Texas' Big Test - Texas Assessment of Academic Skills

Reason, Nov, 2000 by Jerry Jesness

Schools are ranked as "recognized" or "exemplary" based on their TAAS scores despite having combined SAT scores that average in the 800s or ACT scores in the teens. Texas' Region I, an area that stretches along the Rio Grande from the Gulf of Mexico to Laredo and is the most Hispanic area in Texas, saw SAT scores drop from 1993 to 1997, a period in which scores rose slightly nationally.

Although minority and low-income students are overrepresented at the bottom of the academic scale, it is a mistake to equate minority status with poor academic performance. While our Rio Grande Valley schools--the eastern portion of Region I--often host teenaged immigrants from Mexico who have only had a few years of primary school, and some who have attended no school at all, we also receive many immigrant students who are far superior academically to those who are American-born. Students who have attended escuela prepatatoria, the Mexican equivalent of an American high school, tend to perform at a much higher level than their American-educated peers.

So it's interesting to note immigrant parents' reactions to the Texas schools. My next-door neighbor, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, complains that, although the Texas Education Agency has deemed her son's school "exemplary," he was still adding and subtracting by drawing and counting sticks long after his cousins in Monterrey had learned their basic math facts. Another acquaintance, a former business professor from Instituto Politecnico in Mexico City who had come to Texas to manage one of the ubiquitous border-area plants where Mexican workers assemble American parts, was shocked when his daughter, who had been studying algebra in Mexico, was now "learning" how to add fractions. Another, a former Monterrey teacher, lost her job teaching nominally gifted students at a Rio Grande Valley elementary school after screaming at her principal, "What's the matter with them? Are they retarded?"

Then there's Eloisa, who teaches a bilingual class in a Dallas suburb. "Third grade is focused completely on TAAS," she recently wrote to the Teachers' Chatboard, an Internet group. "I'm a third grade teacher and that's all I do. I hate it, but I'm under pressure to do it. The bad news is that 4th, 5th and so on are also focused totally on TAAS. Last week I performed a little experiment I gave my third grade students 4th, 5th and 6th grade TAAS tests (Reading). The results: 19 out of2l passed the 4th grade test, 16 passed the 5th, 11 passed the 6th. Conclusion: Public schools aren't designed to...impart knowledge, but to teach strategies to pass a stupid and useless test....My honest advice: homeschool your kid or send him to a private school."

Texas' education establishment now knows that virtually all children are educable. That does not seem like a major epiphany, but it has improved instruction for the state's worst students, minority and otherwise. If we were to compare the academic levels of the bottom 40 percent of students in each state, I suspect that Texas would come out near the top. If we compared the other 60 percent, I suspect that we would come out near the bottom. Our SAT and ACT scores seem to bear this out.