What We Refuse to Learn About Standardized Testing: Dr. Gerald Bracey and the 89th Legislature, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What We Refuse to Learn About Standardized Testing: Dr. Gerald Bracey and the 89th Legislature

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 4, 2025

Learn more about Dr.
Bracey here.

When I revisited Gerald W. Bracey’s 2009 commentary in Educational Leadership, I was struck by how uncannily prophetic it feels in this political moment—especially in light of the sweeping changes enacted by the 89th Texas Legislature in 2025. Best known for his famous "Bracey Reports," his critique of the nation’s “test mania” reads not as a relic of a bygone era but as a warning flare we failed to heed, one whose consequences unfolded vividly during last session’s battles over testing, accountability, and privatization (see Valenzuela, 2025, for discussion).

While public school advocates secured incremental gains—slightly less disruptive testing policies, quicker turnaround on results, the elimination of a handful of assessments, and improved transparency—the underlying system remains largely intact. Schools are still judged primarily by test scores, accountability frameworks remain narrowly defined, and the deeper structural reforms that advocates have long demanded are once again deferred (Valenzuela, 2025). In this vacuum, the push for charterization and privatization only accelerates. 

Even so, there was a brief moment of meaningful political possibility: Texas lawmakers introduced proposals to overhaul or even eliminate the STAAR exam altogether. Raise Your Hand Texas, in particular, deserves a shout-out for leading the charge. For the first time in decades, a major statewide assessment regime came under serious legislative challenge, and the House even passed a bill to move the state away from STAAR. Yet despite the symbolic significance of this breakthrough, the effort stalled—revealing just how entrenched the test-based accountability system remains.

Bracey began with an observation so commonsensical that many policymakers today still stumble past it: no standardized test can ever know a child better than the teacher who sees that child every day. Yet over a fifty-year span, he noted, the United States managed to devolve from viewing tests as occasionally useful tools, to treating them as compulsory, and finally elevating them into the dominant—almost exclusive—measure of educational quality.

Even though tests like NAEP, PISA, TIMSS, or STAAR were never designed to evaluate teaching, curriculum, or the complex, relational work of schooling, policymakers have repeatedly misappropriated them for exactly those purposes. The result, Bracey argued, has been a national preoccupation with numerical indicators that flatten the human reality of learning, obscure the deeper conditions shaping students’ educational lives, and induce undue stress on teachers and the teaching profession.

That critique feels especially urgent in Texas today. This year, the Legislature passed a statewide voucher program that redirects public funds into private schools, one that rests on the long-standing assumption that public schools are failing (Edison, 2025). This assumption gets reinforced year after year through simplistic interpretations of test scores. 

These debates echo Bracey’s core argument: when policy decisions hinge on flawed measures, those decisions inevitably warp the system they intend to improve. Vouchers, sold as a remedy for supposedly failing schools, rely on the very test-based narratives Bracey spent a lifetime challenging. The claim that low standardized test scores reflect poor teaching ignores the deep structural factors shaping learning in Texas—poverty, segregation, underfunding, and what we are by now discovering as the soaring costs (or "price") of privatization. 

Yet these structural realities rarely appear in the public conversation. Instead, test scores are brandished as evidence that public schools are beyond repair, clearing the political path for vouchers, school district takeovers, and the redirection of taxpayer dollars into private hands.

The fight over STAAR reveals a similar contradiction. Legislators across the spectrum have acknowledged that STAAR tells parents little about what their children actually know and does nothing to inform day-to-day instruction. These critiques echo Bracey almost word-for-word. Still, unless Texas reimagines assessment from the ground up—beginning with teaching rather than measurement—any replacement risks replicating the same distortions. Bracey insisted that the best assessments are those built by teachers and anchored in teacher-made curricula, not imposed from above. 

Bracey also challenged the persistent belief that national or international test scores determine economic success. He reminded readers that Japan continued to dominate global assessments even as its economy faltered, and that countries like Iceland maintained high scores while facing economic collapse. 

The notion that bubbling in answers on a fourth- or eighth-grade exam shapes global competitiveness is, to use Bracey’s word, “easily refuted.” Yet Texas, like much of the nation, continues to tie student outcomes to broader narratives about economic health and workforce readiness, despite overwhelming evidence that economic forces are far larger than any test score.

Bracey’s insistence on returning to the human, relational work of teaching feels especially vital. Public schools are not failing; they are absorbing the accumulated burdens of inequality, political interference, and relentless underfunding—burdens that privatization schemes will only intensify. Vouchers will not solve the challenges facing Texas students. Nor will another standardized test, no matter how politically appealing.

Bracey’s enduring message is that education is not a number. It is not a rank, a percentile, or a scaled score. It is the web of relationships, communities, and possibilities that unfold when schools are supported rather than scapegoated. If Texas is serious about creating a stronger and more equitable education system, then we must move beyond the illusions spun by test scores and invest once again in teachers, teacher-made curriculum, and public schools as public goods.

In this critical moment, Bracey’s voice reminds us that the greatest danger is not that our tests show too little—but that we have come to believe they show too much.

Reference

Bracey, G. W. (2009). Multiple measures. Educational Leadership, 67(3), 32–37.

Edison, J. (2025, May 3). Private school vouchers are now law in Texas. Here’s how they will work. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/03/texas-school-vouchers-greg-abbott-signs/

Valenzuela, A. (2025, September 15). Accountability without justice: The continuing agenda to demonize K–12 public schools to set the stage for further privatization. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/09/accountability-without-justice.html