At this morning’s hearing at the Texas Senate Education committee, Sen. Kel Seliger and Gloria Zyskowski, director of the Texas Education Agency’s Student Assessment Division, had a bit of a conversation. He addressed a question I’ve written about a couple of times. Why is it that STAAR scores have been flat for the three years of testing, in spite of expectations that they would increase significantly by now?
Here’s my transcript of an interesting part of the exchange. Seliger is asking about a new plan to raise the cut score — the passing mark — a bit next year. This will follow four years when the cut scores were held the same.
Seliger:
If you look over the last three periods the pass rate doesn’t seem to be improving…Why are we talking about new standards when we’re making no progress on the existing standards? Are we then ensuring that we’ll have even lower pass rates going forward? I’m confused by that.
Zyskowski:
That might more correctly be directed to school people. I can tell you what happens on the test. I can tell you that the test measures the curriculum standards. The test measures the TEKS. In terms of why student performance is flat I’m not sure I’m the best person to address that because I’m not in classrooms.
Seliger
I think it’s fine to sort of lay this off on the public schools. But they are teaching to the TEKS. And we say we’re testing to the TEKS. There’s still a disconnect, there…Somewhere there’s an alignment problem, it would appear to me, and I would like to know what it is.
Zyskowski:
It is certainly a question we have discussed, we have thought about. We’ve looked at the assessment. Everything that is on the test is something that is, every single item is approved by teachers in Texas It doesn’t go on the test unless teachers look at it and tell us that they believe it’s fair and they think it’s appropriate. In terms of the scores, it’s true that the STAAR model, when we moved from TAKS, to STAAR there was a significant ramp-up in the difficulty level and the overall rigor of the assessment.
The assessments by legislative requirement were tied to college and career readiness. They were meant to be a good predictor of that. As a result of that, the overall rigor of the assessment went up so that we could be an indicator of that.
But you are absolutely correct that the scores have not increased at the rate that we have seen in previous testing programs.
An hour or so later, Education Commissioner Michael Williams took on the same general question. His answer was much the same as he gave last year when the scores stayed the same and much the same answer he’s given every time I’ve seen him field the question: The flat scores are a classroom problem:
There are 70 separate validity studies associated with the variety of STAAR exams. And so I am hard pressed to quibble with the quality of the exam. I do think that what we have done as a state is to say we have raised the bar significantly and we are charging districts and its staff to jump to that level. Senator, I am hard pressed to say it is a problem with the test, I think, quite frankly, and I’m sure we will have this conversation on another matter, it is that we have to get readjusted to the higher level of rigour that STAAR requires.