Texas Schools Gain Notice and Skepticism

Texas schools have long been known for producing powerhouse prep football teams. But in the past few years the state has received national attention for its academic prowess, most notably for narrowing the persistent gap in test scores between white and minority students.

The gains have been attributed to a pioneering accountability and testing system in which schools are labeled exemplary to low-performing based on test scores and attendance rates. The jobs of principals and teachers depend on all students doing well, not just the affluent and middle-class.

“It’s not a matter of boasting, but we have made tremendous strides in comparison to other states because we have most of the components of a good accountability system,” said Felipe T. Alanis, the state’s deputy commissioner of education.

But with the attention has come increasing skepticism about the value of Texas’ system.

Scholars and civil rights advocates in Texas and elsewhere contend that the improved student performance is largely the result not of the tests, but of smaller class sizes, rising overall spending on education and a court-ordered equalization of resources between schools serving the rich and the poor. Moreover, some of the tests are so elementary that passing them means little, critics say.

Sorting out the reality of the Texas education system is particularly important for California, where officials have modeled school reforms partially after Texas’ example. The two states are demographically similar, with about the same percentage of students living in poverty and coming from homes where English is not the first language.

The argument over the success of the Texas education system--sometimes referred to as the “Texas miracle”--is of major importance for Gov. George W. Bush as he campaigns for president. He spoke proudly of the performance of the schools in his home state as he made a swing through California last week.

But changes such as reduced class size and increased spending resulted from policies implemented before Bush took office in 1994, the same year the accountability system was put in place.

One measure of progress that Texas officials cite is that the percentage of students passing the state’s 10th-grade graduation exam, a key part of the accountability system, has risen from 52% to 78%.

But independent reviews of that test have determined that most of the questions are typical of instruction in the seventh or eighth grade or even lower. One sample math question asks how much change a person would get if he spent a total of $66.89 on textbooks and paid the cashier with a $100 bill.

Moreover, more important indicators--such as graduation rates or the rate at which students go to college--have not budged.

Many Still Fail to Graduate on Time

Omar S. Lopez, who heads the state’s Center for College Readiness, said there are no data suggesting that the state’s emphasis on testing has raised the skills of students headed to college or that it has closed the achievement gap between white students and minorities.

Statewide, one out of three white students and one out of two African American and Latino students did not graduate on time with their class in 1998. In addition, of those who graduated, only about a third of the African American and Latino students had taken a full complement of college prep courses.

Lopez said state-sponsored studies have found that students who head to college without such classes almost never graduate.

“The whole thing doesn’t have much of a point” unless it leads to students spending more time in school or achieving greater success in college, said Stanford University education professor Martin Carnoy, who is part of a team studying education reform in Texas.

Reforms that center on tests have caught on across the nation. All states but two now test their students, 19 publicly rate schools’ performance and 16 have the power to shut down those that are failing.

But the impact of that movement remains controversial, and nowhere more so than in Texas.

Texas educators warn that, with so much at stake, schools will emphasize test preparation to the exclusion of almost everything else. That’s particularly true at schools serving poor and minority students who typically have not done well on tests.

Take as an example Kashmere High School, which sits in an out-of-the-way pocket of poverty on Houston’s near north side.

Six years ago, only 16% of the school’s students were able to pass all three parts of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills graduation exam. Last spring, 84% of the 10th-graders passed, a transformation that in 1997 and 1998 earned the campus two “exemplary” banners now hanging on the front of the school. The pass rate for the school, which serves about 1,000 students, nearly all of them African American, is the best in the Houston Independent School District.

“When I got here, I saw children and teachers wanting to do well but being willing to accept failure,” said Principal David L. Alexander, who came to Kashmere in 1992.

Alexander bought a $4,500 machine to rapidly score practice tests that would diagnose students’ weaknesses. He spent $1,800 on a computerized tutoring program designed specifically to help students pass the exams.

Daily tutoring sessions replaced homeroom, the band teacher taught fractions and the shop teacher stressed converting measurements into the metric system because those topics appear on the crucial exit exam. Four times a year, the school sponsored daylong Saturday cram sessions. Teachers threatened to dock the grades of students who didn’t show up for Friday night tutoring sessions.

“That was like, you had to, it was a must,” said Ashley Mann, a 16-year-old sophomore who passed the test.

To give test-takers a final boost, the school’s “Mighty Rams” cheerleaders led a pep rally, complete with rah-rah speeches from teachers and upperclassmen.

“Students are used to going to pep rallies to psych themselves up for the football team, so we might as well do it for the TAAS,” said the 63-year-old Alexander, a former math teacher.

Students grew weary of the nonstop pressure. But, said 16-year-old Haven Smith, “I guess it worked.”

By other measures, however, the school is anything but exemplary.

In 1998, only 24% of those tested passed a statewide exam in algebra, a course considered to be a gateway to college entrance and success. Only 30% of the students who started the ninth grade received diplomas three years later. And all but a few students who took a college placement exam required by the state wound up needing to take remedial courses.

Norm-referenced tests show the school lagging far behind national averages. Students scored as low as the 14th percentile in ninth-grade math on the Stanford Achievement Test in 1998.

Alexander said he was discouraged by the performance of his students on measures other than the graduation test. So this summer, he’s providing three weeks of coaching to students who did not do well on the Preliminary SAT, the test that is used to select National Merit Scholars.

“For TAAS, it was memory and practice, practice, practice,” said Nevarro Daniels, a Kashmere math teacher who is the co-leader of the PSAT camp. “On the PSAT, you have to think.”

Test Seen as a ‘Ticket to Nowhere’

It is just that difference that worries educators.

Rice University education professor Linda McNeil said the test is a “ticket to nowhere. It has no currency in the job market or for getting into community college or anything.”

But the testing system has created so much pressure to score well, she said, that kindergarten students are being taught how to efficiently “bubble in” answers with a No. 2 pencil. She said she knows of highly skilled teachers who, frustrated with the emphasis on the tests, have fled to private schools, worsening the state’s already severe teacher shortage.

Many of the concerns about the 10th-grade test are being raised in a lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund that will go to trial in September. In the suit, MALDEF alleges that the Texas test discriminates against minority students because they pass it at lower rates.

All students are passing it at higher rates than they used to. Back in 1994, only 33% of the state’s African American 10th-graders and 41% of its Latino 10th-graders passed the reading portion of the exam, for example, compared to 70% of whites. Since then, the scores have risen for all groups, and they have risen slightly faster for nonwhites.

But a Rand Corp. testing expert recently produced data that seemed to cast doubt on whether that narrowing of the difference was paying off.

Stephen Klein of Rand gave students at a couple of dozen Texas high schools tests of math, science and reading and found a strong relationship between the poverty level of a school and its scores. When he looked at the Texas exams for those same students, he found that the level of poverty seemed to have no effect at all on scores.

“When I see these data, I know there’s something wrong,” Klein said. “It’s not as if they could have learned something and then forgotten it. It doesn’t happen that way.”

Klein spoke about his findings at a recent meeting of experts in testing and standards. He said he was not suggesting that cheating was accounting for the scores on the test, although there have been several highly publicized cases in Austin, Dallas and Houston. But, he said, the data show that schools may be doing whatever it takes to get students to pass the tests without instilling in them knowledge or skills.

Joseph E. Johnson, a University of Texas professor who is monitoring school reform in the state, said the correlation between poverty and academic underachievement is diminishing.

“We still have a long way to go, but . . . we’re making more progress in that direction than any other state,” he said.

Alanis, the deputy commissioner, said the state until now has focused its reform efforts on the early grades, reinstituting an emphasis on phonics and on assessing students in kindergarten to identify those needing extra help.

Legislation that Bush signed in June will broaden the state’s attention to middle and high schools.

The bill increases education spending by $3.8 billion, the largest hike in state history, Alanis said. That will pay for additional teacher training and will raise teacher salaries by $3,000 across the board, which it is hoped will help ease the teacher shortage.

The state also is revamping the testing system. In addition to the state exam, Texas will count the results of the algebra test when ranking schools. Also, four years from now, the graduation test will become far more difficult, covering algebra and geometry as well as biology and chemistry.

Billy R. Reagan, the revered former superintendent of the Houston school district who left in 1986 but is still influential in Texas education circles, said such changes are badly needed.

“We have defined success so low that, if we achieve it, we still have a plantation system that keeps minorities in their place,” he said.

The state’s current system, he said, is valuable because it has “provided a measure by which the enormity of the equity gap could be identified.”

Now, he said, “the job that’s upon us is to close it.”