Public school kids will soon face a new battery of tests, as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) is replaced by the State of Texas Assessments of Academics Readiness (STAAR). The latest model is set to debut during the next school year.
A feature of the new round of examinations will be end-of-course tests in key subject areas.
The program will also raise the maximum days of testing from about 25 to 45. The exams are intended to move away from "teaching to the test," according to a recent article by Caylor Ballinger in the El Paso Times.
The mandate from the Legislature purports to raise standards for high school graduation. Those in higher education will undoubtedly focus on the degree to which it improves the college readiness of incoming freshmen in the coming years. A perennial point of contention has been the gap between high school standards and college preparation.
Looking back, it's been …well, complicated. The history of standardized testing in Texas resembles an epic (some might say gothic) saga of dueling acronyms. The state's first mandated test was the Texas Assessment of Basic Skills (TABS), used from 1980 to 1985. The next test was Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) from 1986 to 1990. The Texas Assessment of Academics Skills (TAAS) spanned the longest period, from 1990 to 2002. The current test, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), has been used since 2003, the article reports.
Here's a passage from the EPT piece:
TEA officials said legislators voted in 2007 for the new STAAR and end-of-course exams to begin in the 2011 school year.
Gloria Zyskowski, deputy associate commissioner for student assessment for the TEA, said state exams are changed when state legislators decide it is time to move assessments in a different direction.
Zyskowski said the state agency will assess student performance on the STAAR exams every three years and adapt the tests so they can last longer while students continue to be challenged and more college-ready. She said the TAKS also made it difficult to assess or challenge growth in students who continually did well.
"In many ways, students were topping out, so there was a desire to move toward a more challenging test," she said.
She said one of the big changes the STAAR will bring is end-of-course assessments by content area. Students will have to pass 12 tests in high school in order to graduate, beginning with next year's freshmen. She said that because the end-of-course exams may count in the student's grade, students will have three opportunities to take each test.
Zyskowski said people often misunderstand the 45 days of testing to think all students are testing that many days, but that is just the maximum number of days.
"That number was meant to demonstrate a worst-case scenario," she said. "In reality, it would be closer to five days of required testing a year for a freshman, for example.
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