Why must Mike Miles fold, spindle, and mutilate my brain like this?
As Houston ISD students prepare to take the STAAR in less than two weeks, appointed Superintendent Mike Miles is instructing schools to avoid direct test preparation, instead telling principals to have their teachers focus on daily lessons as usual.
The directive is a departure from the norm at many HISD schools, according to multiple district teachers and administrators, who say the weeks leading up to the exam usually included reviews of key concepts, mock tests and sometimes even “STAAR Olympics,” which included educational games to make test prep more engaging.
Miles laid out his instructions last Wednesday in his weekly email to principals, the information in which applies to all schools in HISD “unless specifically called out.”
“Neither the STAAR exams nor the NWEA and EOY assessments should be overemphasized for teachers and students,” Miles wrote in the email, which was obtained by the Houston Chronicle. “Teachers should focus on the curriculum and the quality of instruction. Students should focus on the (Demonstrations of Learning) and learning the objective for the day every day.”
“Direct instruction and a reasonable amount of (differentiated instruction) spent reviewing key concepts is OK. However, there should be little test prep — whereby students take a series of assessments to prepare for STAAR or NWEA,” he wrote.
Erin Baumgartner, the director of the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said that the legacy of No Child Left Behind, the federal legislation signed in 2002 that required states to implement standardized tests, has made test prep standard practice at schools nationwide.
While mock exams and other strategies can help familiarize students with the format and presentation of a standardized test, she said, there is no evidence that explicit test prep necessarily leads to greater outcomes on the assessment itself.
“If test prep isn’t something that necessarily is shown to work, then it shouldn’t matter too much whether schools are doing a lot of it or not, but it’s become the norm,” Baumgartner said.
[…]
Some teachers and administrators expressed frustration with the directive and fear it could unfairly impact their evaluations, arguing it limits their ability to prepare students for a unique assessment they only take once a year. Even staunch opponents of standardized testing, such as Community Voices for Public Education co-founder Ruth Kravetz, said the lack of direct preparation could harm students and schools, given the high stakes associated with the results.
Kravetz, a former HISD teacher and administrator, said that the online-only format of the recently redesigned STAAR makes it necessary to familiarize students with the assessment before its administered, pointing to a Houston Public Media report that revealed 46% of fourth graders scored a zero out of 10 on the writing portion of the STAAR in 2023, the first year the new test was implemented.
“I can’t believe I have to argue for letting students review so they don’t go in cold. The fix is in at the front end and the back end, and that’s not the way we’re supposed to treat schoolchildren,” Kravetz said.
I’m no fan of the STAAR either, certainly not on the emphasis placed on it. But the fact remains that HISD was put into this cursed takeover status because of insufficient STAAR scores, and HISD will remain in this cursed takeover status until its STAAR scores improve to a particular level, and as such it sure seems weird to take such a seemingly indifferent attitude towards them, at least for this year. The STAAR also provides the first apples-to-apples comparison for the before-Miles and after-Miles era, so one way to interpret this is that HISD is just trying to lower expectations ahead of that. When you don’t trust the source, it’s easy to find nefarious motives in their actions.
Margaret Downing at the Press sums it all up nicely.
There is considerable irony in all this.
For years HISD parents and teachers justifiably complained that there was too much emphasis on the STAAR both in execution and test prep. Critics said students should be learning what they need to learn in classes designed to cover the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills criteria. This extra time spent preparing for one test is nothing more than gaming the systems with “strategies” and taking kids away from what they should be learning, they charged.
Well now they got — in part — what many of them asked for with a Superintendent who echoes those views. And a lot of them don’t like it. Their anxiety levels are rising and conspiracy theories have reached new levels: Is this being done so scores will tank and then the next year HISD Superintendent Mike Miles can show a dramatic improvement or call for more resources? Is this a way to get rid of more unwanted teachers? Is this a way to close down schools because no parent wants their child at a school with low test scores and with a drop in population those campuses will have to close, won’t they?
“No one likes teaching to the test but it’s those test scores that got our district in the situation it is and the scores are what will get us out. Is this intentional tanking?” one teacher asked.
Previously, passing the STAAR was a grade promotion requirement for students in grades 5 and 8 but the Texas Education Agency, saying it wanted to relieve pressure, dropped that part in 2023.
The pressure is still on for teachers, though. A big part of their annual assessment is based on how their students do on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness which began in the 2011-12 school year. Poor assessments can lead to not getting the school assignments they want or in worst cases, not having their contracts renewed.
The anxieties and rumors are probably part and parcel of not only a lack of trust of Miles and his academic and administrative policies in some quarters, but of an increasing wariness on the part of many teachers to share their true feelings with their administrators.
That we did too much STAAR prep before and that we are doing too little now can both be true. An administration that cared about its stakeholders and worked to build trust in the community could reasonably explain its change in strategy and what we should expect from it. That is not what we have here. As with everything Mike Miles has done, I feel I am forced to hope that he knows what he’s doing despite my strong misgivings. We’ll know in a few months how it turned out.
If I were a teacher, there is zero probability I would listen to Miles on this. He has shown no reason to trust what he is saying.
I agree that we spend too much time teaching to the test, and that it’s ridiculous to base teacher pay and incentives on standardized test scores, but if that’s the regime we’re in, that’s where we are.