TAKS-ing Work

Former Education Sector intern Danny Rosenthal weighs in on the test-prep debate from his Houston high school:

Nearly 900,000 Texas high school students recently took the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS. All of the state’s students must pass the test’s math, English, science, and social studies sections to get a high school diploma.

But where I teach math, at Hastings High School in Houston, only 54 percent of students passed the math section last year. So Hastings, a typical urban school serving 3,200 mostly poor black and Latino students, puts intense effort into boosting its students’ scores. Along with other math teachers at Hastings, I did test prep with my students every day for two months leading up to TAKS. As the test approached, that’s all we did in class. The Hastings math department also taught courses devoted entirely to TAKS prep. Some students were assigned to them year. Others were moved into the classes closer to the test.

I’m OK with test prep. When standardized tests are well-crafted, as they are in my state, teachers should use tests to shape their classroom instruction. Done thoughtfully, “teaching to the test” is a good idea. But at my school, and others in Houston, we execute test prep so poorly that it ends up hurting students more than it helps them.

Our problems started early this year, at our first planning meeting two months before the TAKS administration. We began by identifying questions that more than half of our students missed on a diagnostic test. Then we matched the questions to topics covered on TAKS, putting colored stickers for each question on posters around the room. The idea was to focus our work on the skills where students needed the most help.

But neither teachers nor administrators tried very hard to draw meaningful conclusions from the posters when we were finished. The data itself was incomplete because some teachers didn’t bother to post most of their stickers. And we didn’t control for things like the number of times each topic was tested. As a result, the sticker exercise told us little about our students’ needs. Nonetheless, we used the posters to guide classroom study sessions, as well as the test-prep work students did in our computer labs and in weekend tutoring.

Our classroom preparation for TAKS aspires to be “drill and kill,” though the term suggests a level of focus and thoroughness in our work that didn’t exist. Mostly, teachers made worksheets with questions only loosely related to each other taken from previous TAKS tests, or, in some cases, from math textbooks that are largely unaligned with the TAKS test. Think panicked college students poring over Cliffs Notes for the wrong novel.

Sometimes, the school made all math teachers work off of the same worksheets, regardless of the fact that they taught different subjects. One day, my freshman Algebra class was expected to review quadratic equations, a complicated topic that my students had never seen before and lacked the background to understand. On another day, my Algebra II class was expected to review graphing lines, a topic they had already studied in depth for the previous two weeks. Almost every teacher uses the worksheets. It is how things are done.

Our test prep worksheets aim to review important skills. But oftentimes students have not learned these skills in the first place. And the worksheets don’t fix that. Most of the sheets require students to answer multiple-choice questions. Motivated students work through the problems. Others guess. After a few minutes, teachers show students the correct answer, focusing their explanation on the particulars of the problem instead of any broader concepts. Then, the class shuffles on to a new problem, usually unrelated to the first. In this haphazard process, there are few opportunities to make connections or think critically. And students don’t master basic skills either.

Perhaps because these worksheets are so ineffective, Hastings administrators encourage teachers to take their students to the school’s computer labs to use test-prep software. Some students are more engaged on a computer, and the software lets students work at their own pace.

But for others, computers are just a bigger distraction; they spend their time finding ways to bypass the school’s internet filter to get to YouTube. Busy checking their email, teachers often fail to notice. The computer software itself is designed to provide practice, not teach new skills. Students can read a short tutorial summary, but this summary is confusing and almost always ignored. So kids learn little of what they don’t already know.

Hastings also sponsors tutorials after school and on Saturdays to prepare students for TAKS. But only a few dozen kids out of 3,200 typically attend. At one Saturday session I attended, teachers outnumbered students. And the motivated students who do show up are not the ones who need the most help.

The larger problem is that most students just don’t care if they do well on the TAKS test. Last year, several confessed to me that they guessed on most of the questions. The school attempts to combat this indifference with simplistic incentives, offering students a chance to win an iPod just for showing up on TAKS test day and threatening those who fail the test with extra math classes.

But such incentives don’t work very well, and they miss the larger point: Students choose not to try mostly because they think they have no chance to succeed. That’s not their fault. At Hastings, we are far too willing to exchange gimmicky test-prep and other instructional shortcuts for real teaching.