How Texas’s STAAR Test Took Over Public School Culture
Months-long preparations, complete with celebrity guests, pep rallies, and theme days, have turned a standardized test into an anxiety-ridden circus for kids.
Months-long preparations, complete with celebrity guests, pep rallies, and theme days, have turned a standardized test into an anxiety-ridden circus for kids.
On Monday, the Senate passed a proposal to add four more writing tests and tie school funding directly to third-grade test results.
An op-ed from the San Antonio senator and member of the Texas Senate Committee on Higher Education.
Eight different readability formulas showed the test's reading portions are at a higher level of difficulty than appropriate for the grades they’re assessing.
More challenges emerge to Texas’s least favorite exam.
Leading educators and testing experts have studied the exams and find that they are asking kids to understand passages aimed two or more years above their grade level.
In ETS’s first year taking over most of Texas’s test administration, they aren’t providing enough improvement from the vendor they replaced.
Experts speculate that the test is measuring the wrong thing.
Over the past two decades a movement to increase the importance of standardized testing in public schools has swept across the country. It was born in Texas. Is Texas also where it might die?
Test your smarts with 15 sample questions from the new STAAR subject matter tests.
State senator Florence Shapiro says that the Texas Education Agency can (and should) waive the requirement that tests count toward fifteen percent of final grades this year.