Losing FairTest would be a major blow to efforts to resist the testing steamroller that continues to flatten education in the interests of public (as opposed to schooling that serves corporate interests).
The New York Times: Watchdog of test industry faces economic extinction
February 22, 2006
On Education
Watchdog of Test Industry Faces Economic Extinction
By MICHAEL WINERIP
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For more than 20 years, FairTest, a small nonprofit group headquartered on the second floor of an old house here, has been the No. 1 critic of America’s big testing companies and their standardized tests.
In 1987, when FairTest began publishing its list of colleges that did not require applicants to submit SAT’s, there were 51; today there are 730, including Holy Cross, Bowdoin, Bates, Mount Holyoke and Muhlenberg.
“The FairTest list provides an enormously valuable service for students looking at colleges who have proved themselves to everyone but the test agencies,” said William Hiss, a Bates vice president.
A generation of education journalists, like Thomas Toch, who reported for Education Week and U.S. News & World Report, were schooled on the complexities and limitations of standardized testing by FairTest.
“They’ve helped me a lot,” said Mr. Toch, who is now a director of Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington policy research group.
On a slow day, like last Friday, Robert Schaeffer of FairTest handled calls from The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Lakeland Ledger, Associated Press and Hartford Courant and Bloomberg News.
On busy days, like July 13, 2004, reporters call by the dozens. That was the day FairTest helped reveal that scoring mistakes by the Educational Testing Service on its teacher licensing test had caused 4,100 men and women in 18 states to fail when they had actually passed the exam.
A few years ago, California officials were considering ending their support of the National Merit Scholarship program because it relied exclusively on a single score on the College Board’s PSAT test to pick semifinalists.
“We contacted the College Board about validity and fairness studies of the PSAT, but they didn’t give us information that addressed our concerns,” said Michael Brown, chairman of a state committee that makes recommendations on admissions policy for California’s public colleges. “So I asked FairTest, which got back with significant information on the limited reliability of a single PSAT score.”
Last year, the University of California system ended its financial support of the National Merit program.
But for all FairTest’s impact, its days may be numbered. Never before has standardized testing so dominated American public education, thanks to the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind Law. Every child from grade 3 to high school must now take state tests. And the Bush administration is considering extending those tests to colleges.
“With N.C.L.B., a lot of people feel the debate is over,” said Monty Neill, director of FairTest, officially the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. “The attitude seems to be, ‘Testing is so pervasive, what’s the point?’ ” Support from foundations has virtually dried up and individual donations have not made up the difference. “Our board has seriously discussed whether to fold the operation,” Mr. Neill said.
Mr. Toch, Mr. Hiss and Mr. Brown all said this would be a major loss.
“There is no watchdog over the testing industry except FairTest,” Mr. Brown said.
Christopher Hooker-Haring, dean of admissions at Muhlenberg College, called FairTest “an important voice that pushes back against the test mania in the U.S.”
(This reporter and several others at The New York Times have used FairTest as a source through the years. And last fall, after more than a dozen major publications had reviewed this reporter’s children’s novel, FairTest also reviewed it, in a newsletter, along with several other children’s books with testing themes.) Four companies — Pearson, McGraw Hill, Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin — along with the nonprofit Educational Testing Service, dominate the nation’s $2.3 billion testing industry. They will shed no tears if FairTest disappears.
Kurt Landgraf, the president of the testing service, which administers the SAT, wrote in an e-mail message: “Perhaps if they had been more attuned to the public’s support for using tests to help teachers teach and students learn, then they might have had wider support.”
The companies criticize FairTest for dwelling on testing mistakes, which they say are minor compared with all the successfully administered exams. Privately, they call it NoTest, complaining that the group never met a test it liked.
But Mr. Schaeffer said it was not so much the tests that FairTest opposed, as the overreliance on them to make decisions about which students get promoted and graduate, which schools are failing under federal law and who gets a teacher’s license. The test companies’ own research indicates that the margin of error is too great to use the tests this way, he said.
FairTest has always been a David versus the testing industry. At its high point in the mid-1990’s, FairTest had seven staff members and a budget of half a million dollars. Today it is down to one full-time worker, Mr. Neill; one half-time employee, Mr. Schaeffer; two phone lines; a one-room office; and a $168,000 budget.
That has not quieted them. Mr. Schaeffer pointed out after examining Educational Testing Service’s most recent public disclosure forms that at least 21 E.T.S. executives make salaries larger than FairTest’s entire budget, starting with Mr. Landgraf, who earned $1.07 million in 2004, and three vice presidents, who each earned over half a million.
“Those are outrageous salaries for a nonprofit,” Mr. Schaeffer said.
Mr. Landgraf countered, “The salaries we pay are benchmarked against other organizations in the nonprofit sector and reflect our commitment to hiring the best and brightest.”
FairTest has a knack for catching the testing companies at their worst, sometimes by using the companies’ own research.
In a recent newsletter, FairTest printed an analysis of SAT results, using, and crediting, College Board research showing the direct correlation between family income and SAT scores. For every extra $10,000 a family earns, children’s combined math and verbal scores go up 12 to 31 points. So children whose parents earn $50,000 score better on average (a combined 996 SAT) than students from families who earn $40,000 (967) but worse than students from families who earn $60,000 (1014).
For politicians and testing executives bragging about how No Child’s testing emphasis is closing the achievement gap, these are not promising numbers.
In 2004, the College Board demanded that its data breaking down SAT scores by income, race and sex be removed from the FairTest Web site, claiming that the posting was a copyright infringement. But after FairTest showed the letter to reporters, the College Board backed down, calling it a mistake by a junior staff member.
Chiara Coletti, a spokeswoman for the College Board, which develops the PSAT, said the group worked hard to address California’s concerns about that test, and stood by it. She was more generous about FairTest than her E.T.S. counterparts. Though FairTest’s criticisms are painful, she said, “every industry needs a watchdog.”
Mr. Schaeffer, who is a good tester himself (his 800 math SAT helped get him into M.I.T.), plans to keep watch until the money runs out.
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