Polling Center: Leaving Tests Behind
Enlargephoto by: Jerod Foster
Bayless Elementary teacher Holly Guillmen identifies and explains the use of the contents of the Waterwise home water conservation kit provided to students by the High Plains Underground Water District in Lubbock, Texas, Oct. 17, 2012.
Amid the monumental advancements celebrated during last week’s Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library,George W. Bush’s little noticed reminder of “the tyranny of low expectations” highlighted a shift in attitudes toward accountability in public education.
Texans have largely abandoned one of the weapons championed by Bush in the fight against that tyranny — frequent, high-stakes testing — marking yet another way in which the Bush era in Texas seems a distant memory. That once-popular standardized testing has become anathema to much of the public — so much so that it has become a political weapon in the current gubernatorial campaign.
The breadth of current public opposition to K-12 testing in the public schools is a marked change from the mythic era of good feeling in Texas politics presided over by then-Gov. Bush, Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and Speaker of the House Pete Laney. Those good feelings included warm fuzzies for Bush’s education policies and certainly helped in getting him elected president. But attitudes captured in the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll suggest that the good feelings toward accountability through testing have gone the way of those friendly weekly breakfasts shared by the Big Three way back when.
In the 2013 session, in a rebuke to Bush’s reforms, the Legislature voted overwhelmingly to reduce the number of standardized tests required to graduate from Texas public high schools to five from 15. In the June 2013 UT/TT Poll, as the session came to a close, we asked Texas voters whether they approved of this change. Overall, 60 percent of Texans expressed Polling Center: Leaving Tests Behind | The Texas Tribune: