Categories: Education

What Does the California Star Test Do for Your Child?

“What Does the Star Test Do for My Child?” a teacher had recently been asked during a parent conference. She thought about the answer carefully before responding. Given the emphasis placed upon the test each year, as well as the interpretation of the results and how it affects the view of a given school being labeled “high performing”, the answer required much thought.

Over the life of the Star Test, variances in performance have been caused by many factors, some frivolous, such as teaching students to identify two “foolish answers” amongst the four choices given in order to skew the odds to their favor. Of course, this method has absolutely nothing to do with any knowledge the student may have actually learned and is, perhaps, more a reflection of the desperate need for some level identification of student achievement, even at the expense of accuracy.

Likewise, multiple-choice questions in general are poor indicators of a child’s understanding. The adopted publishers’ for each school district’s math series usually offers assessments in both multiple choice as well as fill-in-the-blank formats. Administering both versions a week apart, the teacher, not surprisingly, found the students almost universally do poorly on the latter, an indication that too much emphasis is placed on the multiple-choice format altogether.

Since school funding is tied in to Star Test performance, with rigid annual growth expectations under No Child Left Behind giving the government the right to take over a school that fails three years in a row, it is hardly surprising to see that actual learning and actual knowledge are nearly separate entities.

And since Star Test results affect school performance, which in turn affects neighborhood real estate values, there seems little incentive to end the addiction to the test in favor of more tangible assessments. Parents expect that performance on the Star Test to be an indicator of their child’s ability in subject matter competency and while this is certainly true, some of the time; it is hardly the universal truth that has been presented as a “sure-thing”.

Another factor, that must be noted, is that the Star Test was intended to be one of many measures of a child’s progress. That said, a child who demonstrates excellent written work and fails the Star Test, still runs the risk of retention, and if not retention, certainly endless bureaucratic meetings to determine why their test performance was not better, usually a reflection of the teacher’s ability to “differentiate” instruction.

And to keep teachers in line with this “Star” way of thinking, the proposals to tie teacher performance ratings and pay increases directly to their class Star Test results will simply add more pressure for teachers to further teach to the test – have students become proficient ‘gamblers’ in the taking of the test, rather than strictly focusing on the content and their understanding of it.

Millions of dollars are tied into the Star Test, from the massive textbook adoptions that now require publishers to standardize the content to what is being tested, to the salary increases of District Superintendents based on the overall increases in the performance of the district as measured by the Star Test. And yet all site principals find anxiety in the test results each year with the higher performing schools fearing a scoring decline causing a failure to reach their Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) goals and starting the State’s three-year stopwatch for improvement or take-over, and the lower performing schools fearing an immediate State takeover. It all adversely affects job security, state of mind and the overall mental health of educators. Already stressed and over-burdened by the mess of politically driven restrictions that plague educators, placing the brunt of assessment performance on teacher quality remains the political soap box agenda.

And, as with most things in education, the brunt of the adaptations required fall to the teacher who must further differentiate their skill set, despite ridiculous restraints, to ensure that they perform sufficiently well.

Learning is a multi-modal experience. What has, in the past, made a teacher successful, has fallen by the wayside in today’s homogenization of teachers. Personality and passion are stifled in favor of standards and benchmarks that are part of the Star Test assessment profile. Teachers have had to resort to ‘underground’ teaching practices, away from the observation of their administrators, where they still inject the passion and creativity that makes teaching the noble profession. These creative approaches can hardly be brought out in the open due to the current atmosphere under No Child Left Behind. And that is a shame. Those teachers unable to ‘bend’ have left the profession. The turnover rate among teachers is high.

As long as parents take a back seat to the politics of education – for it is politics running education – then the Star Test and other ‘absolutes’ will continue to prevail despite their inadequacies. As long as parents allow the dilution of education under the title of ‘mainstreaming’, things will remain. And while edu-politicians will cite data about performance increases in this new state of learning, the truth remains apparent by the end result; the number of high school graduates failing to exit high school remains dismal, colleges reporting an alarming number of students applying still lacking the basic skills, and employers throughout the State demanding better training for new workers in all areas including ethical standards.

When funding is higher for a prison inmate in California than for a student, there should be no doubt that priorities are askew. It is a dangerous trend that will not change anytime soon.
The teacher who had been asked, “What Does the Star Test Do for My Child?” smiled slightly before responding.
“Everything and nothing at all,” she said. “You choose!”