the test. The study guide was just about word for word what the test was. And, as long as you DID the homework, you got an A+. He didn't actually read your homework, figuring that you're shooting yourself in the foot for the test if you didn't do it right. This was also a required religion course that had no basic, regular and advanced levels, so he had to make it passable for all.

The only thing that's weird about this to me is how unlike ed. school thought this guy's assessments were.

He assessed knowledge, which I think we should do more of, but teachers are constantly bombarded with the need to teach "higher level thinking skills," so teaching in a way that assessment only came from testing over exactly what was on the study guide would be bad, bad, bad in the eyes of many education professors and state and local curriculum guides and policies.