Dear Editor,
Regarding the July 27 article “Math identified as ‘Achilles’ heel’ in AISD STAAR results,” Jordan Thiem calls “Ban the Blank” a bright spot. It is not. It is scoreboard manipulation.
When students leave a writing prompt blank, the honest score is zero. The district’s solution is to tell them to rewrite the prompt for two points, because any points beat zero and the averages look better. That is not teaching writing. It is training kids to put anything on the page just to inflate the numbers. Real writing takes work and thought, which are being pushed aside to make data look favorable.
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