Podcast Transcript: The Future of School Measurement: Examining HB 4 and Texas Education Reform

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 5

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MORGAN SMITH: Welcome to the Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. 

Today, we are talking about how we measure the performance of Texas public schools — which, right now, means standardized testing and an A-F accountability system that assigns grades to campuses almost entirely based on those tests. It’s a policy that overlooks a lot of what public schools do to prepare students for later success in the workforce — and everything else our public schools do on a daily basis to ensure student well-being. 

And the heavy emphasis on how students perform on one test on one day hurts public education in other ways, too — creating a system where teachers are pressured to teach to test instead of focusing on all the other elements that go into learning.

Today we’ll hear about school districts in Texas and around the country who have found innovative ways to preserve a culture of student learning while maintaining high standards of accountability and transparency for their communities — and a promising proposal lawmakers are currently considering as the 89th Legislative Session comes to a close in Austin. 

BRAD OWEN: Any given assessment is a snapshot in time of where a child is in relation to their learning journey at that moment. So, trying to say that every child in every school district in Texas should be at the exact same spot in the moment in time in their journey is impossible, and it’s not justifiable.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Brad Owen, who is the superintendent of Burkburnett ISD, a district of 3,000 students on the Texas-Oklahoma border. To make up for the failures of the state’s current accountability system, his school board decided to develop its own local accountability system based on values and standards set by the community. It is among very few districts in the state that have adopted such a system. 

BRAD OWEN: So our community-based accountability system is essentially grounded in seven key pillars: student learning and progress, community engagement, student readiness, safety, security, financial. Again, it’s pillars that almost every school district already has the same, we’re just actually formalizing those. And then each pillar breaks down into key questions. So, three key questions, basically, about how we are addressing that pillar. And then each key question has a system response, meaning, what are we as a school district doing to ensure that we’re hitting that pillar every year for all students? And then from that, it then breaks down into all of your strategies, goals, and objectives. And that’s where the reporting comes out on each of those key questions.

MORGAN SMITH: Instead of the single annual report that comes out under the state accountability system, in Burkburnett ISD, the school board issues progress updates in stages throughout the year. 

BRAD OWEN: Every quarter our principals report out to our school board and then we put that report out to the public, of where we stand on certain pillars. Those pillars rotate. Twice a year, we report out to the community where we are on every pillar. At the end of the year, we do a 22-page report that has lots of narrative, lots of storytelling, lots of graphics, lots of data, raw data, good data, bad data. We don’t just hang our hat on the good data. We are very open and transparent. And we give that report to the entire public too. Not only to our parents, but also to our community members who are not parents. 70% of communities are non-parent adults. But they still vote, and so they need to be informed on what’s going on in the school district, and they’re an integral part of our community. 

MORGAN SMITH: This helps make sure everyone in the district community — parents, educators, students, residents — is engaged in what’s going on.

BRAD OWEN: Our teachers know what it is, our kids know what it is, our teachers know how they’re being held accountable to that. Our kids know how they’re tracking their own learning in relation to that. Our board is better informed than ever on what we’re doing each quarter with students and where we’re at in relation to that progress monitoring. Our community does. It’s aligned to our strategic plan. Our alignment as a whole, because of community-based accountability, is much better. We don’t have random acts of success with initiatives going in every different direction. Everything is aligned to that.

MORGAN SMITH: What’s happening in Burkburnett is part of a larger nationwide trend toward more holistic accountability systems. Texas is one of just six states that has yet to move away from a standardized test-based requirement for a high school diploma.

HARRY FEDER: A lot of states have said either, “We’re going to try to monkey around with those kind of tests and ask the federal government for permission to make it different,” or what really happens is localities are given freedom to create assessments and systems of assessments that operate below at the level of the classroom, at the level of the school that are much better.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Harry Feder, who is the executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a group that was founded in 1985 to combat the misuse of standardized testing across all levels of education and the workplace.

HARRY FEDER: All federal law says is that most of your accountability system has to be a state test, a standardized test. Now, most can mean 51%. There are states that sort of take that percentage more seriously, Kentucky, for example. Yes, they do the state test, but they also, a lot of states, and Kentucky is one of them, use a school survey as an accountability measure. Are my kids happy? Do the teachers respect the kids? Do the teachers seem to know what they’re talking about? The quality of teaching is an accountability measure. How rigorous is the curriculum? You can look at inputs in addition to a test score or other outputs like graduation rates. We talk about growth, but that’s just another test score measure. There are all sorts of things. The city of Chicago has a brand new dashboard of accountability. Parents can see how well does this school do with special needs kids? What is the ratio of teachers for English language learners? There are all sorts of inputs that you could look at, and also, the satisfaction of how many books does each kid read in a year? That could be an accountability metric. It’s a number. The opportunities for advanced mathematics, what are they?

MORGAN SMITH: Right now, in the last few weeks of the legislative session, Texas lawmakers are working on a proposal — House Bill 4 — that would bring major reforms to the state’s accountability system, including doing away with the STAAR exams, the state standardized test that forms the basis for the accountability system and using nationally norm-referenced tests instead.

MAX ROMBADO: These are test products or test instruments that are designed with national scope. This makes it easier for Texas and Texas school districts to compare how their students are doing to a much larger body of students across the country, not just insulated by the state. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is Max Rombado, the legislative director for Raise Your Hand Texas.

MAX ROMBADO: The STAAR test is not a nationally norm-referenced test. It’s what we call a criterion-referenced test. And the criteria references are the Texas standards, what we call the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Standards, TEKS. And so this takes a substantial amount of time and investment to design, and it also takes a while for the results of the STAAR test to actually be made available to schools and to families, which was a major concern and reason for this change. 

Now, under House Bill 4, what we see is nationally norm-referenced assessments and school districts have to implement through-year testing. Meaning that there’s going to be a beginning of the year, a middle of the year, and an end of the year assessment that students have to go through. And the reason that matters is because an important aspect of learning is growth. And the current way we test students and use those results for our accountability system doesn’t tell us how much the student has grown from the start of the school year till the end of the school year when they take the STAAR test. And that’s a massive data point that we’re missing in the system. And so the complications with how long it takes to get those results back and the fact that the test, as it currently is designed, doesn’t give us that growth measure, was a big motivation for these revisions. 

MORGAN SMITH: House Bill 4 would also use a whole new group of non-test-based metrics to determine school ratings — so, along with test scores, a school’s ratings would include access to full-day pre-K, higher grade level courses, teacher quality development, and career and technical education programs. 

MAX ROMBADO: So what we’re seeing now is an expansion of the accountability system that was almost entirely driven by STAAR assessments, now incorporating other aspects of the learning experience that are very highly correlated with better student outcomes and a better life in the long run. We can point to countless studies that show that having full-day pre-K experience improves your chances of success in the long run. We have studies that show when students are engaging in advanced coursework, they’re much more likely to not just complete high school but succeed beyond high school. When they have earlier access to career and technical education (CTE), they’re more likely to complete and meet their college and career and military readiness goals. And when they have access to high-quality teachers, we know that high-quality teachers are the most important in-school factor to student success. 

MORGAN SMITH: There’s another significant piece of HB 4, and it has to do with the private school voucher legislation — Senate Bill 2 —  that Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed into law. If HB 4 passed, it would put public schools on more of an equal playing field with private schools when it comes to testing. 

MAX ROMBADO: SB 2 requires the students who receive the voucher to take nationally norm-referenced test or the STAAR test. Before House Bill 4, school districts were only going to take the STAAR test. Now, House Bill 4 by allowing school districts to also use nationally norm-referenced assessments in their accountability system, will create important parity between public schools and private schools. There was a larger conversation about competition between private and public schools and the importance of creating competition for the sake of improving quality. Well, it’s important for the playing field to be even if you’re going to have competition, and testing parity was a really important step forward, and creating that level playing field too.

MORGAN SMITH: It’s hard to overstate what a big step HB 4 would be in improving how we measure the performance of our public schools in Texas — and in turn, better support student learning for the sake of learning instead of assessment. 

MAX ROMBADO: I think House Bill 4, if it passes, will create a sense of relief and excitement among schools, teachers, and students. And I think it’ll encourage behaviors that actually improve our quality of education and the outcomes for our kids. 

I think it would mean less stress. I think it would mean less pressure. I think it would feel more organic for students and teachers to assess growth and learning than it currently feels. I think it will encourage school districts to emphasize these other non-testing aspects of education. It’ll encourage school districts to expand their pre-K programs. It may encourage school districts to expand career and technical education. So I think overall it creates a sense of relief, excitement, and a sense of genuine, authentic quality evaluation.

MORGAN SMITH: But as with all legislation at this point of the session, HB 4’s fate is uncertain. And while HB 4 has received overwhelming support from House lawmakers, it’s unclear whether members of the Senate share their colleagues’ enthusiasm for the bill. 

MAX ROMBADO: So, based on what the Senate filed around accountability and assessment and what the House is putting forward through House Bill 4, there does seem to be a mismatch in tone or perspective about what needs to happen moving forward. The hope at the moment is that the amount of support that House Bill 4 has garnered the amount of appreciation that has been shown regarding these changes will encourage the Senate to consider moving in a direction that’s more aligned with House Bill 4 moving in a direction that’s about improving and strengthening the accountability system so that we’re not just more accurately assessing our schools and our students, but we’re also minimizing the potential cases in which litigation might be pursued.

MORGAN SMITH: That means – when it comes to assessment & accountability – the most effective action anyone can take right now, according to Max, is to contact their state senators and encourage them to support HB 4. 

MAX ROMBADO: For folks who may not know who their senator is, Raise Your Hand Texas has you covered. We have a page on our website called the “Who Represents Me” page. If you go and visit our website and click on the Who Represents Me page, you can put in your information, and we’ll provide you exactly who it is that represents you both on the House and the Senate side.

OUTRO: Thank you for listening to this episode of Intersect Ed. To stay informed on critical education issues this session, and throughout the interim, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across The Lawn Weekly Newsletter at https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/get-involved/. You can also sign up for text messages at the same place.

Today’s episode was written by me, Morgan Smith. Our sound engineer is Brian Diggs, and our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt.

Thank you for listening to Intersect Ed. If you want to learn more about how to support Texas public education or how to get involved, head over to RaiseYourHandTexas.org.