The State of our State’s Education Address

The main reason the TAAS was ousted from its title of “the test for the biggest, ‘bestest’ state in the continental US” is because it became the standard for teachers’ curriculums.  This was a problem because teachers would no longer teach, but just give practice TAAS tests.  If a teacher wanted to make sure students would remember something they would threaten them with “This will be on the TAAS in April!” 

            Let’s face it, the TAAS test should not be the pinnacle of our school system. After all it is testing basic skills.  Do we want our students to have nothing but basic skills?  To answer this question, the state of Texas came up with a new, “harder” test which would force schools to improve.  It was an excellent idea on paper, but with a year until the first test is given, teachers are recycling their old lesson plans, but exchanging the word TAAS for TAKS.  “THIS WILL BE ON THE TAKS IN APRIL!” they scream, “YOU HAVE TO PASS THE TAKS TO GRADUATE!!!”
            This quickly became the new pinnacle of our schools.  I agree that it is an improvement, but we should not hold kids back depending on how well their teacher’s prepped them.  There are very good teachers, who do NOT teach to a test, and do not have a 100% passing rate on the TAKS.  Other teachers pass out Xeroxed TAKS/TAAS and are commended by the school district for having excellent TAAS scores.  Students’ scores on TAAS, or TAKS, do not reflect a teacher’s teaching ability. 

Standardized tests today mean nothing.  The reason standardized tests were created was to make an even measure for all schools.  The moment a school “teaches a test” or even gives a practice tests is the moment that the test becomes useless.  Standardized tests are supposed to give an assessment of what the students are learning in their school.  However, when districts require students to take 6 “benchmark” tests per year, and the teachers help the students prepare for these tests, the tests become invalid.  When a student is “prepped” for a test, the test measures how much the student was prepped for it.

            This is not true for just the TAKS and TAAS test, but also any other test like the SAT or ACT.  The SAT should test what you learned in high school, but students now buy $50 books that claim, “5,000 PAST SAT TESTS” or “INCREASE YOUR SAT SCORE BY 200 POINTS!”  When you first think about this, it seems that if you study to raise your score by 200 points, then you learned 200 points worth of materials, but a standardized test cannot ask questions on every single possible concept, so it chooses a few.  This way, theoretically at least, students won’t be able to score well unless they know everything.  This was true until companies started finding patterns in questions and selling books like “THE SECRETS OF THE SAT TEST.”  Students now learn the easy way to solve analogies, instead of having to know what all the words mean and how they can be related.  Students now take the possible answers for math tests and input them into a question, since this is faster than actually solving the problem.  I will venture to say that a majority of high school students could not solve a 2 or 3 variable equation without the aid of their graphing calculators.

            The other problem with the new TAKS test is how “hard” it is.  It is SO hard that students only need 40% accuracy to pass the test.  In essence, this test is not really that hard, the state just wants to look good.  If last year the state had an 85% passing rate on the TAAS test, then heaven forbid that the students do worse on the new “harder” test. If students do not do great on the practice test this year, then the test will be watered down until it is at the level of TAAS, since Texas cannot admit that our schools are not wonderful.  The only way students will “really” do better on this test is if they are forced to do better.  The state should say “Students must be forced to score a 70% or better on this test.  After a three year initiation of the test, students who do not score a 70% or better will be held back.  The test will not be made any easier, but over the years the test will be made harder.”  Instead Texas is saying, “Students should score about 40% on this test.  If it is too hard then we will make it easy enough for most students to score a 40%.  Over the years we will try to make it harder until it hurts the state’s scores and then we will make it easier.”  We must force our schools to jump up to a high level, not bring the “high level” down to the schools.  We don’t want another TAAS!

            The solution to Texas’s (and the US’s) problem of standardized tests is to give teachers information about a certain type of test, and then give the students a completely different type of test.  After a few years, teachers would catch on and would realize, “Hey, maybe we can’t teach the information that is supposed to be on this test.  Maybe we actually have to teach.”  Another method would be to create a “secret test” which changes every year that the teachers would not be allowed to see.  This would be very unpopular, but our students would learn.

            Until we force our schools to perform well, we will not have an “exemplary” state.  To quote a terrible, but truthful cliché, “You can’t make applesauce without cutting up a few apples.”  We must fail to achieve.  Acceptance is the first step to solving that problem. 

 

Texas, please join me in saying, “I am from Texas and WE have a problem.”