Do Good Scores Mean Learning?

Many Texas teachers say the state's higher school test scores touted by Governor George W. Bush in the presidential campaign are not a "Texas Miracle."

The teachers tell Correspondent Lesley Stahl that scores are rising because kids have become good test takers, not good students. Stahl's report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, Sept. 10, (7 p.m.-8 p.m., ET/PT) on CBS.

The teachers, who work in the Houston area, tell Stahl their students don't have the comprehensive skills they should because teachers are pressured to emphasize preparing for the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test rather than traditional subjects like social studies and science.

"We do a wonderful product as far as the TAAS test and the format is concerned," says fourth-grade teacher Sherrie Matula. "But branch off into anything else or tell them they must write in a complete sentence the answer to a question....They look at you like you're a blank."

Nanette Bishop, who teaches sixth grade, is frustrated by the testing emphasis. "I've gone to school to be a professional teacher.…I know what I need to do for my kids, and yet, people keep taking that away from me," she tells Stahl.

Most Texas teachers seem to agree with Hansen and Matula.

In a recent survey, only 27 percent of them thought that rising TAAS scores reflected real gains in learning. But Houston's school superintendent, Rod Paige, disagrees. "I don't think you can do well on the test by simply knowing how to take the test. You must know the content. The gains are real,…the product of very hard work," says Paige.

Real or artificial, the gains Bush has been quoting are spectacular. Eighty percent of the Texas students who took TAAS this year passed, up from just 50 percent in 1994. Minorities have especially improved; more than twice as many black students passed TAAS in 2000 than in 1994.

But it all comes at a price, says a Rice University education professor, Linda McNeil, who says one high school in Houston doesn't have a library, but spent nearly $20,000 on TAAS preparatory materials. "We have kids, including at the high school level, who can pass the test," McNeil tells Stahl. "But then their teachers call and say, 'Our kids can't read...an English lesson…[or] their science books.'"