If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember sitting at your desk with a sharpened #2 pencil getting ready to take a standardized test.  There was no special prep. You didn’t eat a big “test day” breakfast. You just showed up, got your brand-new pencil, and started answering questions. 

The questions themselves were pretty straightforward. Could you add and multiply? Could you read a passage and answer a few questions about it?

Most of us of a certain age went through school taking tests like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the TAAS test here in Texas.  These tests, as the name implies, were tests of “basic” skills.

So, when we hear that students are performing poorly on the STAAR test, what we hear is “kids can’t read.” 

But that is not exactly what the STAAR test is designed to measure.

The STAAR exam was created to measure whether students are on track for college and career readiness. That means that even as early as the third grade the STAAR test includes more complex tasks than the tests many of us adults remember from our own school days. 

Instead of multiplying two numbers together like we did, kids now are more likely to be expected to read a paragraph-long word problem, figure out what it is asking, and figure out which numbers are needed, and what to do with those numbers to answer the question being asked.  There are often purposefully tempting “distractors” to make sure that you know precisely what you are doing – not that you just have the general idea. Believe me when I say, mastering basic skills does not necessarily equal “passing” the STAAR test.  

I’m all for high standards and college and career readiness.  I think we all want that for our kids.

Here’s the thing though…I don’t think this kind of accountability system is getting us there.  Or at least it is not helping us help more kids get there.

Here’s the challenge. Higher-level thinking skills depend heavily on strong foundational – basic – skills. It is hard for students to analyze complex material if they are still working to master the basics of reading or arithmetic. It’s hard to identify the themes in Shakespeare if you are still trying to sound out the words.

You wouldn’t try to build the second floor of a house before the foundation is poured. In education, though, our testing system sometimes asks teachers and students to do exactly that.

If we push students too quickly into advanced tasks before the foundation is sound, we risk losing twice: (1) students may not ever fully develop the basic skills they need, and (2) without those strong basic skills, they are less likely to succeed at the higher-level work either.

An additional complicating factor is that students start school with different levels of preparation.

Some kids have grown up with lots of words and books and building blocks and other toys that helped them grasp pre-literacy and pre-math.  Some are already on the cusp of reading before they ever start school.  They are ready to move quickly into more complex learning. To use a baseball analogy, they are starting on second base.  The STAAR test would be fine if all kids were these kids.

A whole lot of kids though, don’t start with those kinds of advantages. They need time and skilled instruction to build the foundation for future learning.  For them, it makes more sense to go slow at first, so that they can go fast later.

Our current accountability system lacks the nuance to recognize this reality. It tends to measure progress as if every student started in the same place and should move forward at the same pace.

And, since test results are “king” in our high stakes accountability system in Texas, the system puts pressure on teachers to ignore what they know about how students actually learn and to rush through material instead of building a strong foundation. It pushes them to take part in a largely fruitless effort to cram everything on the test into the time available – to “cover” the material instead of teaching it.

For a lot of kids this results in less learning now, less learning later, and – perhaps most troubling of all – more frustration with school and learning altogether.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

At the very least we could design our test and our reporting system so that it works at two levels.  We could report acquisition of basic skills as the foundation, and then also report on acquisition of higher-order thinking skills.

That way families and communities could see when schools are successfully helping students build the strong academic foundation they need to go fast later — even if they are not yet ready to “go fast now” when it comes to advanced analytical skills.

Meanwhile, we can work on higher order thinking skills through projects, and fine arts, and building and play – while basic literacy and math skills are catching up enough to map that thinking into reading and writing and arithmetic. 

I want to make sure you hear what I am saying. 

I am not saying we need to dumb down the test.  

I am not saying that some kids can learn and others cannot.

I am saying that we need to re-design our accountability system so that it drives us to make best use of what we know about how kids learn.  

I am saying that more kids can reach their learning potential if we take the time to help them build a strong foundation for learning up front.

I am saying that we know good and well that all kids don’t learn at the same pace or start at the same place.

I am saying that if we stick with a system that ignores that plain fact – then we are the ones who deserve to be rated “F” — not the kids, not the schools, not the teachers.

We know how to do better, and when we know better, we should do better.

— ABT