Re: No Child Left Behind

I agree wholeheartedly with my classmate’s disapproval of standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind Act. As a fellow veteran of the TAKS test, I can attest to its ineffectuality. These standardized tests are in no way a measure of student academic intelligence, and the manner in which schools prepare students for assessments (read: devoting much of the curriculum to preparation for them) likely only eats valuable course time that could have been spent on subjects of the instructor’s choosing. Who thought it was a good idea to take the curriculum out of the teachers’ hands?

Luckily, it seems as though the TAKS test is being phased out, gradually. Perhaps this means legislators are finally realizing the mistakes made in the No Child Left Behind Act? In any case, the test that has been chosen to replace TAKS is called STAAR, and the Texas Education Agency promises the test will be “significantly more rigorous than previous tests” and purports to “measure a child’s performance, as well as academic growth.” However, the TEA also notes that “the grade 3-8 STAAR tests in reading and mathematics, by law, must be linked from grade to grade to performance expectations for the English III and Algebra II end-of-course assessments.” So, I suppose we can only hope that these “performance expectations” have will be higher than the ones used during the TAKS’ era, for the sake of our state’s students.

Though these changes are limited to Texas schools, I believe it shows promise that our state government is listening to our complaints, and I think their actions are indicative of a growing understanding in our government that major educational reform is needed if the students of our nation are expected to succeed amongst our foreign peers.

EDIT: Here is the TEA's website, where I obtained information on the STAAR test.