School vouchers are coming to Texas.

I work in public education, and am distraught about the financial implications for the state’s public schools, which are underfunded and serve more than 90 percent of Texas students, or 300,000 young people in Bexar County alone. 

As painful as it is for me, given the fact that I do not support vouchers, I am forcing myself to ask: What opportunities might vouchers create?

One debate among lawmakers as they design a funding mechanism to send money to private schools (or parents to pay for private schools or homeschooling) concerns state standardized testing—a massive driver of public schools’ operations. Unsurprisingly, private schools eager to accept state dollars are less enthusiastic about subjecting themselves to this relentless testing regime.

In Texas, public school students at multiple grade levels take computer-based exams, largely multiple choice, to determine if they have mastered key content. Based on the results, schools are given grades from A-F. At the high school level, the state also factors in a definition of college, career and military readiness. 

Schools are graded not exclusively on student scores, but on complex formulas that attempt to evaluate how different groups of students perform, and also to measure student growth from one year to the next. 

We call this system: “accountability.”

In contrast, private schools report almost nothing, allowing them to make broad claims about student success without substantiating them. Years ago, as an education reporter covering San Antonio’s one-time voucher experiment, I investigated a claim about “100 percent college enrollment” and found no supporting evidence.

To quote Tim Daly, CEO of EdNavigator: “Let’s start with a basic question: When we send our little ones to school, what are our hopes for them? I doubt your answer is ‘kick-ass test scores!’”

What if vouchers spurred Texas to rethink what we measure, report, and share with the public to gauge whether schools are truly serving students?

I serve as the executive director of CAST Schools, which began as a network of career-themed high schools, and now includes 5 high schools, 1 Pre-K-12 Academy, and 1 middle school. We partner with East Central, Northside, San Antonio and Southwest ISDs to implement an innovative school model that prepares students for both college AND careers.

In a rapidly changing world, with the advent of machine learning, schools have an opportunity to nurture the uniquely human qualities of adaptability, creativity and innovation. No employer ever assesses a person’s quality of work on a single test.

Sadly, we’ve trained young people to read short selections rather than consume entire books, to write formulaic essay responses to be fed into a computer grading system, and to produce answers in a way that is totally decontextualized from real-world problems. Meanwhile, industry leaders tell us they want employees who can work in teams, communicate effectively, manage their time, and lead.

It might be time in Texas for us to question our current thinking that the measure of a great school comes from a letter grade derived from an annual standardized test, given that education is one of the most complex things we do as a society. Other states, such as Indiana, are way ahead of us on this conversation.

Standardized tests, by the way, aren’t inherently evil. Once upon a time, they were diagnostic tools to gauge how students fared, compare instructional approaches, and signal when intervention might be needed. Today, however, they’re tied to grade promotion, teacher pay, high school graduation, and more. While it’s vital to know when students fail to demonstrate basic mastery, we’ve inadvertently incentivized prioritizing tests above all else. And also, they are a huge time waster, occupying time that could be spent in much more worthwhile and engaging student experiences.

So what should we focus on instead?

Educational Attainment Beyond High School: Young people increasingly need certifications or degrees for economic success. (At CAST, we help students earn these credentials while still in high school to reduce the risk of them falling through the cracks.) 

Employment Outcomes: At CAST, we’re attempting to track our students’ jobs and wages several years post-graduation, with the goal of achieving economic mobility. Texas has the data to track this across all schools, which could provide meaningful insights into how education influences young people’s long-term success.

Civic Engagement: Schools should prepare young people to engage productively with society—through voting, community service, and other forms of democratic participation. While harder to measure, fostering civic engagement should be one of the purposes of schooling.

Durable Skills: There is an emerging, business-led movement to ensure that students gain important life skills such as communication, collaboration and leadership. Given the unintended consequences we’ve seen with standardized tests, we need to be careful about how we measure these, but they are highly predictive of success in the workplace and beyond.

It’s hard to resist the allure of immediate results, and letter grades provide a satisfyingly simple solution for ranking schools. But if the true purpose of education is to enable economic mobility and civic participation, that is what we should measure, while also examining how different student groups fare in achieving these goals. For instance, it’s more exceptional when a child from a low-income background achieves economic prosperity than when an affluent child does so.

What if vouchers prompted us as Texans to have a serious conversation about how we measure success—and maybe come up with something better for all students and schools?