She basically just writes about her feelings on anything of her choice and often is encouraged to just make things up as long as it is flowery and emotional. This is apparently what they look for on TAKS.”
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“It is no wonder that college professors think our Texas high-school graduates are not ready for college. The brutal fact is that they are not ready.”
“An Expose of the TAKS Tests” (excerpts)
[TAKS: Texas Assessment of Knowledge/Skills
ELA: English/Language Arts]
by Donna Garner
Education Policy Commentator EducationNews.org
10 April 2008
….Please note that each scorer spends approximately three minutes to read, decipher, and score each student’s handwritten essay. (Having been an English teacher for over 33 years, I have often spent over three minutes just trying to decipher a student’s poor handwriting.) Imagine spending three minutes to score an entire two-page essay that counts for 22 % of the total score and determines whether a student is allowed to take dual-credit courses. A student cannot take dual-credit classes unless he/she makes a “3” or a “4” on the ELA TAKS essay…
…The scorers spend only about three minutes scanning the essays and do not grade students down for incorrect grammar, punctuation, spelling, and capitalization unless the errors interfere significantly with the communication of ideas. Students are allowed to use an English language dictionary and a thesaurus throughout the composition portion of the test, and they can spend as much time on the essay as they so choose…

On April 5, 2008, a worried parent sent me the following e-mail:
Hi Donna,
“Our 3rd graders are taking a district wide 4th grade writing benchmark this week…Because (name of her daughter) was sick, I got to see her initial work because the teacher sent it home to be redone. What do you know… the comments on it were ‘not catchy enough’; ‘how did this make you feel’; and ‘needs more adjectives.’ The only thought organization was a ‘word web’ (looks like a wheel w/different paragraphs relating to the main topic on the spokes…At this point (3rd grade) the kids should be learning how to do research for papers, how to organize their thoughts for the papers, and how to draft the papers. My kids know none of this. But they sure are learning about flowery, descriptive writing (with little organization behind the writing)! I will be tutoring them over the summer on how to put together and write both research and persuasive essays in order to get them ready for private school in the fall since this is what they are learning in the private schools.”
…POINT #7: A CONVERSATION WITH A SCORER
Several years ago I had a unique dialogue with an experienced ELA TAKS scorer (grader). In the course of our e-mails, she revealed that she had never been a teacher. In fact, she said that most of the scorers were not teachers because the ELA TAKS is given in February. She stated that 200+ scorers were usually required per grade level (4th, 7th, 9th, 10th, and exit level). She said that she had a degree in English, but her e-mails to me were filled with grammatical/usage errors. She told me that she worked for Pearson Educational Measurement which had a contract with the TEA to score both the multiple-choice and short-answer portions and that the graders were hired and trained based upon TEA requirements.
POINT #8: WRITTEN COMPOSITION ABUSES
More important than any other problem with the ELA TAKS is that the test drives classroom instruction. “Whatever is tested is what teachers are going to teach.” Because the TAKS essay is overly weighted (i.e., “2 Rule” and conjunctive policy), students and their teachers do not see a real reason to spend much time on correct grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Therefore, in their compositions and in their speaking, students are not being expected to follow standard English. Playing the “TAKS game” has become more important than paying attention to basic writing skills.
Texas public-school English teachers used to teach their students the four different modes of paragraph writing—expository, persuasive, descriptive, and narrative. Students could easily understand these terms: expository exposes facts; persuasive persuades; descriptive describes; and narrative tells a story.Students learned how to weave smoothly all four modes of writing into their compositions as needed.
Along came the ELA TAKS, and personal victimization narratives became the norm. Instead of students’ writing solid fact-based persuasive essays with good argumentative content and a substantial amount of expository information based upon actual knowledge, students are now taught to emote.
“Voice” has become the big factor toward a student’s receiving a “4.” Voice is a literary term that basically means “personality.” Students have learned the way to “play the TAKS game” is to reveal something personal about themselves, give their opinions and feelings, and tap into an emotion usually through explaining how they have been a victim of society. Students’ compositions have to demonstrate uniqueness in order to catch the grader’s eye, and many students have learned to fabricate persona. This informal style welcomes dialect, poor grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. I have received e-mails from experienced teachers who have told me they had minority students with serious syntax problems who made passing grades on the TAKS essay yet had other students with good writing skills who failed.
This is an example of an essay prompt from the TAKS Released Version, Exit Level, July 2006: “Write an essay explaining the value of the small, everyday events of life.” The more students can spin their tales of adversity, the higher their TAKS essay grades will be—even if students have to make up examples. In essence, Texas schools are teaching students to lie.
Then when Texas students get to college and have to write their first formal expository or persuasive compositions, they simply saturate them with “voice,” personal opinions, experiences, and emotions—no real fact-based substance or deep content. It is no wonder that college professors think our Texas high-school graduates are not ready for college. The brutal fact is that they are not ready.
One concerned parent of a college student told me recently that she is very worried about the dumbing down of her daughter’s college course. The daughter is a student in a major Texas university. So many of the students in her class have not written formal research papers that the professor has been forced to lower his expectations. Now the students present their research in a poster format. The student puts together his/her poster, displays it, and answers questions orally.
Just a few weeks ago, an assistant superintendent in a Central Texas school district sent me the following e-mail:
Donna,
“Our students had to score a ‘3’ on the ELA Exit Level essays in order to be eligible for English 1301/dual credit at MCC (Community College). Last Monday the professor came to school to sit down with each individual and explain why he had scored their papers so low. They were covered in red marks, and our students were crushed by the grades. He wanted no flowery and fluffy language but wanted substantive persuasive and expository content!”
These students take the ELA TAKS in February, school ends in May, and in August they have to be ready to write to a new style under much more rigorous expectations. This school year, the teachers will have less time to prepare these dual-credit students because the TAKS ELA has been moved to March…
On October 23, 2007, the Houston Chronicle ran a story telling about a writing program between the University of Texas and college-bound seniors at Houston Jack Yates High School. Jim Warren, a University of Texas postdoctoral fellow, is coordinating the program. “Jim Warren…noted even accomplished writers can be in for an unpleasant surprise when they hit a mandatory freshman writing course at UT. ‘We were getting a lot of students who were under-prepared to read and write as we asked them to do…Warren said most high school students have little experience with analytical writing because they’re coached to master narrative skills needed to score well on TAKS tests. But narrative sentences…won’t cut the mustard in college rhetoric courses.’”
This is a comment posted by “A Parent” on EdNews.org on April 3, 2008:
Comment #15 (Posted by A Parent) Rating:
“…My daughter is a public school student, and we plan to pull her out of school at the end of this year. We will enroll her in a highly respected and rigorous private school. While her English class is very “fun” and she likes her teacher, we feel she is learning almost nothing about writing and the class reads very little. Nearly all of the writing she does is something called an “OP”. She basically just writes about her feelings on anything of her choice and often is encouraged to just make things up as long as it is flowery and emotional. This is apparently what they look for on TAKS. We’re not experts, but this doesn’t seem to teach her how to think logically (but then again she is a teenager). We have not seen a single essay that is persuasive or expository, and we are worried that she will not learn how to write papers correctly for college someday. We have not seen any instruction that teaches her to organize her thoughts or support a thesis coherently. I wish I could say that this is an off year, but most of her English classes have been like this. When we see that so many college students need remediation in English, reading and math it is a little scary…”
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