More news from the Lone Star front line...
Man, the concerned parents from Texas are coming out the woodwork! I'm getting a real education on the TAAS and the difficulties parents are having in dealing with those test scores. My most recent email comes from Susan Sarhady, the president of the Plano Parental Rights Council. The website is a great repository of TAAS-related articles, news about effective teaching strategie, and plans for giving parents more say in the educational process.
Susan's email is related to my previous post about the extreme fluctuation in the TAAS cutscore. According to her sources, the TAAS administrators claim that the test shouldn't fluctuate very much from admin to admin, but somehow they ended up with a test so much more difficult that the cutscores moved by a huge amount. These cut scores were not released until after the test was administered and scored, which leaves parents with no way to tell if the test was more difficult, or if (as they suspect), the cutscores were tweaked so as to preserve the illlusion that Texas schoolchildren are doing great on the TAAS, as described in this press release.
Also, the new test that replaces the TAAS is called the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), which may or may not better measure the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards. The transition from the TAAS to the TAKS is critically examined in this report (requires Adobe Acrobat) by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The report is 65 pages, and after giving it a thorough reading, my head is spinning from the TAAS - TAKS - TEKS discussion. I'll just list a few highlights.
First off, one reason for the change is ostensibly because the TAAS is no longer challenging enough to measure the higher levels of academic acheivement in schools, which every parent who's emailed me thinks is absolute hooey. Second, the stakes are now higher - social promotion in Texas is going to end, and federal funding will be tied to progress on the state assessments. The new test, the TAKS, doesn't seem to be based on any new assesment objectives and promises to be similar (depressingly so, according to this report) to the TAAS. The Texas Education Agency's claim that the TAKS will be more rigorous is met with skepticism. For some constructs, TAAS scores and NAEP scores rose, but on others, NAEP scores declined even when TAAS scores rose. The difference between norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests is discussed so as to make it clear that the TAAS items are criterion-referenced (mastery depends on knowledge of standards) but the passing standard and scores are norm-referenced(test takers are compared to one another). The new TAKS tests will seemingly continue to measure students at the TAAS level, which appears to be below-grade level as compared to the national standards. Performance on the TAAS may be more related to familiarity with the test format, rather than knowledge of the skills. The test development procedure currently in place does not give enough weight to the TEKS so as to produce a meaningful assessment of the standards. And so on.
The authors's closing plea? "Nothing is more important than getting TAKS tests right..[...]..No less than the future of Texas is at stake."