Spoonful of sugar helps STAAR medicine

Mary Poppins must have taken a job at the Texas Education Agency.

At least, she must have had a hand in crafting Thursday’s announcement of results on this year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness — better known as STAAR — tests.

The results came with a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down in a most delightful way.

See if you can spot it:

“After four years of seeing little change, the 2016 results for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) for grades 3-8 are on the rise. Thirteen of the 17 assessments showed gains — some as much as nine percentage points — when compared to 2015 passing standards.”

If your eyes widened when you read “2015 passing standards,” let’s just say you are supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

To make this year’s test results taste good, we need sugar. We need to measure them by year-old standards.

TEA announced long ago that this year’s standards would be tougher, that students would have to answer more questions correctly to pass. More about that in a moment.

There’s always been an element of statewide testing that makes officials fear could make educators look bad.

That explains why TEA called up last year’s standards. By that easier measure, Education Commissioner Mike Morath said the report on this year’s testing “reflects the day-in, day-out hard work of teachers in the classroom across the state.”

In grades 3-8, this year’s results showed student gains on 13 of the 17 tests “when compared to 2015 passing standards,” TEA said.

Now, back to the real world. When measured under 2016 standards, this year’s tests showed improvement in only six of the 17 assessments. For the other 11, results were down or flat.

The six areas of improvement are the entire highlight reel for this year’s tests: fourth-grade math, fourth- and eighth-grade reading, fifth- and eighth-grade science and eighth-grade social studies.

Various groups criticize or oppose statewide testing. One of them, Texas Parents Opt Out of State Tests, posted a terse evaluation of Thursday’s TEA announcement on Facebook: “Test scores are meaningless.”

In March testing, the state’s new contractor, New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service, experienced a raft of problems, including a computer glitch that erased answers on 14,220 student tests.

Morath and school officials from across the state hit the roof over that.

This story was originally published July 14, 2016 at 6:15 PM with the headline "Spoonful of sugar helps STAAR medicine."