Category: High-Stakes Testing

• Decade of Education Outcome Data: Texas vs. California vs. New York vs. Nation

  4–6 minutes

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  September 27, 2012

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  Accountability, African Americans, Announcements, High-Stakes Testing, Higher Education Access, Latina/os

  Today we are pleased to release the report Is Texas leading its peers and the nation?: A Decadal Analysis of Educational Data. The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin commissioned a policy this report in the spring of 2012 to examine education data for the state of Texas,…

  

• “Illusion of Inclusion,” Article about Race and Standards in Harvard Educational Review

  1–2 minutes

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  September 20, 2012

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  Accountability, African Americans, High-Stakes Testing, Latina/os, Standards

   In this article, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Keffrelyn Brown, and Anthony Brown offer findings from a close textual analysis of how the Texas social studies standards address race, racism, and communities of color. Using the lens of Critical Race Theory, the authors uncover the sometimes subtle ways that the standards can appear to adequately address race while…

• Back to School

  1–2 minutes

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  September 13, 2012

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  Accountability, High-Stakes Testing, School Finance

  I recently did an on-camera interview with YNN for their Back to School series. If you have TimeWarner, access to the videos is open, otherwise the print stories are available to the public. The print stories are here and here. My comments: “You can’t cut several billion dollars from the [Texas] education budget and expect…

• High-Stakes Testing, Accountability and The Simpsons

  1–2 minutes

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  September 10, 2012

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  Accountability, High-Stakes Testing

  Who knew that high-stakes testing and accountability also impacts Bart and Lisa Simpson? Check out the episode “How the Test Was Won” Bart accidentally receives a perfect score on a practice test for the upcoming Vice President’s Assessment Test, by writing “Slurp My Snot” across his page. This enables him to attend a special pizza…

• Bad Apples?: Accountability, AYP, and Cheating

  1–2 minutes

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  August 10, 2012

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  Accountability, High-Stakes Testing

  I gave another interview on the cheating scandal in El Paso (1,2,3) yesterday. The question that often arises is this only a case of bad apples? The research literature has long shown serial dishonesty in Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) publicly reported dropout and graduation numbers (See for example IDRA; Losen, Orfield, & Balfanz, 2006; Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond) suggesting…