Education Policy Analysis Archives

Volume 8 Number 41

The Texas Miracle in Education

Walt Haney

3. Evidence and Boosters of the Myth

          Given the consequences attached to performance on TAAS, it is not surprising that this test has had major impact on education in Texas. At first glance, this impact appears to have been largely positive; and it is evidence of the apparent positive impact of TAAS, and the Texas system of school accountability, that has helped give rise to the "miracle" story of education reform in Texas over the last decade.
          Four kinds of evidence seem to have been most widely cited as indicative of major improvements in education in Texas, namely: 1) sharp increases in the overall pass rates on TAAS during the 1990s; 2) apparent decreases in the achievement gap between White and minority students in Texas (again based on TAAS scores); 3) seemingly decreasing rates of students dropping out of school before high school graduation; and, 4) apparent confirmation of TAAS gains by results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

3.1 Improved results on TAAS

          The main evidence contributing to the perception of dramatic educational gains in Texas during the 1990s (what the March 21, 2000 USA Today editorial called "widespread improvement in student achievement") seems to have been sharp increases in passing rates on the TAAS. TAAS was introduced in Texas in 1990-91, and, as recounted previously, was administered at somewhat varied grades (and seasons) during the early 1990s. In several publications, the TEA has presented TAAS pass rates aggregated across different grades. Inasmuch as this sort of aggregation may obscure as much as it reveals, here I present results mainly for grade 10 TAAS testing.
          Table 3.1 (and corresponding Figure 3.1) shows the results on the grade 10 TAAS test from 1994 to 1998.

Table 3.1
TAAS Grade 10 Percent Passing 1994-1998
All Students Not in Special Education
(Does Not Include Year-Round Education Results)

  1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
TAAS Reading 76% 76% 81% 86% 88%
TAAS Math 57% 59% 65% 72% 78%
TAAS Writing 81% 86% 85% 88% 89%
TAAS All Tests 52% 54% 60% 67% 72%
Source: Selected State AEIS Data: A Multi-Year History (www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/swresult/gd10sp98.htm)
          As can be seen from these data, grade 10 TAAS results show a pattern of steady improvement from 1994 through 1998, with the percentage of students passing the TAAS reading test rising from 76% to 88%; the percentage passing the TAAS math test rising from 57% to 78%; and the corresponding increase for the TAAS writing test going from 81% to 89%. The percentage of grade 10 students passing all three tests increased from 52% in 1994 to 72% in 1998.

3.2 Decrease in Race Gap in Test Scores

          Even as test scores were improving overall, the gaps in achievement between White and nonwhite students (specifically Black and Hispanic students) appeared to have been narrowing. The USA Today editorial (3/21/2000) reported that "Texas is one of the few states that has narrowed its racial learning gap." Figure 3.2 and Table 3.2 show how the "racial learning gap" appears to have narrowed on the grade 10 TAAS tests (for economy of presentation here, I do not show results separately for the reading, writing, and math tests, but only the percentages of grade 10 students passing all three tests).

Table 3.2
TAAS Grade 10 Percent Passing All Tests by Race 1994-1998
All Students Not in Special Education
(Does Not Include Year-Round Education Results)

  1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
Black 29% 32% 38% 48% 55%
Hispanic 35% 37% 44% 52% 59%
White 67% 70% 74% 81% 85%
Source: Selected State AEIS Data: A Multi-Year History: www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/swresult/gd10sp98.htm
          As can be seen, in 1994 there was a huge disparity in the grade 10 pass rates for Black and Hispanic students as compared with White students. The 1994 White pass rate of 67% was 38 points higher than the Black pass rate of 29%; and 32 points more than the Hispanic rate of 35%. In other words, in 1994, White students were passing the grade 10 TAAS tests at about double the rate of Black and Hispanic students. This gap was just about what might have been predicted based on the 1990 field test results (see Table 2.1). By 1998, the White grade 10 pass rate had climbed 18 points to 85%. But the Black and Hispanic pass rates had climbed even more, 26 and 24 points respectively. So in a period of just five years, the race gaps had been reduced from 38 to 30 percentage points for Whites and Blacks and from 32 to 26 for Whites compared with Hispanic tenth grade students. Or in other words, minorities had increased their rate of passing grade 10 TAAS tests from less than 50% of the White pass rate to two-thirds of the White pass rate in just four years.

3.3 Decreases in Dropout Rates

          If the dramatic gains in grade 10 pass rates overall and substantial decreases in the "racial learning gap" were not sufficiently remarkable, official TEA statistics indicated that over the same interval high school dropout rates were also declining.

Table 3.3
Texas Annual Dropout Rate, Grades 7-12 1994-1998

  1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
All Students 2.8% 2.6% 1.8% 1.8% 1.6%
Black 3.6% 3.2% 2.3% 2.3% 2.0%
Hispanic 4.2% 3.9% 2.7% 2.5% 2.3%
White 1.7% 1.5% 1.2% 1.1% 1.0%
Source: Selected State AEIS Data: Five Year History
www.tea.state.tx.us/perfreport/aeis/hist/state.html
          As shown in Table 3.3, TEA data indicated that between 1994 and 1998, even as pass rates on the TAAS were increasing among grade 10 students, dropout rates were decreasing not just among secondary students overall, but also for each of the three race groups for which data were disaggregated. In short, what appeared to be happening in Texas schools in the 1990s truly did seem to be a miracle.
          As Peter Schrag has recently written: "Some of Texas's claims are so striking they border on the incredible. The state's official numbers show that even as TAAS scores were going up, dropout rates were cut from an annual 6.1 percent in 1989-90 to 1.6 percent last year. If ever there was a case of something being too good to be true, this is it" (Schrag, 2000). But before reviewing the doubts of Schrag and others, let me recap one additional source of evidence that seemed to confirm the miracle story.

3.4 NAEP Results for Texas

          Anyone even remotely familiar with recent education history of the United States must view with some skepticism the meaningfulness of the almost inevitable increases in performance that follow introduction of a new testing program. When a new testing program is introduced, students and teachers have little familiarity with the specifics of the new tests. But after a few years, they become familiar with the style and format of the tests and students can be coached specifically for the test in question. Hence, performance—or at least average test scores—almost inevitably increases.
          That students can be successfully coached for particular tests has been well known among education researchers for decades. As far back as 1927, Glimore, for example, reported that students could be coached on Otis group intelligence tests "to the point of increasing their standing and score in intelligence tests even in the case of the material used in coaching being only similar and not identical with that of the basic test" (Gilmore, 1927, p. 321). Indeed what happens when students are coached for a specific test has come to called the "saw tooth" phenomenon because of the regular pattern in which scores steadily rise following introduction of a new testing program, only to fall dramatically when a different test is introduced (Linn, 2000, p. 7).
          The phenomenon of falsely inflated test scores was brought to wide public attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s because of publicity for what came to be known as the "Lake Wobegon" phenomenon in test results. Lake Wobegon is the mythical town in Minnesota popularized by Garrison Keillor in his National Public Radio program "A Prairie Home Companion." It is the town where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." In the late 1980s it was discovered that Lake Wobegon seemed to have invaded the nation's schools. For according to a 1987 report by John Cannell, the vast majority of school districts and all states were scoring above average on nationally normed standardized tests (Cannell, 1987). Since it is logically impossible for all of any population to be above average on a single measure, it was clear that something was amiss, that something about nationally normed standardized tests or their use had been leading to false inferences about the status of learning in the nation's schools.
          Cannell was a physician by training and not a specialist in education or education research. His original (1987) report was published by "Friends for Education," the foundation he established to promote accountability in education. A revised version of Cannell's report was published in the Summer 1988 issue of Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice (Cannell, 1988) together with responses and commentary from representatives of major test publishers and officials of the U.S Department of Education (Phillips and Finn, 1988; Drahozal and Frisbie, 1988; Lenke and Keene, 1988; Williams, 1988; Qualls-Payne, 1988; Stonehill, 1988). Cannell's charges regarding misleading test results were hotly debated in this and other forums. Some people doubted whether the Lake Wobegon phenomenon was real (that is, whether large majorities of states, schools and districts were in fact scoring above average on the national norms of the tests), while most observers accepted the reality of the phenomenon but disputed what caused it. Among the causes suggested and debated were problems in the original norming of the tests, outdated norms, lack of test security, manipulation of populations of students tested, artificial statistical manipulation of test results, and teachers and schools teaching to the tests, either purposely or inadvertently.
          The publicity surrounding the Lake Wobegon phenomenon was sufficiently widespread that the U.S. Department of Education funded researchers at the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) to investigate. On the basis of a survey of state directors of testing, Shepard (1989) concluded that the conditions for inflated test results—such as high stakes being pinned on test results, efforts to align curricula to the tests, and direct teaching to the tests—existed in virtually all of the states. And on the basis of an analysis of up to three years of test results from 35 states from which they were available, Linn, Graue and Sanders (1989) essentially confirmed Cannell's basic finding that test results across the nation were implausibly inflated—Lake Wobegon had invaded the nation's schools. For instance, they found that "for grades 1 through 6, the percentage of students scoring above the national median in mathematics ranges from a low of 58% in grade 4 for the 1985 school year to a high of 71% in grade 2 for the 1987-88 school year . . . " (p. 8). Linn, Graue and Sanders concluded that the use of old norms was one cause of the abundance of "above average scores" (p. 23), but also pointed out that in situations in which the same form of a test is used year after year, "increased familiarity with a particular form of a test" (p.24) likely contributed to inflated scores.
The practice of using a single form of a test year after year poses a logical threat to making inferences about the larger domain of achievement. Scores may be raised by focusing narrowly on the test objectives without improving achievement across the broader domain that the test objectives are intended to represent. Worse still, practice on nearly identical or even the actual items that appear on a test may be given. But as Dyer aptly noted some years ago, "if you use the test exercises as an instrument of teaching you destroy the usefulness of the test as an instrument for measuring the effects of teaching (Dyer, 1973, p. 89)." (Linn, Graue and Sanders, 1989, p. 25).
          The problem was illustrated even more clearly in a subsequent study reported by Koretz, Linn, Dunbar & Shepard (1991), which compared test results on one "high- stakes" test, used for several years in a large urban school district, with those on a comparable test that had not been used in that district for several years. They found that performance on the regularly used high-stakes test did not generalize to other tests for which students had not been specifically coached, and again commented that "students in this district are prepared for high-stakes testing in ways that boost scores . . . substantially more than actual achievement in domains that the tests are intended to measure" (p. 2). To put the matter bluntly, teaching to a particular test undermines the validity of test results as measures of more general learning.
          While education researchers were essentially confirming Cannell's initial charges, the intrepid physician was continuing his own investigations. In late summer 1989, Cannell released a new report entitled The "Lake Wobegon" Report: How Public Educators Cheat on Standardized Achievement Tests. This time Cannell presented new instances of the Lake Wobegon phenomenon and a variety of evidence of outright fraud in school testing programs, including a sampling of testimony from teachers concerned about cheating on tests. After presenting results of his own survey of test security in the 50 states (concluding that security is generally so lax as to invite cheating), Cannell outlined methods to help people detect whether cheating is going on in their school districts, and "inexpensive steps" to help prevent it.
          More recently Koretz and Barron (1998; RAND, 1999) of the RAND Corporation investigated the validity of dramatic gains on Kentucky's high stakes statewide tests. Like Texas, Kentucky had adopted policies to hold schools and teachers accountable for student performance on statewide tests. During the first four years of the program, Kentucky students showed dramatic improvements on the state tests. What Koretz and Barron sought to assess was the validity of the Kentucky test gains by comparing them with Kentucky student performance on comparable tests, specifically the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the American College Testing Program (ACT) college admissions tests. What they found was that the dramatic gains on the Kentucky test between 1992 and 1996 were simply not reflected in NAEP and ACT scores. They concluded that the Kentucky test scores "have been inflated and are therefore not a meaningful indicator of increased learning" (RAND, 1999).
          Even before the release of the report showing inflated test scores in Kentucky, anyone familiar with the Lake Wobegon phenomenon, widely publicized in the late 1980s and early 1990s, had to view the dramatic gains reported on TAAS in Texas in the 1990s with considerable skepticism. Were the gains on TAAS indicative of real gains in student learning, or just another instance of artificially inflated test scores?
          In 1997, results from the 1996 the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in mathematics were released. The 1996 NAEP results showed that among the states participating in the state-level portion of the math assessment, Texas showed the greatest gains in percentages of fourth graders scoring at the proficient or advanced levels. Between 1992 and 1996, the percentage of Texas fourth grades scoring at these levels had increased from 15% to 25%. The same NAEP results also showed North Carolina to have posted unusually large gains at the grade 8 level, with the percentages of eighth graders in North Carolina scoring at the proficient or advanced levels improving from 9% in 1990 to 20% in 1996. (Reese et al., 1997)
          Putting aside for the moment that the 1996 NAEP results also showed that math achievement in these two states was no better (and in some cases worse) than the national average, these findings led to considerable publicity for the apparent success of education reform in these two states. The apparent gains in math, for example, led the National Education Goals Panel in 1997 to identify Texas and North Carolina as having made unusual progress in achieving the National Education Goals.

3.5 Plaudits for the Texas Miracle

          In Spring 1998, Tyce Palmaffy published an article titled "The Gold Star State: How Texas jumped to the head of the class in elementary school achievement." Citing both 1996 NAEP results and TAAS score increases, Palmaffy praised Texas for being in the vanguard of "an accountability movement sweeping the states" (not surprisingly he also mentioned North Carolina and Kentucky). Regarding TAAS, Palmaffy reported "In 1994, barely half of Texas students passed the TAAS math exam. By last year, the proportion had climbed to 80 percent. What's more, the share of black and Hispanic children who passed the test doubled during that time to 64 percent and 72 percent respectively." Palmaffy's article, published in a Heritage Foundation journal, also included testimonials for the Texas success story from divergent vantage points. Kati Haycock, "director of the Education Trust, a Washington D.C.-based organization devoted to improving educational opportunities for low-income children" was quoted as touting Texas as "a real model for other states to follow." The article also referred to "researcher Heidi Glidden of the American Federation of Teachers union" as praising the sort of education accountability system used in Texas.
          Meanwhile, the National Education Goals Panel had "commissioned Dr. David Grissmer, an education researcher with the RAND Corporation, to conduct an analysis of education reforms in both states [Texas and North Carolina] to determine that the improvements were indeed significant and to seek to identify the factors that could and could not account for their progress" (Grissmer & Flanagan, 1998, p. i). The National Education Goals Panel released the Grissmer/Flanagan report in November 1998. Without trying to recap or critique the Grissmer/Flanagan report here, let me simply summarize how it was conveyed to the outside world. The report was released November 5, 1998 with a press release titled "North Carolina and Texas Recognized as Models for Boosting Student Achievement." The first paragraph of the press release read:
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) A new study that both belies conventional wisdom about problems in K-12 education and illuminates some approaches for solving them points to the extraordinarily successful policies of two states North Carolina and Texas as models for reform throughout the nation. (NEGP, 11/5/98)
          After quotes from North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt and Texas Governor George W. Bush, the press release went on to summarize the Grissmer/Flanagan findings. The researchers found that "several factors commonly associated with student achievement, such as real per pupil spending, teacher pupil ratios, teachers with advanced degrees, and experience level of teachers—are not adequate for explaining the test score gains." (National Education Goals Panel, November 5, 1998, p. 1). The press release explained that, instead, Grissmer and Flanagan attributed the achievement gains in Texas and North Carolina to three broad factors common to the two states (business leadership, political leadership, consistent reform agendas) and seven educational policies (adopting statewide standards by grade for clear teaching, holding all students to the same standards, linking statewide assessments to academic standards, creating accountability systems with benefits and consequences for results, increasing local control and flexibility for administrators and teachers, providing test scores and feedback via computer for continuous improvement, and shifting resources to schools with more disadvantaged students).
          Grissmer and Flanagan (1998) did not explain how they had determined that these were the factors behind the apparent achievement gains in Texas and North Carolina; but whatever the case, this 1998 report from the National Education Goals Panel, coupled with the sort of diverse support for the Texas model education accountability system cited by Palmaffy, seemed to certify the apparent miracle of education reform in Texas. The success of education reform in Texas was being heralded by observers as diverse as Palmaffy (of the Heritage Foundation), Haycock (head of an organization dedicated to improving the educational opportunities of low-income children), and Glidden (a researcher with one of the nation's largest teachers unions). The Grissmer/Flanagan report seemed to be the clincher. Here was a report from a bipartisan national group (the National Education Goals Panel), prepared by a Ph.D. researcher from a prestigious research organization, the RAND Corporation, that straight out said, "The analysis confirms that gains in academic achievement in both states are significant and sustained. North Carolina and Texas posted the largest average gains in student scores on tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered between 1990 and 1997. These results are mirrored in state assessments during the same period, and there is evidence of the scores of disadvantaged students improving more rapidly than those of advantaged students" (Grissmer & Flanagan, 1998, p. i). Few people seemed to notice that the Grissmer & Flanagan report was not actually published by RAND.
          Nonetheless, the report from the National Education Goals Panel seemed to certify the seeming miracle of education reform in Texas. Subsequently, the story of the Texas miracle has been circulated far and wide. Without trying to document all of the stories on the Texas miracle I have seen, let me mention here just two examples. On June 10, 1999, the Boston Globe ran a front-page story headlined "Embarrassed into success: Texas school experience may hold lessons for Massachusetts" (Daley, 1999). And on March 21, 2000, in the editorial cited at the start of this article, USA Today, in urging the U.S. Senate to adopt a Texas-style school accountability system for the $8 billion Title I program providing federal aid to poor schools, the editors cited "Texas-size school success" in the Lone Star state. In an apparent reference to 1996 NAEP results, the editorial cited the Education Trust as the source of evidence about gains in Texas on 1996 math tests administered nationally.

0: Home   |   1: Intro.   |   2: History   |   3: The Myth   |   4: TAAS   |   5: Missing Students
6: Teachers   |   7: Other Evidence   |   8: Summary   |   Notes & Ref.   |   Appendix