STAAR should be a diagnostic at most during challenging time
Texas children are learning a lot lately about the world in which they live and the country they will inherit — a country vulnerable to pandemics, natural disasters, recessions and the occasional ham-handed coup attempt.
If they’re not learning as much grammar and arithmetic as usual — well, that’s hardly their fault. Nor are educators or parents to blame for the disruption that COVID-19 has caused during this school year, or the last one; we all understand that.
So it’s no wonder that a bipartisan group of legislators is calling on the state to cancel next year’s scheduled State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness — or at least to treat the 2021 STAAR results as merely diagnostic rather than using them to evaluate students, teachers, principals and districts.
The group wants the Texas Education Agency to seek waivers from federal testing and accountability requirements from the U.S. Department of Education.
“At most, any administration of the STAAR during the 2020-21 school year should only serve as a diagnostic instrument to see where our students stand academically as opposed to an assessment instrument to determine district and campus sanctions under the current A-F accountability system,” the legislators wrote Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
This is just common sense, said state Rep. Diego Bernal, a San Antonio Democrat who serves as vice chair of the public education committee and leader of the current effort.
“We’re making technical arguments about what could and should happen,” Bernal told me Tuesday, after his 3-year-old finished her morning Zoom classes. “But the spirit of it is — parents, educators, teachers, they’re all suffering.”
“You have to start with the assumption that people are trying to do the best they can.,” he continued, praising the forti
tude and grit that Texas teachers have shown thus far in the face of the pandemic. “If you’re not starting there, you’ve got a bigger problem with educators in Texas.”
The STAAR, introduced in Texas in 2012, was controversial even before the pandemic. It was intended to be more rigorous than the standardized test it replaced, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. But according to many parents and educators, the STAAR is too tough and too fraught, leaving many students miserable, demoralized and distracted from their actual lessons.
In March, when Gov. Greg Abbott waived STAAR requirements
for the 2019-20 school year, there was really no backlash. In fact, state Rep. Dan Flynn, a Republican from Canton, then urged the governor to suspend the accountability ratings derived from the test for the 2020-21 school year, arguing that the test results would be “unreliable” given that COVID had not only brought traditional learning to a screeching halt but replaced it with a less productive learning environment.
A group of 14 Texas superintendents, including Aldine ISD’s LaTonya Goffney, agree. In their own letter to Morath 4last week, which was also signed by business groups including the Greater Houston Partnership, they suggest keeping the test in place “to fully understand the extent and the disproportionate nature of COVID-19 learning loss that has likely occurred for our communities from limited income homes and our communities of color.”
Put differently, the disruption caused by COVID may be a good reason not to cancel the spring 2021 STAAR test, according to Tom Luce, the founder and chairman of Texas 2036, a new think tank focused on datadriven public policy.
“Covid has created enormous challenges for our educators and our students,” Luce said. “You cannot have a real program of helping students to ‘catch up’ from learning loss if you do not measure where they are.”
A fair point — and we do know, already, that the learning loss from COVID has been significant. As the Chronicle’s Jacob Carpenter reported, education administrators in a number of Houston-area districts have recently reported a troubling surge in the percentage of students failing at least one class.
Bernal countered by pointing out that under the circumstances, the test results would be unhelpfully cryptic.
“Are you evaluating the effectiveness of the teacher?” Bernal said. “The durability of a laptop? The quality of the internet connection? Are you evaluating who has a parent or guardian who can sit with them through lessons, and who doesn’t? I’m not saying there’s no value in it, but let’s not pretend that it’s not fraught with tremendous challenges.”
In any case, he continued, it’s crucial that parents and educators know whether the STAAR should be on their list of worries that year. And it does seem that
Republicans, as well as Democrats, would agree that it should not.
“What a tremendous waste of time this conversation is right now,” Bernal said, not impolitely. “Shouldn’t we be talking about why we’re the most uninsured state in the country right now, and what that means for these families? In San Antonio, despite the best efforts of local government, we’re losing small businesses left and right — what’s our plan to save them?”
Questions like these are what our leaders should be focused on this year. We don’t need a standardized test to tell us that Texas students and educators, facing extraordinarily difficult circumstances, are doing their best.