Excellent piece by Drs. Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner on why these tests for last year and the current one are invalid. We need much more than "a waiver request to the U.S. Department of Education seeking to pause the A-F school-grading process this year," we need to actually not be testing children in the middle of a pandemic, period.
In fact, the pandemic gives us as citizens in a democracy a unique opportunity to question, and ultimately, eliminate high-stakes testing altogether. To wit, we need a moratorium on these tests and fashion a new, humane, holistic, system of assessment where failure becomes more mythic than real. We should replace it with a system where the question is less whether one graduates, and more when this happens. One could even graduate early in just such a system.
Please join us tomorrow at 12:00PM on Monday, Feb. 8, 2021 for an Austin Council PTA meeting to discuss on Make it Matter Monday - "The STAAR: What is it?" Join our panel of standardized testing experts as they discuss the history, validity, equity impacts, and future of the STAAR in our schools.
Panel includes:
- Dr. Angela Valenzuela, UT Department of Educational Leadership and Policy
- Dr. Walter Stroup, UMass
- Theresa Trevino, Texans Advocate for Meaningful Student Assessments (TAMSA)
Register here to join in on the conversation at noon CST.
-Angela Valenzuela
Commentary: STAAR outcome obvious; test a waste of $90M
STAAR testing should halt for the school year. It’s expensive and education has been uneven for Texas students.
Times Union /Times Union
The Texas Education Agency is submitting a waiver request to the U.S. Department of Education seeking to pause the A-F school-grading process this year.
This is good. Continuing the charade of grading schools on the social-class makeup of their students has always been unethical. That is because “who” attends the schools is the overwhelming determinant of the standardized test scores on which school grades are based. Rating schools “A” or “D, “good” or “bad,” without visiting schools and evaluating staff and the quality of instruction that kids get is unintelligible — if not simply mean.However, according to the waiver notice put out by the TEA, students should still take the STAAR test this year because “it remains critical that parents, educators, and policymakers understand the impact of the pandemic on student learning.”
This is absurd. Let’s just admit kids have fallen behind in learning the standard curriculum. Most of us are sure that is the case. But we have no way of estimating what they might have learned from time at home while cooking, gardening, playing educational games, practicing instruments, tutoring siblings, reading on their own, etc. They weren’t all watching cartoons.
It costs Texans $90 million to test students every year. Why would we want to spend $90 million of taxpayer money on an endeavor that will yield information Texas already has? Data from other states’ testing programs inform us that year-to-year school scores are correlated so high that if state testing were to be suspended for one or two years, there would be hardly any change in what was learned about a school’s performance and its relative rank. Texas already has 2019 test scores. If the state gives the test this year, $90 million will be spent only to learn something already known. Surely such money could be used for other educational needs.
Furthermore, if you want to know how the students are doing, ask a teacher. Studies show they can predict the rank order of their students on the state’s test amazingly well.
Another important reason for not testing this year is that content coverage by students has been uneven. Some kids took to remote learning; some didn’t; some kids had an adequate computer and a reliable Wi-Fi signal, but some did not. Some had a parent at home working with them; some did not. Some grappled with COVID-19 directly having to cope with sick family members; some did not.
We know that depression rates skyrocketed the past year, with three times as many Americans meeting criteria for depression. We have no idea how this has affected millions of school-age children. So if the Texas curriculum for, say, fifth-grade mathematics or language arts was not taught fully or not received by every child, the test is patently invalid. That is because the test designers assume all kids have had an equal chance at exposure to the required curriculum.
If that assumption has clearly not been met, as in the 2019-20 school year and now the 2020-21 school year, the test scores obtained are prima facie uninterpretable. Furthermore, to use such a test for any consequential decision-making is in violation of the code of ethics of the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education. Consequential decisions made on the basis of those invalid tests are easily and rightfully challenged in court. STAAR data for 2021 are tainted.
Do we really want to spend $90 million of our education budget on standardized achievement tests when it is clear students need new curriculum to discern facts from lies; when they need to deal with history and contemporary issues related to racism, sexism, social class differentiation and climate change; and when they need to learn the rights and obligations of citizenship in our state and nation? Surely, in Texas, there are better ways to use $90 million.
Sharon L. Nichols is a professor with and chair of the Department of Educational Psychology at UTSA. David C. Berliner is professor emeritus with Arizona State University.
Your post is very informative and I love this
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