Education software sold to schools is dogshit for the most part, and that is when using it as a native English speaker. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to try and use something made for non-English speakers.

I thought this was a joke before having to help my kiddo when they were doing remote schoolwork during covid.

That's the point. They want to keep non-native speakers in poverty and working entry-level labor jobs.

My partner is ESL (English second language). She sometimes repeats a word that I say to practice the pronunciation. Yesterday, it was "binoculars," and I explained the root of "bi," two, and "ocular," as in the eyes. That's not happening with a computer program that can't discern a human's degree of understanding.

Texas doing kids a disservice is what they do best.

I think it was just the testing being done by computer, as opposed to a teacher evaluation test. In other words, the teachers can't claim a student is good, even if they aren't.

The teaching was the same, but now the testing became impartial.

FTA: This year, the TEA said that at least 25% of the TELPAS writing and speaking assessments were re-routed to a human scorer to check the program’s work. That number oscillated between 17% and 23% in the previous six years, according to public records obtained by the Tribune.

Teachers tend to just pass students through. It makes the teachers look better if their students are doing well. The new testing involved is that it became impartial, so teachers evaluating can no longer claim words that the students butchered was correct.

It's possible for both things to be true. Human reviewers might be biased towards awarding higher scores and the computer could be dog shit at scoring. I have no idea how this can meaningfully be grading fluency. Fluency in a spoken language consists of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.

I have seen plenty of people who were very fluent who speak with an extremely noticeable accent who were none the less comprehensible. Software is extremely likely to perform poorly at recognizing speak by non-native speakers and fail individuals who are otherwise comprehensible. Because it wont even recognize the words its nearly entirely testing pronunciation and then denying such students access to electives that would allow them to further their education.

If I understand the article correctly, the system is doing some kind of AI speech recognition to score how people speak. It's not a natural environment for people to talk to a computer, and could easily be biased by accents. I doubt any automated scoring that isn't just multiple choice is accurate.