Naked City

Rep. Dora Olivo, D-Rosenberg

As public schools throughout Texas recover from last week's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests, at least one legislator is considering ways to ease the drama surrounding the annual tests. Two new bills filed by state Rep. Dora Olivo, D-Rosenberg, (HB 1612 and 1613) open the possibility that public school students, all of whom currently must pass tests in third, fifth, eighth, and 12th grades to move up a grade or graduate, could be promoted through alternative measures. To Olivo, the bills will address the problem that schools spend too much time in test prep and not enough time in activities that encourage creativity, critical thinking, and other 21st-century-economy skills.

"It's not acceptable to turn our schools into testing centers, and forget that they're supposed to be learning centers," said Olivo, speaking at a joint NAACP-LULAC-ACLU press conference on Monday.

Olivo's bills would allow students who fail required tests to be promoted through assessments that include the students' grades in their regular courses and the decisions of teacher committees at their schools – in other words, basically the same measures that were traditionally used to decide which students needed to be kept back. So those who believe the TAKS does a good job measuring student achievement are likely to see the bills as a return to "social promotion," which "objective," test-based measures were supposed to stop. However, critics say that a single test is a poor way to measure something so complex as learning. Some go even further: UT professor Angela Valenzuela, a longtime critic of high-stakes testing, argued that the agenda behind tests like the TAKS has little to do with student achievement and a lot to do with school funding. Tests like the TAKS, she said, are "a way to use numbers-based accountability systems to discredit the public schools and pave the way to privatization and vouchers."

In any case, bills that essentially gut the accountability system will likely have a hard time of it in the current Legislature; however, they suggest a growing desire on the part of the anti-TAKS crowd to stop complaining and start offering alternatives.