08/29/2003: "<p>Leave No Test Behind"

08/29/2003

Leave No Test Behind — A new essay by Edward Humes. Forget the official slogan: Our public schools’ top priority these days is to leave no test behind.

Testing has become a national obsession. A bloated array of grade-level assessments and exit exams has hijacked our classrooms, the obsession fed by a White House fixated on politically popular yet academically pointless standardized tests and school-ranking schemes. Along the way, test-taking skills have been confused with real learning, and finger pointing mistaken for actual reform. Our kids and our schools -- from the lowest performing to the highest-achieving -- are none the better for it.

The latest casualty of the testing addiction is California, which has decided to postpone its highly touted high school exit exam for two more years. Too many kids, it seems, can’t figure out how much money they’d need in order to buy a $24 pair of jeans on sale at a 25% discount – a sample question from the exit exam, reflecting math skills supposedly mastered not in twelfth grade but in fifth.

In any sane educational landscape, this abject admission of failure in such a bellwether state as California would serve as a warning sign that the national campaign for something called “school accountability” is miserably off track. But the message is not getting through, even as other states also have been forced to postpone, cancel or dumb down exit exams due to massive flunking.

This has happened most recently in New York, Florida and, most spectacularly, Texas, where George Bush’s model for education reform, the “Texas Miracle” that helped get him elected, is unraveling amid one scandalous revelation after another. The latest embarrassment is news that the Houston school district, formerly run by Rod Paige, the president’s education secretary, cooked its books by claiming a drop-out rate of under two percent when the actual rate appears to be a terrifying 40 percent. Some miracle.

The blinders are on just as firmly in California, where the two-year postponement of a long-dreaded day of reckoning for high school seniors is being sold as a minor swerve on the road to accountability. But make no mistake: This is the academic equivalent of derailing a runaway train at the last possible moment. The alternative – holding back the 38 percent of the graduating class of 2004, (a whopping 172,000 California girls and boys) who can't do elementary school math or write a coherent paragraph for the exit exam - would have been a political and economic train wreck for state leaders already saddled with a $38-billion-dollar budget hole and public esteem ratings somewhere around the Voldemort level. Ordering California schools to continue giving the exit exam without counting the abysmal results, while the state hastily moves to make future tests easier, provides a quick and expedient solution – to politicians' problems, that is, though not our children's or our schools'.

So how did we end up painted into this educational corner?

The intentions were good, at least at the outset, built on the conventional wisdom Americans have always accepted: that our schools used to be better and need to be held to account for the decline. (Every generation seems to believe, often without benefit of actual evidence, that a more desirable golden age of public education has just passed. Will Rogers long ago skewered this uniquely American perception with a famous quip: “The schools ain’t what they used to be and never was.”)

For the past decade, the catchword for correcting the failings of public schools has been accountability. State after state rushed to put into place huge systems for annually testing elementary, middle and high school kids in order to identify which schools were failing to meet standards. The tests track the performance of individual students, but their real purpose has always been to survey the achievement of ethnic groups, economic classes, entire schools, whole school districts, and even entire states.

Once the new tests were in place, all sorts of accountability rankings could be compiled, including a list of the best and poorest scoring schools in each state – rankings that bureaucrats and parents and prospective homebuyers could then pore over. Pretty soon, everything from principals’ jobs to teacher bonuses to district budgets, reputations and even local real estate values were pegged to the test scores. And the ante was upped further with Bush’s first big legislative achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, which seeks to brand schools as failures based on test performance, requiring them to pull up their scores or face mandatory student transfers or closure (not to mention providing impetus for two of the president’s pet causes, public school privatization and school vouchers).

Even the once respected Blue Ribbon Schools program has been morphed by the testing obsession: For 20 years, the prestigious awards relied upon comprehensive reviews and school visits by teams of educators, in recognition of the fact that there are ways to succeed and innovate not necessarily reflected in multiple choice tests. But now we have the No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbons Schools program. Detailed reviews and actual visits to campuses are history. Only test scores count.

“It’s really a shame, the direction they’re taking,” says Bart Teal, head of the nonprofit National Blue Ribbon Institute. “Test scores do not tell the whole story, not even close. And the tests are now being written to please politicians, not to serve any useful educational purpose.”

Holding schools accountable is a laudable goal, but the high-stakes testing approach has been plagued with problems from the start: Although these standardized tests measure a great many things, what’s actually going on in your children’s classrooms is not one of them.

One reason is the nature of the tests -- off-the-shelf commercial products that may not match up with individual state curriculums. So high schoolers can end up being tested on math they learned (and possibly forgot) years earlier. Ninth graders are tested on science they won’t study for another year. Even when the tests do match up, the stakes are just too high simply to give them and be done with it. Coursework grinds to a halt for days – or weeks – of drilling, so great is the terror that falling scores could lead to the dreaded “failing school” label. Elementary schools are particularly vulnerable, because their tests tend to stress math and reading over all else, which means other subjects are crowded out – science, art and history can all but disappear.

Another flaw: These tests and accountability schemes emphasize failure, not success, and so poorly performing schools that improve marginally are celebrated, while high-achieving schools that hold their ground seldom get recognition. Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, has been top-ranked in the state’s for years, but its students toil in virtual anonymity, with little to gain and everything to lose with these accountability tests: The school gets nothing for holding onto its stellar ranking (indeed, it gets less money per student than most comparable schools with lower test scores). Yet, absurdly, if scores were to falter a bit, Whitney could be branded failing under federal law, even if it still academically outshines all others in the state.

Perhaps the greatest problem, though, is the snail’s pace with which these multiple choice monsters are graded. After days of grueling bubbling-in of test sheets, they are boxed up, shipped to the testing company – and the scores don’t return until months later. In California, like many other states, the results of the annual grade level assessments aren’t in until the following school year. As a means of building on students’ strengths and identifying weaknesses, of truly holding a school, a teacher and a student accountable for what is or is not happening in the classroom right then and there, the tests are worthless. They were designed to be worthless – to allow politicians to rail about failure without actually doing anything about it. The children who take the tests have already moved onto to the next grade, the next teacher, the next curriculum, by the time the scores become available. Sorry, kid, you don’t understand fractions? Too late! Maybe next year!

The futility of the annual grade level tests is no more apparent than in the advent of the high school exit exams. Some 27 states so far use them as a kind of trip wire, forcing kids to show some modicum of knowledge before being handed a diploma. But if there were any value in the annual accountability exams, which begin in the early grades and continue through the junior year of high school, we wouldn’t need exit exams – we would already know what each student has learned. Clearly that is not the case.

A test, after all, is only as good as what is done with the results. If policymakers genuinely were interested in identifying, nurturing and encouraging success, teachers would not be boxing up the accountability test forms and waiting for months for results. They’d be walking to computers in the back of the classroom immediately after the testing ended. They’d feed the test sheets into inexpensive scanners, so that real-time displays of each student’s performance could be generated, analyzed, used by the teachers, and sent home with a set of worksheets. Then teachers and parents would know their kids’ strong and weak points and could help them as needed – right then and there. Nothing in this would preclude also emailing the results onto the state for the usual bureaucratic nip and tuck, but this, at least, would make the tests constructive in the classroom – there would be some genuine purpose and real accountability.

The tests would stop being political props, and become educational tools. That would be a first. Then, just maybe, we could begin to leave the testing obsession behind, instead of our children.