Laurence A. Toenjes and A. Gary Dworkin, Education Policy Analysis Archives
March 21, 2002
In August 2000, Boston College ed school professor Walter Haney sought to dispel what he called "The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education" in a paper for the Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA). Indeed, he said that the tremendous improvement by Texas sophomores on the state's spring exit test was a sham. According to Haney-who has served as an expert witness in a lawsuit claiming that Texas testing program is unfair and discriminates against minority students- the rise in pass rates on the 10th grade Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) from 52 percent to 72 percent between 1994 and 1998 was the result not of higher standards and stronger achievement but of special ed exemptions and weak students dropping out prior to taking the test. Those assertions made a bit of a stir, considering that the 2000 election was then just a couple of months away and candidate George W. Bush was making much of his state's education track record. In this new paper, the University of Houston's Laurence Toenjes and Gary Dworkin say that Haney got it all wrong. Delving into the details of his data and methodology, they show that none of the score improvements can be attributed to dropouts or testing exemptions. Rather, they show, via close examination of "progression ratios" (calculations of Grade 11 enrollment divided by Grade 6 enrollment) that enrollments-including those of minorities-actually rose during the years in question, thereby disproving Haney's assertion that TAAS drives struggling and/or minority students to quit school altogether. Though the analysis is a bit complicated, this debunking of Haney's anti-testing tract is worth a read at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n17/. Haney's paper can be found at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41/.
