Why We Must Resist The Teaching Over Testing Act

As public school teachers who are apparently on the “wrong side” of the accountability movement at this time, we are challenged quite a bit. Standardized tests are unfair and biased. Standardized tests only test a student’s ability to guess. Standardized tests are inauthentic experience that aren’t a judge of anything other than themselves. And after all - “Don’t you think that every student is an individual, and every kid has strengths, and every kid can learn…Don’t you want to teach them and not teach a test?”

Yes, of course. No one wants to spend their lives wasting their time teaching students things that don’t matter.

Hence the impact of politically charged legislation like The Teaching OverTesting Act – which aims to reduce the accountability piece of the STAAR performance system.

But standardized testing and standardized measures of accountability are not incompatible with teaching, individuality, or strengths finding in students. The trouble with the reinforcing this idea of teaching OVER testing is the polarization of those two concepts. Rhetoric would have you believe that to do one, you must not do the other. But actual educational research says that the two work in tandem. To understand what your kids know, you assess. Then, you plan instruction. Then you assess to see if your plan provided good instruction. Then you plan again. That is what good teaching looks like. It is targeted, precise, and purposeful.

And you know what? Some of our colleagues have this figured out.

Standardized tests, like the STAAR, reveal deep demographic biases, right? The test could really just be an income test right?

It’s funny isn’t it? In the high-performing schools – let’s call it like it is, the wealthier schools - in the wealthier schools the teachers there are SOMEHOW managing to provide high quality education, valuable life skills, educational content AND those students are still somehow passing standardized tests. Right? No one’s arguing that the 1% are just teaching to the test, agreed?

There is a reality in education. That reality is that our vulnerable student populations are underperforming their privileged peers in higher education. The demographic lines that we see our standardized tests follow are rooted – not in the invalidity of the tests – but in THIS reality. The privileges that the wealthy classes enjoy day-in and day-out are heightened by the preparation of the academic institutions for the rigors of higher education – which include high performance on standardized exams such as the GRE, the MCAT, the LSAT, and so on.

So we must concur with former Secretary of Education Dr. Rod Paige when he said bills like the Teaching Over Testing Act are “a loss forTexas children but a win for those dodging accountability”.

 If we in public education remove accountability measures such as the STAAR, if we remove our incentive to train our students how to use their knowledge on “inauthentic” standardized test, do you think the “high performing” students will stop preparing for the SAT? Do you think they will no longer pay thousands of dollars for College Boards preparation programs? No, they will not. Because they understand that not only must you learn, but you must be able to demonstrate that learning in the way our society requires.

Is the true purpose of the Teaching over Testing Act to hide the gross systemic inequity that we’ve exposed here? This Act wants public schools to “choose their own systems of accountability”. Great, let’s send Texas education into the wonderful world of Who’s Line is it Anyway? where everything is made up and the points don’t matter.

But education DOES matter. The decisions that educators make – whether they be well-meaning or negligent, benign or maleficent, intentional or not – ricochet through the rest of a person’s life, often changing that course forever. And accountability measures - particularly those in the lower grades – are absolutely crucial.

Stefanie – our resident English expert – is a smart, capable woman who is a product of the Texas public school system under the far less rigorous TAAS framework. She tells a story that is, let’s face it, not an unusual one in public education.

Once, I had a love for math as a child, and always did well in the subject, until geometry, when a teacher decided he did not want to teach anymore. No one was watching, so our tests were handed out, and he called out answers. It was understood that we should make sure to copy a question or two wrong here and there. The rest of the time, he read the newspaper and we hung out. There was no standardized test to show that this teacher’s students had no idea what an equilateral triangle was. By looking at our grades, this teacher looked like a boss!

Later, I couldn’t do Algebra 2. I chose to not take Trig because math was suddenly “too hard”. I went to UNT, which required undergrads to take pre-cal, and I took it four times without ever passing. I ended up going to another college with a less stringent math requirement. This string of failures all stem from one teacher with no accountability, and literally changed the trajectory of my life.

And make no mistake - our society requires accountability. Parents want to teach their kids to be accountable for their mistakes. Doctors must be accountable for hurting their patient through negligence. Politicians should be accountable to their constituents. But somehow education is this golden calf that we cannot touch with accountability but must simply worship.

But don’t worry. There are those of us who will look at the painful truth – that decades after Brown v Board of Education public schools are still not providing equal outcomes for their students. We will be brave enough to look at the data from the tests, accept that this data means we have work left to do, and try to figure out how to do it. There are those of us who will fight for equity in public education.

We have to face adversity, not run from it. When we are challenged, we rise.

Texas needs accountability. We have huge problems facing us as a state, and we need the best, most highly educated group of kids in order to help solve them. This is not a sweet platitude, I know. This is not popular, I know. But change starts with us, today, demanding that we know the truths of our schools, and that instead of hiding it, or trying to destroy public education with vouchers, we need to fund our schools that take ALL students and hold them to high standards of excellence that we know every school and every student can achieve.