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Texas' annual reading test adjusted difficulty yearly, masking improvement

A deep dive into the test’s framework reveals it was designed to fail about the same share of students every year, even if they’d made actual progress from previous years.

I recently did a peer-reviewed deep dive into the test design documentation to figure out why the reported results weren’t showing improvement. 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. I found an unexpected trend: The share of students who correctly answered each test question was extraordinarily steady across years.

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