Let’s continue the timeout on STAAR tests
Texas is in the middle of a deadly pandemic that may continue to worsen before it subsides. State officials and educators are still figuring out how to reopen schools safely and educate students effectively and equitably under extremely challenging circumstances. And parents are deciding whether to send their children back to school or keep them home for remote learning.
Even with all these worries and uncertainties, however, state Education Commissioner Mike Morath announced to the State Board of Education that stress-inducing and money-wasting STAAR exams will resume during the upcoming school year.
The Texas State Teachers Association has a better idea: Let’s continue the timeout on STAAR testing.
We applauded Gov. Greg Abbott for suspending STAAR last spring. The coronavirus was beginning to strike Texas, and school districts were sending everyone home and closing their campuses to slow the spread of the virus. We said then that educators, students and their parents should focus on keeping themselves and their families safe and not have to try to cope with the additional burden of STAAR testing.
Now, with COVID-19 infections increasing daily at a scary rate, we haven’t changed our minds.
Standardized testing should be the last priority for students, educators and policymakers as Texas plans for what could be a very difficult school year, assuming the pandemic is brought under control in time to have a school year. Even now, students and educators are still dealing with COVID-19 losses in their families and among their friends while worrying about their own health and safety.
For all its expense and attendant stress, STAAR tests do not add value to other tests or other ways of measuring students’ success. They are not valid measures of student progress or learning loss, as the commissioner would have us believe. They do little more than measure a student’s ability to take a test.
In announcing the resumption of STAAR testing, Morath also said the A-F school accountability rating system will have to be adjusted, but he didn’t say how. The rating system, which unfairly labels underfunded schools in low-income neighborhoods with large concentrations of minority students as “failures,” also needs to be jettisoned, along with the STAAR tests. Texas must apply for whatever waivers from the federal government are necessary to do this.
Even under normal circumstances, STAAR exams waste millions of tax dollars — the 2020-21 contract with the primary test administrator is about $73 million — which could be better spent on real teaching and learning. That waste will be even more harmful now. The state and school districts are losing millions of dollars in revenue from the pandemic’s blow to the economy, while accumulating additional expenses.
These extra expenses begin with the personal protective equipment and procedures necessary to allow campuses to reopen when it becomes safe enough to do so.
Additional funding also will be necessary to find and help the thousands of students, mostly low-income children and children of color, who fell through the cracks while school buildings were closed this spring. The Texas Education Agency has counted more than 600,000 of these children so far, or about 11 percent of the total student enrollment, and that may be an undercount. Many of these children don’t have computers or reliable virtual access at home. So, they didn’t complete assignments or simply didn’t respond to their teachers. Many may remain home for the fall semester, and their needs must be addressed.
A large, but unknown, number of other students who participated in the online learning this spring also will have suffered from an academic regression, the so-called “COVID slide,” and they will need extra attention from their teachers, not a standardized test.
Many special needs students, whose families may be reluctant to return them to campuses, will need individual services, which can’t be provided remotely and also will require additional spending.
The implementation of a new school system — with on-campus, virtual and blended learning alternatives — will be costly and stressful for educators, students and parents. Educators and student families don’t need the additional stress of STAAR testing, and taxpayers don’t need the wasted expense.
Even in a normal year, STAAR exams and test preparation, aside from the monetary expense, rob students and teachers of valuable classroom time. They certainly can’t afford that distraction as they adjust to the new realities of our public schools. Let educators spend their time and our resources during these challenging times enriching their students, not enriching testing companies.