Texas Assessment Of Academic Skills Research Articles

Consequences of (Mis)use of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) for High-Stakes Decisions: A Comment on Haney and the Texas Miracle in Education.

Consequences of (Mis)use of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) for High-Stakes Decisions: A Comment on Haney and the Texas Miracle in Education.

An Oral Storytelling Approach to Teaching Writing in the Primary Grades

An oral storytelling approach to develop writing skills was used in a single section fourth-grade students. Nine 1-hour weekly sessions involved: (a) oral presentation of a stony, (b) a subsequent in-class activity carried out in small-group storytelling clubs, (c) a writing activity in which students wrote in their storytelling journals, and (d) selection of a few students from each storytelling club to read their essays to the entire class. To measure the effectiveness of the approach, Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) uniting scores of students participating in the storytelling project were compared to those of students not participating. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of the development of analytical and reasoning skills. Specific implications for classroom interventions are suggested.

The Multiple Dimensions of Managerial Networking

Studies in public management show that agencies draw different types of support from different actors and organizations in their environment. If this is true, we would expect that managers differentiate their networking activity toward different types of external actors and organizations. However, empirical studies of the networking activities of managers do not reveal such a differentiation: these studies consistently report the existence of only one factor of managerial networking activity. The present article aims to solve this puzzle by disaggregating managerial networking into multiple scales of managerial networking activity, each related to a specific type of support from the agency’s environment. A cumulative scaling analysis of the network ties of Texas school district superintendents for the years 2002 and 2005 shows the existence of three such stable and homogeneous networking scales, respectively, providing (a) political support, (b) bureaucratic coping, and (c) coproduction. We compare these results with those of the method used in previous studies: factor analysis. We illustrate the potential of cumulative scaling for the analysis of managerial networking by comparing the effect of the managerial networking factor with those of the three networking scales on the pass rates of Latino students on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of managerial networking.

Instructional Comparative Advantages May Exist Despite the “Comprehensive Uniformity” of Traditional Public Schools

A special tabulation of individual student scores from the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test allowed a ranking of Texas schools according to test score changes (“value added”). The rankings varied greatly by student subpopulation. That is, the vast majority of schools are much more effective with some kinds of students than others. The implied comparative advantages suggest possibly large academic gains just from indicated student movement, even among unchanged, traditional, “comprehensively uniform” public schools, perhaps through well-informed public school choice. Further gains from specialization are also implied by the results.

Increasing Finance, Improving Schools

Much debate from many political sides has ensued to raise attention to the struggle state legislatures face over school finance issues. This study examines the changes in academic achievement, before and after increases in funding occur, to show that money does matter. The uniqueness of this study is that it examines per pupil funding and academic achievement test scores, Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), not at the aggregated school district level, but at the neighborhood school level. Using data from Dallas County public schools, we are able to see that even within school districts, as resources increase, achievement improves.

Teachers With Linguistically Informed Knowledge of Reading Subskills are Associated with a Matthew Effect in Reading Comprehension for Monolingual and Bilingual Students

A longitudinal investigation determined the growth of reading comprehension from third to fifth grades in a cohort of students who received Language Enrichment (LE), an Orton-Gillingham–based literacy program, during first and second grades. The LE instruction was provided by regular education teachers who received comprehensive training in linguistically informed content pertaining to reading subskills. All students were traditionally instructed in kindergarten, third, fourth, and fifth grades. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) confirmed that mono- and bilingual students had significantly advantaged individual growth in reading comprehension as measured on the state-mandated Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) when their teachers had more experience implementing LE over students whose teachers had less experience implementing LE, or students whose teachers had no LE training. Findings showed a fan-shaped spread in achievement from third to fifth grades for all students in the cohort. The significance of the spread was confirmed by reliable covariance between the initial reading level and the growth in reading across grade levels. This fan-shaped growth pattern is often referred to as a Matthew effect in reading comprehension (Stanovich, 1986). These results provide evidence that the Matthew effect may be associated with specific teaching pedagogies, especially early direct implementation of multisensory linguistically informed language arts instruction. LE instruction emphasizes phonemic awareness, symbol–sound correspondences, morphology, and vocabulary to develop phonological decoding strategies, word recognition accuracy, and comprehension of words in text.

Accountability Data and Decision Making in Texas BilingualEducation Programs

This study reports data collected from a survey of 140 Texas bilingual program directors to explore the use of accountability data for program decision making. Examined are findings related to the availability, kinds of decisions made, and evaluation activities conducted using 11 sources of data (i.e., the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, English norm-reference tests, Spanish norm-reference tests, report card grades, oral language proficiency, high school status of "on track to graduate," retention, attendance, student socioeconomic status, student discipline, and student mobility). Implications of findings for practice are drawn, as well as relevance to current accountability policy.

Language Enrichment Teacher Preparation and Practice Predicts Third Grade Reading Comprehension

First and second grade public school teachers were trained through interactive video-conferencing to implement Language Enrichment, an Orton-Gillingham-based literacy instruction. The effectiveness of the linguistically informed training was demonstrated by documenting the longitudinal third grade reading comprehension achievement of their students. Student achievement was measured on the state-mandated achievement test, Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) showed that students whose teachers were trained in Language Enrichment instruction had higher third grade reading comprehension achievement than students whose teachers were not trained. Additionally, a significant effect of the length of Language Enrichment teaching experience of the second grade teacher on third grade reading comprehension was found. Earlier occurring second grade teacher training was associated with higher reading scores than later training. Based on these findings it is suggested that teachers who have content-rich knowledge known to support literacy acquisition can provide reading instruction that results in a level of reading comprehension that is significantly higher than that resulting from teachers who do not have a well-developed domain of knowledge concerning the reading process. This study also indicates that teacher competence was enhanced through practice because student reading achievement of the more-experienced Language Enrichment teachers was higher than that of the less-experienced Language Enrichment teachers.

What do Klein et al. tell us about test scores in Texas?

A paper appearing in this journal by Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey and Stecher (2000) attempted to raise serious questions about the validity of the gains in student performance as measured by Texas' standardized test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). Part of their analysis was based on the results of three tests which they administered to 2,000 fifth grade students in 20 Texas schools. Although Klein et al. indicated that the 20 schools were not selected in a way which would insure that they were representative of the nearly 3,000 Texas schools that enrolled fifth graders, generalizations based upon the results for those schools were nonetheless offered. The purpose of this short paper is to demonstrate just how unrepresentative the 20 schools used by Klein et al. actually were, and in so doing to cast doubt on certain of their conclusions.

Teachers’ Perceptions of High-Stakes Testing

Over 900 Texas teachers were surveyed on their perceptions of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), which at the time of the survey was Texas's high-stakes achievement test. The sample included elementary middle and high schools within each of four test performance levels: exemplary recommended, acceptable, and low performing. Respondents answered questions on how students were prepared for the high-stakes test and the effects of the test on their school and its curriculum, students, and teachers. Respondents reported that tested curriculum received increased emphasis, high-stakes testing did not motivate students to learn, and that the test was not an accurate measure of student learning or school effectiveness. Results indicate serious incongruence among proponents’ arguments for testing, teachers’ perceptions of test effects and the research on authentic pedagogy and student achievement.

High-Achieving Middle Schools for Latino Students in Poverty

This study was conducted to examine the characteristics of middle schools in which Latino students from low-income families made substantial achievement gains. Nine schools in Texas were selected where Latino students had shown strong gains in the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. Data from onsite interviews, focus groups, and documents were reviewed for evidence of 57 characteristics of effective schools. As expected, schools were characterized by strong leadership; a clear focus on achievement; positive climate, including supportive relationships among students and teachers; and good communications with parents. Surprisingly little attention was paid to providing culturally relevant curriculum or bilingual instruction. The schools generally exhibited a strong coherence, marked by articulation of common goals and a strong sense of guiding purpose, shared norms, consistent messages, and consistency of beliefs and practices. The schools could be further improved by drawing more explicitly on the cultural knowledge of home and community.

Exploring the Achievement Gap Between White And Minority Students in Texas

The Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) has been used to document and track an achievement gap between white and minority students in Texas. Some educators have credited the TAAS with fueling a drive to close the achievement gap while others suggest that TAAS scores may be misleading because of factors such as score inflation and a possible ceiling effect. The purpose of this study was to analyze the gap in mathematics achievement for eighth grade students. The study compared TAAS and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test results to determine if the achievement gap between white, Hispanic, and African-American Students had narrowed between 1996 and 2000. Results indicate that TAAS mean scores increased significantly for all three ethnic groups between 1996 and 2000. Comparison of the TAAS test score frequency distributions for each ethnic group indicated that white students' scores shifted from the middle to the upper portion of the test score range while minority students' scores shifted from the lower to the middle and higher score range. Both white and minority students' TAAS test score distributions were significantly more negatively skewed in 2000 than in 1996. Comparisons between white and minority students' TAAS scores showed that white students had significantly higher scores than either Hispanic or African-American students in both 1996 and 2000. Comparison of mean score differences in 1996 and 2000 indicated that the achievement gap between white and minority students had narrowed. NAEP scores increased significantly from 1996 to 2000 for Hispanic students, but not for white or African-American students. However, test score distribution patterns showed small positive changes for all three ethnic groups. Comparisons between ethnic groups indicated that there were significant differences between white and minority students' scores in both 1996 and 2000. Comparison of mean score differences in 1996 and 2000 indicated that the achievement gap between Hispanic white students had narrowed slightly but that there was no change in the achievement gap between white and African-American students. Analysis of the TAAS test score distribution patterns indicated the likelihood that a ceiling effect had impacted students' scores. The evidence for a ceiling effect was strongest for white students. In 2000, 60.4% of white students had a TAAS score that fell in the top 10% of the score range. In contrast, there was no evidence of a ceiling effect for the NAEP. Mean score gains on the TAAS are only partially substantiated by the NAEP data. Furthermore, there is a very strong possibility that a ceiling effect artificially restricted the 2000 TAAS scores for white students and created the illusion that the achievement gap between minority and white students had been narrowed.

Enhancing Content Areas Through a Cognitive Academic Language Learning Based Collaborative in South Texas

This article describes the implementation and assessment of the Content Area Program Enhancement (CAPE) model. Based on the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach, CAPE fosters a collaborative environment among teachers, administrators, and practitioners to improve instruction and achievement for English language learners. Specifically, the CAPE implementation in a predominantly Hispanic school district in south Texas is examined in terms of program goals, instructional support, administrator and teacher program critical assessment, and student assessment through the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, a high-stakes, statemandated test. The CAPE approach was found effective with English language learning students, including those who were atrisk of dropping out of the school. Through several paired-samples t-tests on the students' reading and mathematics Texas Learning Indexes, the program was found to improve the student scores in both domains. The research also confirms that school commitment to improve their teacher instructional approach was crucial to the success of program implementation.

Stolen Lives/Found Opportunities

Suggests students who go to school under the shadow of high-stakes tests (such as the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) may feel that their educational lives have been stolen, reduced to the fear of passing or not passing one single exam. Presents transcriptions of four interviews with four outstanding middle school teachers. Suggests ways to connect standards to engaging activities.

New ESEA Extends Choice to School Officials

CALL IT the bill people loved to hate. Some people, that is, like state legislators, governors, school administrators, conservative groups, and the National Education Association. This odd bunch shares a common dislike of the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). On the other hand, much less powerful interest groups, primarily advocates for poor children, found themselves on the winning side. In addition, the American Federation of Teachers swallowed its objection to the portion of the statute that demotes paraprofessionals in classrooms and went for the bill's emphasis on higher standards and testing. The most important power behind the revised ESEA was a Bush White House, which remains convinced that the miracle can be a revelation for the rest of the country. And the Administration was joined by Democratic leaders disgusted with the opposition of interest groups to accountability measures in public education. So we have an ESEA that accomplishes what a Democratic White House could never have done: create a much larger federal presence in education policy and funding and set the foundation for a national testing system. However, the legislation comes wrapped in several layers of exaggeration. All students are to be proficient in reading and math by 2013 - a statement that calls to mind the braggadocio of the first Education Summit's declaration in 1989 that U.S. students would be first in the world in math and science by 2000. The new ESEA promise of alternatives for students attending consistently failing schools rings hollow as well. The new ESEA will improve the education of students, its shapers declared, because of the mandate to test all students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 - the Texas model. In Texas, success is based primarily on student scores on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), and, as scores have risen, so have the plaudits for the public education system. There are serious flaws with the TAAS approach, however. A new version is in the works, but some comparisons of TAAS items with those in other assessments, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have indicated that TAAS is a low-level test. For example, a study of middle-grade students in one urban district - declared a recognized district because it met all the objectives of the state's Academic Excellence Indicator System - found that one-third of the eighth- graders were below basic in reading skills and 44% were below basic in math skills when tested on NAEP items. Because the students were weak on higher-order skills, the researchers concluded (as have others as well) that Texas teachers were spending an inordinate amount of time on low-level skills and test preparation. States with much better-designed assessment systems have chosen other strategies, such as sampling student performance (Maryland) or testing in all core subjects but at different grade levels (Kentucky). Moreover, states with low-stakes tests tend to do better on NAEP assessments. Yet the new legislation requires all states to spend their funds and energy conforming to one set way of using assessments. Administration officials praise the reauthorization as a breakthrough in education policy. Actually, the 1994 reauthorization, which meshed ESEA with Goals 2000 and with the standards of the School-to-Work Act (as well as creating an Occupational Skills Standards Board), was a more sweeping change. …

Mounting Evidence Supports the Achievement Effects of Success for All

Any independent reader or reviewer who took the time to read the actual evidence would have to conclude that the achievement effects of SFA are thoroughly and scientifically documented, and many reviewers have concluded exactly this, Mr. Slavin retorts. IN HIS seventh article attacking research on Success for All, Stanley Pogrow engages in his usual tactics: making baseless accusation after baseless accusation in the hope that readers, who must long ago have stopped paying attention to the content itself, will figure (incorrectly) that with so many charges, some of them must be true. The current critique is in response to an article in the June Kappan.1 This study presents Pogrow with a difficult challenge. Here is a study of 111 schools across Texas, reporting data from the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) Reading Scale that anyone with an Internet account could easily replicate. These schools serve more than 55,000 children. Their progress was compared to that of all Texas children and to that of subgroups according to ethnicity. These whole-state comparisons were made specifically to avoid charges that we selected particular control groups after the fact to make Success for All look good. Apparently recognizing the impossibility of impeaching a study of this size, quality, and policy relevance, Pogrow spends a great deal of time rehashing decade-old criticisms about Baltimore and other issues that have nothing to do with Texas. I'll return to these. However, let's start with the Texas evaluation. Pogrow's main claim, stated at the outset, is that Success for All (SFA) couldn't possibly have worked in Texas, because SFA doesn't work. It's hard to respond to this circular reasoning. Pogrow then goes on to say that it's absurd to claim that SFA is responsible for the overall reduction in the minority/white achievement gap or for the overall rise in TAAS scores. Yet we never made any such claim. In each case, we compared the gains made by SFA students to those of other Texas students. TAAS scores did rise, but those of SFA students rose significantly more. The gap did narrow, but the gap for SFA students narrowed significantly more. Pogrow, who has opposed research involving control groups,2 does not appear to understand this most fundamental element of research design. He then criticized our comparison of scores for (mostly minority) SFA students to those of the state as a whole, on the basis that these are not equivalent groups. Yet we addressed exactly this issue in our article, making separate comparisons of African American students in SFA schools to African American students in the state as a whole and Hispanic SFA students to Hispanic students in the state as a whole. In both cases, the SFA and other students were similar at pretest, but in both cases the African American and Hispanic students in SFA schools gained significantly more than similar students elsewhere in Texas. To save readers the trouble of finding their June issue, I reproduce the relevant graphs below. Pogrow accuses us of making SFA look good by stopping our analyses with the 1998 data. At the time we wrote the June article, only 1999 data were available, and the state itself cautioned against longitudinal analyses because of the significant changes in TAAS procedures introduced in 1999. In fact, Pogrow himself cites bilingual specialists who told him exactly this and suggested doing exactly what we did - analyzing scores through 1998. However, we now have data through 2001 (see Figure 3). Once again, analyzing at the school level, SFA students gained significantly more than other Texas students. Because of the testing change in 1999, Figure 3 understates the amount of gain for both SFA and state scores, but both sets of scores are probably affected to a similar degree. Note that Figure 3 includes every school in the original study except one, which closed in 1999. Pogrow accuses us of failing to include every Texas SFA school that began the program between 1994 and 1997, as we claimed. …

Fighting the TAAS: The shedding of stereotypes at a bilingual high school

The author participated in the Border Studies Program during the fall semester of 2000. As a part of his field study, he worked as a tutor at Bowie High School, a bilingual school in El Paso, Texas. The author chose this field study because he is a native of California and wanted to prove the critics of bilingual education wrong. This ethnography offers his assessment of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) and then documents the author's process of ''decodification,'' as he came to shed many of the stereotypes he had of the ''inner-city high school.''

Effects of Success for All on TAAS Reading Scores

The statewide data for Texas reported here show that Success for All schools are significantly and substantially closing the gap in TAAS reading performance between themselves and the far less impoverished schools in the rest of the state. The authors found this to be particularly true for African American and Hispanic students, for whom the gap with white students closed significantly more than it did for African American and Hispanic students in other schools throughout the state. SUCCESS for All (SFA) is a comprehensive reform model for elementary schools, especially schools that qualify for Title I schoolwide funding. Begun in 1987 in one inner-city school in Baltimore, Success for All is now operating in more than 1,800 schools in 49 states, as well as in five foreign countries. In fall 2000, about one million children were in schools implementing Success for All. An important strength of Success for All - and a key to its rapid growth - is the amount and quality of the research done to evaluate the program.1 Studies in 12 school districts have compared SFA to matched control schools on individually administered measures of reading, especially the Woodcock, Durrell, and Gray informal reading inventories.2 These have reported that, on average, SFA schools have exceeded controls on these measures by approximately 50% of a standard deviation - or, in grade-equivalents, approximately 2.5 months in first grade, increasing to 1.1 years by fifth grade. These effects have been particularly positive for the lowest-achieving students, and the program has had a profound effect on reducing special education placements and retention.3 In addition to research using student-level data and individually administered measures, several have found positive effects of Success for All on a variety of standardized and norm-referenced measures used in state accountability programs.4 In all, of thousands of elementary school children in dozens of schools and in a variety of settings have been published in the most selective journals in education, and they have consistently reported positive impacts of SFA on student achievement. A few have also reported atypical program impacts on student achievement. The balance of evidence would suggest that such results may be attributable to the quality of implementation, a variable known to be critical to all school reform efforts and one that is too often left unconsidered. Nonetheless, the rigor and variety of evidence indicating positive impacts of SFA on student achievement have established the effectiveness of the SFA program design well beyond the empirical standards typical of educational research. One review of 24 comprehensive school reform designs, conducted by the American Institutes of Research, found very few that had ever been compared to a control group.5 Only two, Success for All and Direct Instruction, met the highest standards for the rigor of their evaluations. A later compendium by the Thomas Fordham Foundation came to the same conclusion.6 Despite this research, some scholars have questioned the basic effectiveness of Success for All and the evidence that supports it, charging in particular that the majority of the were completed by Johns Hopkins researchers or their colleagues and that independent studies have found few benefits beyond the early grades, especially on the group-administered measures for which schools are increasingly held accountable. In this article, we use data (available on the Internet) from the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). Such outcome data are often reported by program developers, but usually they have little scientific validity, since the data presented are for schools selected because they happened to have done well in a given year. Yet these standardized test scores are outcomes of greatest importance to educators. The present study deals with this problem of selection bias by including every school that began SFA from 1994 to 1997, a total of 111 schools, and comparing their gains from the year before SFA to 1998. …

Can State Accountability Systems Drive Improvements in School Performance for Children of Color and Children from Low-Income Homes?

States and school districts throughout the nation have developed or are developing accountability systems to spur improvement in student achievement. Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners have both praised and criticized accountability systems, particularly concerning their impact on children of color and children from low-income homes. Do accountability systems harm the education of children of color and children from low-income homes, or do these systems drive educational improvements for these students? Few state accountability systems have been in place long enough to help answer this question; however, the Texas public school accountability system has been in place for several years, providing a useful case for analyzing the impact of accountability systems on student achievement. Additionally, Texas is a useful case for study because of the wealth of disaggregated student achievement data available through the state education agency. If the accountability system in Texas were driving improvements in student performance (particularly for children of color and children from low-income homes), one would expect to see substantial increases in student achievement over time on multiple measures of student performance, including the state's Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). One would expect to see increases for children of color and children who meet low-income criteria. Furthermore, one would expect to see those increases result in a narrowing of the achievement gap when their performance is compared with that of White students and students with typical family incomes. One would expect the improvements to be a fair reflection of the performance of all students without the omission or exclusion of significant populations of students. Furthermore, one would hope that the results would represent real improvements in student achievement, as opposed to artificial indicators of success. Finally, if the accountability system were to be considered at lea

Statewide Assessment Triggers Urban School Reform but How High the Stakes for Urban Minorities?

The articles by Linda Skrla and James Joseph Scheurich (2001), Edward Fuller and Joseph Johnson (2001), and James Koschoreck (2001) in this issue of Education and Urban Society report on urban schools using social justice principles to enact meaningful reforms for African American and Latino/Latina students through the use of state testing policy in Texas. The articles offer readers a detailed analysis of teacher/administrator/community-led, proactive policy initiatives in the contested political terrain of high-stakes educational assessment accountability. The authors review the key findings of assessment measures and their deleterious impact on African American and Latino/Latina children, as well as various efforts by schools and school districts in Texas to use the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) requirements as an opportunity to raise the level of care about the academic welfare of African American and Latino/Latina children in particular urban districts in Texas. This is very similar to efforts going on in other states like California and how some school districts have reacted to statewide assessment mandates with increased efforts to focus on the technical core of curriculum and instruction in mathematics (Cohen & Hill, 2000). The authors also do justice in discussing and showing overall support for the main points of the race/culture-based movements to challenge the power of these tests and the state education agency to define minority education. Despite the authors' implicit support of the overall goal to abolish testing and standardized assessment, they also realize that controversy surrounding this political/psychometric issue will not go away. Therefore, one can put forth a proposition, borrowed from critical race theory's Derrick Bell (1995), of interest convergence, in that Whites will concede or agree to public policy changes that involve African Americans only if the White interest converges with the African American interest. This major