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 

Faculty at Texas university fear entire liberal arts departments will be slashed, Alice Speri | Friday, 17 October 2025 | The Guardian

Friends:

News from the University of Texas at Austin this week is deeply alarming. 

Faculty have learned that a committee has been quietly appointed to study the “restructuring” of liberal arts programs, with particular focus rumored to fall onAfrican and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. These are precisely the disciplines that give students the tools to think critically about race, identity, and democracy—areas of study already under sustained political attack in Texas.

That the university has provided no public explanation only compounds faculty and student fears. The timing of this move—just weeks after the state eliminated faculty senates and centralized power in administrators’ hands—suggests a larger pattern of institutional unraveling of higher education.

I fear this is not restructuring at all, but rather a purge of vital fields—like Mexican American Studies—that were born from historic grassroots and civil rights struggles to ensure that the histories, experiences, and contributions of our communities are researched, taught, and valued. Far from “political correctness,” these programs embody the very mission of a public university: to expand knowledge, deepen understanding, and prepare students to engage critically and compassionately in a diverse democracy. 

Like Dr. Julie Minich quoted in the piece below, she represents all of us when she expresses just how offensive an allegation this is when the reality is one of our administrations seeking to censure precious knowledge and our teaching of it.

Moreover, if these programs do not promote the kind of workforce readiness that SB 37 insists upon, I don’t know what does. The capacity to think critically, navigate complexity, communicate across difference, and lead with empathy—these are precisely the skills our state and nation need to thrive. To dismantle the very programs that cultivate them is not only short-sighted policy but a profound disservice to the students and communities that public education was created to serve.

-Angela Valenzuela

Faculty at Texas university fear entire liberal arts departments will be slashed

University of Texas at Austin faculty fear changes from new taskforce that could restructure humanities programs

 The first day of classes at the University of Texas at Austin on 25 August 2025. Photograph: Jay Janner/

The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images.

Alice Speri | Friday, 17 October 2025 | The Guardian

Faculty at the University of Texas at Austin fear entire academic departments may be on the chopping block after the university quietly appointed a committee charged with studying the restructuring of its liberal arts programs.

The university – the largest in the public University of Texas system – has not made any announcements about cuts or restructuring, but faculty there have learned the committee was established earlier this semester and tasked with a review that they believe is focused on ethnic and regional disciplines such as African and African diaspora studies, Mexican American and Latina/o studies, as well as women’s and gender studies.

The university did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment and faculty who asked administrators about the committee said they have received no clear answers. On Thursday, UT Austin also announced a taskforce to conduct a “thorough review” of the university’s core curriculum – a set of required courses taken by all students – “to better fulfill the purpose of this curriculum and identify gaps in quality, rigor, or intellectual cohesion”, the university’s president wrote in an email.

The taskforce is made up of 18 professors – none from the departments where cuts are feared. Students have circulated an image in private emails and chats mocking the fact that almost all faculty on it are white.



An image circulated by students at the University of Texas at Austin. Photograph: Obtained by The Guardian.

“We’re hearing bits and pieces,” said Julie Minich, a professor in the English and Mexican American and Latina/o studies departments at UT Austin. “We’re hearing that the dean appointed a restructuring committee. We’re hearing rumors about who’s on it. And then we’re trying to read the tea leaves.”

Concerns escalated after a new state law went into effect on 1 September, disbanding the public university system’s long-established faculty senates and giving university administrators near-absolute control over university governance matters. While university senates hold advisory roles at most schools, they are generally a primary outlet for faculty to engage in decisions concerning the university.

As the law kicked in, UT Austin’s new president – the first to be appointed without faculty input – announced the establishment of a 12-person faculty advisory board entirely selected by him and “charged with advising on institutional matters and focusing on the best interests of the entire University”.

While UT Austin leaders have said little about their plans for the university’s future, the new provost, William Inboden, recently outlined his vision in a 7,000-word manifesto published in National Affairs, a rightwing magazine. In the essay, he laments the crisis of “legitimacy and trust” in US higher education and universities’ “ideological imbalance”, in part blaming the “identity-studies framework” for them.

“Too many American history courses present the American past as a litany of oppressions and hypocrisies, leaving students with an imbalanced view of the United States,” he wrote, repeating a position often invoked by conservatives, including Donald Trump, who have railed against universities as bastions of woke liberalism.

Inboden’s manifesto “really outlines his sense that the humanities and liberal arts are full of pathology and rot”, said Craig Campbell, an anthropology professor at UT Austin. “That’s what they’re going after.”

He added that the uncertainty had been a major distraction this semester. “It’s a horrible, horrible climate right now.”

“We really took this article as an indication of hostility for our field,” echoed Minich, referring to Inboden’s essay. “The combination of the formation of this committee without any communication with the faculty and then this article published by the provost has really put a lot of people on edge.”

Earlier this year, the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute also took aim at UT Austin. In a report titled “Are the ‘Studies’ Worth Studying?”, the conservative thinktank appears to foreshadow the targeting of the same departments faculty now fear are under threat.

“The ‘Studies’ – e.g., ‘Women’s Studies,’ ‘Asian American Studies,’ ‘Critical Disability Studies,’ etc. – are activist rather than scholarly disciplines,” the report concludes, claiming that they are rife with “grade inflation”. “‘Low hanging-fruit’ remedies to grade inflation include eliminating low-rigor disciplines (such as the Studies).”

Minich flatly rejected the report’s conclusions.

“I would vigorously dispute any characterization of area studies or ethnic studies as ideologically engaged in the indoctrination of students,” she said. “My goal in the classroom is never to tell students what to think. It’s to give them tools for how to think about a complicated world, and the fact that I feel I'm being prevented from doing that seems to me to be a real problem."

UT Austin leaders have not yet responded to the president’s offer. Earlier this week, about 200 students made their opposition to it clear as they chanted “do not sign” in front of the administration’s main building.

More Educated Than Ever, Still Unequal: The Fantasy Economy of Skills Shortages, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

More Educated Than Ever, Still Unequal: The Fantasy Economy of Skills Shortages

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

October 1, 2025

I have been reflecting on a newly-published essay by Neil Kraus, a political scientist from the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, published in the Summer 2025 issue of American Educator, as it hits close to home for those of us fighting for public education. Here is a summary, which I also plan to share with my students, as it is full of insights debunking myths about neoliberalism (‘capitalism on steroids’) and its intersections with labor market and education data.

Kraus calls out what he terms the “fantasy economy,” the decades-long myth that the United States is a knowledge economy bursting with high-skill, high-wage jobs, and that our schools and universities are “failing” to produce workers ready to take them on (Kraus, 2025). 

From a global perspective, this is consistent with Karen Hao’s book The Empire of AI, which finds that the so-called knowledge economy is in fact deeply uneven, built on precarious and low-wage labor across the globe, particularly in the Global South. 

Hao shows how the myth of endless high-skill opportunities obscures the exploitative underpinnings of the AI economy—data labeling, content moderation, and other hidden forms of digital labor—that mirror the same structural inequalities Kraus critiques. Both reveal how these myths function to misdirect blame toward schools while legitimating an economic system that thrives on inequality and dispossession.

It’s a story we’ve all heard. Business leaders, politicians, and the media repeat it so often that it feels like common sense: if only schools would do a better job, if only students worked harder, then prosperity would follow. But the data—and our lived experience—say otherwise.

The truth is that Americans are more educated today than ever before. Nearly 70 percent of adults have education beyond high school. And yet, roughly 60 percent of jobs still require nothing more than a high school diploma or less. A third of college graduates are underemployed, and about 40 percent of recent grads end up in jobs that don’t require their degrees. This mismatch—persisting for decades—shows that the economy remains dominated by low-wage service jobs, not high-skill opportunities.

The “skills gap” that business leaders love to talk about is not real. There’s an oversupply of well-educated workers, not a shortage. The same is true in STEM.Despite constant claims of a STEM shortage, such jobs make up only about 6 percent of the labor market, a share that has barely changed, and many STEM graduates remain underemployed. (Carnevale et al., 2023; Mishel & Bivens, 2021).

So why does this myth persist? Because it is useful—especially to corporate America. By blaming schools and colleges for economic inequality, corporations deflect attention away from their own role in depressing wages, offshoring jobs, busting unions, consolidating power, manipulating tax policy, and driving inequality ever higher. In this way, the “failure of education” becomes a convenient scapegoat, while the structural forces that actually shape the economy remain largely unchallenged. 

When corporations blame schools, whether K-12 or higher education this justifies cuts, tuition hikes, undermining faculty, and narrowing the curriculum —all while corporations rake in profits and pay less in taxes.

This is the heart of neoliberalism, the system ushered in during the Reagan years and still with us today. 

Neoliberalism tells us that the market solves all problems and that public goods like education must be cut, privatized, or turned into revenue streams for the wealthy. It tells us to accept online education as the future, not because it’s better for students but because it saves money for administrators and enriches tech companies.

But we know better. Education is not the problem; inequality is. Americans are better educated than at any point in history, yet wages have been flat for most workers for over forty years while wealth has soared at the very top (Mishel & Bivens, 2021). That’s not on teachers, professors, or students—that’s on a political and economic system designed to benefit shareholders over communities.

While Kraus powerfully exposes the myth of the “fantasy economy,” his analysis unfortunately does not explicitly take up the question of race or gender. When we add that lens, the picture becomes even clearer—and more troubling.

Students of color have made significant strides in educational attainment over the past several decades. Black, Latino, and Indigenous students are graduating from high school and college at higher rates than ever before. Yet racial and gender wage gaps remain stubbornly wide, revealing the hollowness of the ‘great equalizer’ narrative

A Black worker with a bachelor’s degree earns less, on average, than a white worker with the same credential, while Latino and Indigenous workers face similar disparities (Carnevale et al., 2014; Gould, 2020; Scott-Clayton & Li, 2016). Hence, both systemic racism and sexism continue to structure labor market outcomes regardless of attainment.

Source: Gould, E. (2020). State of working America wages 2019. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/

This racialized reality and gender gaps expose just how false the skills-gap narrative really is. If education alone could fix inequality, then rising attainment among communities of color and women would have narrowed economic gaps. But the opposite has often been true. What persists is not a failure of schools, but the endurance of structural racism and sexism in hiring, wages, and opportunity.

Moreover, neoliberal reforms that elevate STEM and “workforce readiness”—combined with such discourse as "return on investment" often come at the expense of Ethnic Studies and the humanities—fields that affirm identity, build civic capacity, and offer the critical perspectives that communities of color have long fought to preserve (Sleeter, 2011). By insisting that education’s value is only economic, the fantasy economy erases not only the realities of structural racism but also the democratic and cultural purposes of schooling.

To wit, analyses of race deepen Kraus’ argument that the attack on education is not just about shifting blame for inequality from corporate actors to schools—it is also about obscuring how racial capitalism continues to marginalize Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, regardless of how much formal education they achieve (Taylor, 2016).

In summary, to reclaim education as a public good, we must expose the fantasy economy as a lie that justifies austerity. Education is not just job training—it is preparation for democracy, citizenship, and human flourishing.” The wealthiest country in the world can afford great schools and universities for every student. The question is not whether we can, but whether we will choose people over corporate profits. As Kraus credibly conveys, that’s the struggle before us.

References

Carnevale, A. P., Fasules, M. L., & Campbell, K. P. (2014). Race, ethnicity, and the college completion gap. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

Carnevale, A. P., Smith, N., & Strohl, J. (2023). The recovery: Job growth and education requirements through 2031. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

Gould, E. (2020). State of working America wages 2019. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/

Hao, K. (2024). Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. Penguin Press.

Kraus, N. (2025). The fantasy economy: Neoliberalism, inequality, and the education reform movement. American Educator, 49(3), 12–21.

Mishel, L., & Bivens, J. (2021). Identifying the policy levers generating wage suppression and wage inequality. Economic Policy Institute.

Scott-Clayton, J., & Li, J. (2016). Black-white disparity in student loan debt more than triples after graduation. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-white-disparity-in-student-loan-debt-more-than-triples-after-graduation/

Sleeter, C. E. (2011). The academic and social value of ethnic studies: A research review. National Education Association.

Taylor, K. Y. (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black liberation. Haymarket Books.