Test scores show some improvement, but no breakthrough for Texas school kids.
The results are now in for this year's State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, the STAAR tests.
“There’s a lot of pressure on everyone, where this is involved,” sighed Jean Burk, president of College Prep Genius. “Sadly 40% of high schools use STAAR testing for grades.”
The tests measure whether students are ready to move on to college, a career, or the military.
This year’s scores show that, compared with last year, a higher percentage of students met grade level for algebra and biology, but a lower percentage met grade level for English and history.
“The kids are demoralized,” Burk exclaimed, “and reduced to this developmentally inappropriate test that labels them as failures. As if kids don’t have enough issues these days. No need to add this onto their plate.”
These latest scores sync up with longtime educational assessments which show Texas students lagging behind the national average on skills such as reading.
“We rate so low among all other countries, in the basics, the core, reading, writing, math, science,” Burk said. “If our school system took that seriously, they would stop this testing nonsense, which is nothing more than teaching to a test.”
Burk warns that, on the surface, those test scores may soon take a turn for the worse because of the state’s school choice initiative which helps families escape failing public schools.
“If you have a failing school system already, because of the STAAR test, and the kids who really want to learn, they’re pulled out, very possibly you’ll be left with the kids who… maybe their parents aren’t really involved and they aren’t going to do that well on the STAAR test,” she pointed out. “So the averages will go down even further and it’s really going to show up as a failure for the school.”
Photo: AFP