An Educational Contrarian

Here’s why everyone in the state of Texas should take the most recent accountability ratings provided (or about to be provided) by the Texas Education Agency and drop them in the trash. The state of Texas changed its testing program from 2022 to 2023. It added more items, it added different kinds of items, it appears to have added some extraordinarily difficult items, and it moved the administration entirely online. Whatever your feelings about standardized testing (mine are quite strong as anyone who knows me is aware), the guidelines for how you make this sort of change are crystal clear: you start over. The whole (and only legitimate) point of standardized testing is to create comparability of students via a test instrument, both as of a moment in time and over time. Since the students (and the world around them) are going to obviously change and grow, detecting changes and growth is only possible if the design of the instrument stands still. If the instrument shifts at the same tim...

This week the Texas Education Agency did its annual dump of standardized test scores onto the public. All states are in the process of doing the same. Once again, the rhetoric surrounding this dump (in my state and probably yours) is embarrassingly and dangerously ignorant of what a standardized test is and the limits of its interpretive reach. We might as well release the blood pressure readings of all Americans from the lowest to the highest and then entrust all interpretations to those with no medical training or understanding of what a blood pressure reading means. It’s that ridiculous. Should the medical community speak up, to follow the logic applied to test scores, we should ignore their training and logic, treat them as apologists unwilling to stand up for patients, and act as if our patently false understandings are true. And we should use those data we do not understand to judge the effectiveness of our hospitals and the overall medical community. I wish that were hyperbole, ...