Texas children’s performance on an annual reading test was basically flat from 2012 to 2021, even as the state spent billions of additional dollars on K-12 education.
I recently did a peer-reviewed deep dive into the test design documentation to figure out why the reported results weren’t showing improvement. I found the flat scores were at least in part by design. According to policies buried in the documentation, the agency administering the tests adjusted their difficulty level every year. As a result, roughly the same share of students failed the test over that decade regardless of how objectively better they performed relative to previous years.
