Category: Testing History

PART 2: TAAS to STAAR – Texas Education Agency Admits ‘Below Grade Level’ Performance Achieves Its Constitutional Burden

By George Scott

Project Director, Academic Equity Advocates

You will need to access the link immediately below this sentence to access the pdf of Part 2 of this series. In Part 2, you will begin to see and sense the disastrous impact that policy and practice has on disadvantaged students as recently as the most recent STAAR administration in 2022-23.

PART 2: TAAS to STAAR and Texas’ Systemic Academic Deception

The practice during the 10-part presentation of this report will be to provide additional links to supporting documents. In this case, the necessary documentation is provided in the column.

The Most Brutal Column You’ve Ever Read Announces Major Monograph on Academic Corruption of Texas Testing & Accountability

By George Scott, Project Director

Academic Equity Advocates

Points 1 through 1,000. Sincerely. Unequivocally. Unapologetically. Never not true. Don’t even try to twist this against me. This is my last rodeo. I’ll leave no Texas ‘public official public policy-related or corporately enabling bastard(s)’ – whatever that is – behind.

If anyone reads this history of the academic fraud treatise of Texas public education accountability since the advent of the TAAS testing system through STAAR as an attack or “blame on classroom teachers and campus-based educators” for the horrific, unconscionable academic fraud of the past 30 years of Texas public education testing and accountability, they are intellectually dishonest and horrifically wrong. This will include the impending dissection of student academic performance in Katy I.S.D.

The blame for what I describe can be assigned 100% to a deficient political structure in Texas from Gov. George W. Bush to Rick Perry to Gov. Greg Abbott and their morbidly, pervasive, systemic, control of the rabidly complicit Texas Education Agency which metaphorically could have sold its soul for $2 but did so for cumulative billions of dollars and influence.

Students – particularly at-risk, disadvantaged minority students will never be replaced as the number one victim. Too many millions of their lives have been academically eviscerated by the academically dishonest shenanigans of the Texas Republican Party leadership and its willing co-conspirators at the Texas Education Agency for some 30 years.

Classroom teachers. Campus-based professionals. They are the close-second tier of tragic victims that have progressively eviscerated any concept of academic integrity from TAAS to TAKS to STAAR based testing and accountability systems.

This is a gross political failure of ignorant or cowardly politicians who have never known enough to know enough about what they don’t know, and they have willing surrendered to their self-imposed ignorance with some surrendering to their strategical malfeasant, intellectual dishonesty.

In the private sector, the last 30 or so years of Texas testing and public education accountability would be categorized as systemic consumer fraud subject to potential and legal massive financial recovery. God bless government immunity or gutless, ignorant civil rights attorneys who surrendered without fighting, right?

HOW ABOUT THAT FOR A 7 PARAGRAPH LEAD in my last effort to represent the interests of economically-disadvantaged, at-risk minority children that the TEA and its political and corporate ‘apologizers and justifiers and financial benefactors’ have imposed for too damned long.

Over the past 30+ years, the TEA has published literally hundreds of millions of pages and more hundreds of millions more numbers about their compromised assertions of its public education testing and accountability system – much of which is embedded with institutional racism against minority children. Sadly, true.

The AEC monograph will be:

  • 77 pages.
  • Have a few thousand of actually important numbers and words.
  • Tell the truth.
  • The whole truth.
  • Nothing but the truth.
  • Provide context to the TEA’s and the political structure’s motivation for not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

To be reader friendly starting next Sunday, we’ll break down those 77 pages into discreet chapters so you won’t have to swallow the whole story in one setting.

The reality is this:

  • If you truly want to understand the academic corruption that has infested three decades of student testing and accountability:
    • You need to read it all.
    • Then, you need to follow Academic Equity Advocates.
    • Then, you need to help spread the word about this website to your friends throughout Texas.

That series starts next Sunday. It will be divided into separate chapters to make the reading easier parts 7 days. You will have access to the full document without breaks.

If you really want to understand; you will read it all.

I can make it easier. But I cannot read it and all else on this website for you.

If you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at ghscott2050@aol.com

George H. Scott