(Houston Chronicle) Editorial —
Houston Independent School District made a move in the right direction on Thursday when trustees scaled back the district’s reliance on the state’s standardized testing program, known as STAAR. Trustees voted to use results for student promotion only when required by state law. Currently, the state mandates passage of STAAR in fifth and eighth grades.
Standardized tests can serve an important diagnostic role in K-12 education. They can provide educators with data to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses.
They can give the state a basis upon which to compare all of its students and all of its schools. But flawed, multiple-choice exams shouldn’t possess the power to derail students’ futures.
In an essay for The Huffington Post which was reprinted in the Chronicle, poet Sara Holbrook recently highlighted STAAR’s shortcomings. Holbrook – the world’s foremost expert on her own poetry – found that she didn’t know the correct answers to questions about two of these poems on Texas’ reading assessment tests.
Holbrook was alerted to the problems on the state-mandated tests when Sean, an 8th grade English teacher in Texas, emailed her at 10 p.m. on a Wednesday night last year about a test prep question. The question, originally on a previously administered middle-school STAAR test, revolved around two stanzas in Holbrook’s poem, “Midnight.”
The question, Holbrook said, was unintelligible because the poem as reproduced had no stanza break. Further, the question asked about the author’s motive for dividing the poem into two stanzas. Although four possible answers are set forth, Holbrook says all were wrong. Moreover, no test maker ever bothered to ask the poet why she broke up the poem there.
Holbrook’s failing grade as to her own poetry illustrates what most educators and students already know: The STAAR test is arbitrary.
The state could improve the test by reducing the number of standards that STAAR is supposed to cover. For each subject, those standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, are hundreds of pages long. It’s impossible for STAAR to fairly measure so much required content.
If the state is going to give the test so much weight, the assessment (and its administration) should be as close as possible to being a perfect instrument. It is not.
What should Sean, the teacher who emailed Holbrook, have been doing that Wednesday night? (A) working on a lesson plan (B) getting some sleep so that he would be ready to teach his students or (C) doing some extracurricular reading for inspiration? Surely the correct answer is not (D) tracking down the answer to an obscure and poorly considered test question
