Laredo school districts post TAKS test results

By Paul de la Peña-Franceschi

The Texas Education Agency recently released the test scores for third graders challenging the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) in reading as required by law. Both Laredo school districts have hundreds of students who are required to pass the test or face being retained the coming school year.
UISD Superintendent Oscar Rodriguez announced at a recent press conference that the majority of the district's third graders -- 93 percent -- passed the TAKS reading test after their final attempt. Ninety-two students did not pass the test. Those students who did not master the test were personally contacted by telephone to inform them and their families of their options for the new school year. While some of the students would be able to continue to the next grade, Rodriguez estimated that most would be retained.
While pleased with the results of the test, Rodriguez said that they still did not reflect the desired 100 percent passing rate. He commended teachers and administrators across the district for their resolve in teaching students the proper content areas in order to succeed. "We teach content, not the TAKS test. It is important to make this point because it is a Catch-22 -- on the one hand, parents are concerned for their children not advancing, on the other, the State wanting to see the proper passing ratios," said Rodriguez.
"There are some real problems with language that many of our students face in challenging the TAKS test," said Rodriguez. "It takes approximately five to seven years for students to become acclimated to a new language, so much of the difficulty is not with the content, but with a language barrier." While some campuses scored "0" in the field testing last August, those same campuses met the standards for success after the last round of testing this July in which a total of 2,262 third graders were tested. In a pool out of a total of 2,500 students, 2,113 passed the TAKS reading test and 238 did not take the test in UISD.
The UISD motto this year is "Believe to Achieve," and the district appears to be in a better position to realize the outcome of future testing after this year's battery of tests.
According to LISD's Office of Communications, 96.1 percent of the 1,946 third graders passed the test. Seventeen percent did not take the test; that number does not include the 3.9 percent who were exempt. A total of 386 students did not take the test. This amounts to a total of 20 percent of all LISD students who did not take the test. If these numbers were added to the totals for both districts, the passing rate for LISD and UISD would be much lower than reported and would not meet the state's guidelines of an 80 percent passing rate. After speaking with both school districts it was unclear what provisions were going to be made to address the large numbers of students who did not take the state-mandated tests.