It’s that time of year: school is winding down and TAKS test results are being sent home. In the Linehan household, the news is all good. Woo hoo!
HISD has good TAKS news as well:
HISD made very solid progress on the state TAKS test this year, with reading, math and science passing rates increasing nearly across the board as the school district enacted major reforms to improve learning.
HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra will announce the TAKS scores of nearly 115,000 Houston students at a news conference at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday
And for those people who lament that the TAKS test forces teachers to “teach to the test,” I would counter that TAKS tests are a measure of basic skills, therefore teachers are teaching basic skills!
For example, my fourth-grader has struggled with composition. The benchmark test he took at the beginning of the year indicated he would have failed the TAKS writing test (miserably so) had the test been taken back then. But because there was so much focus on the basics of grammar and writing over the course of the school year, he passed the writing test. In fact, by the time he took that TAKS test, he was writing some above-average papers in class!
“Teaching to the test” is not a waste of teaching time; it is teaching what students SHOULD be learning.
