Too Many Challenges Affecting Texas Teachers

There are so many challenges facing teachers today, including classroom management, the breakdown of families, rising state and federal standards, increasing expectations for schools and their staff, and the ever- changing job market. None of the challenges I can think of solely affect Texas teachers. When talking to my fellow educators both here in Texas and in other regions of the country, many of them seem to agree that government- mandated standardized testing and government imposed academic standards are the stem of our most major challenges. It is not, in fact, the existence of state standards and testing, it is how they are administered and how the results are used. In general, it has been my experience, that many teachers acknowledge

The current climate of standardized testing creates unreasonable stress for both students and all school staff. While there is a welcome shift to measuring individual and group student progress, as opposed to solely higher overall test scores, there still remains a great deal of pressure due to continued significant consequences for results that are viewed as inadequate. A colleague of mine once shared her view of how state testing could be improved. I have given her perspective a great deal of consideration since our conversation. She proposed that annual state testing, with the exception of those tests that may be given to seniors in high school, should be administered a month or so after the beginning of school. This would allow schools to spend the first month reviewing the content of the previous year, which is done in many cases anyway. Students would then take the standardized test. Grading of these tests would need to be performed more quickly and the data supplied to schools as rapidly as possible. Test results would allow teachers to adjust both individual instruction and whole class instruction based on the strengths and weaknesses discovered by the start of the year testing. All of the students, in a given teacher’s current classes, would be tested and the teacher would have valuable, usable, actionable data that would inform instruction for the entirety of the