Category Archives: Testing

National School Testing Urged

This is a development that many opponents of standards-based reforms (which rely on high-stakes testing) predicted at the dawn of the movement during the George H. W. Bush administration.

The US Department of Education’s Higher Education Commission is laying the groundwork for NCLB-like, standards-based reform of post-secondary education, including, perhaps, individual tracking of college and university student performance. So national testing of college and university students, while perhaps far in the distance, is likely a predictable result. The results of which will have a similar effect on undergraduate education as it has had on K-12 education (narrowed curriculum, de-emphasis on critical thought, and loss of academic freedom).

Washington Post: National School Testing Urged

Many states, including Maryland and Virginia, are reporting student proficiency rates so much higher than what the most respected national measure has found that several influential education experts are calling for a move toward a national testing system.

The growing talk of national testing and standards comes in the fifth year of the No Child Left Behind era. That federal law sought to hold public schools accountable for academic performance but left it up to states to design their own assessments. So the definition of proficiency — what it means for a student to perform at grade level — varies from coast to coast.Maryland recently reported that 82 percent of fourth-graders scored proficient or better in reading on the state’s test. The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card,” show 32 percent of Maryland fourth-graders at or above proficiency in reading.

Virginia announced last week that 86 percent of fourth-graders reached that level on its reading test, but the NAEP data show 37 percent at or above proficiency.

Some experts say it’s time to be more clear about how well American schoolchildren are doing.

“The more discontented the public is with confusing and dumbed-down standards, the more politically feasible it will be to create national standards of achievement,” said Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor who was an assistant U.S. education secretary under President George H.W. Bush.

The political obstacles are formidable, including a long tradition of local control over public education. But the approaching presidential campaign, a pending debate over congressional reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind law and the wide gaps between assessments have raised hopes among proponents that the issue will gain steam. Some say gradual steps toward a national system would be better than none.

A recent study by Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, found that states regularly inflate student achievement. In 12 states studied, the percentage of fourth-graders proficient in reading climbed by nearly two percentage points a year, on average.

The NAEP (pronounced “Nape”) data show a decline on average in the percentage who were proficient over the same period, Fuller said.

Another Fuller-led study found only three states — Massachusetts, Missouri and South Carolina — with proficiency standards that come close to NAEP’s. (A similar rating by the journal Education Next showed that D.C. school standards have been stringent. It showed 14 percent of D.C. elementary school children reading proficiently on the D.C. scale and 11 percent on NAEP’s.)

Unlike state tests, which are used to help rate public schools and measure achievement of all students in certain grades, NAEP has a more limited mission. It tests selected pools of students in key subject areas to produce data on long-term educational trends.

NAEP standards were designed to establish what students ought to know to do well in the next grade and beyond, said Mark D. Musick, former president of the Southern Regional Education Board, who helped draft them. State standards, he said, more typically reflect what teachers say are the levels good students reach in their classes.

Although classroom experience varies across the country, Musick said, what students should know to be proficient in Algebra I is clear to most educators, and a national test would help set that standard.

The argument over national standards splits both major political parties. Many Republicans defend each state’s right to set its own standards, but the Bush administration includes advocates for a stronger federal role.

No Child Left Behind, which President Bush signed into law in 2002, struck a balance: It required a major expansion of state testing programs but left standard-setting authority to the states.

Many Democrats supported President Bill Clinton’s effort in the 1990s to encourage national standards, which was blocked by a Republican-led Congress. Other Democrats, particularly those allied with teachers unions, oppose judging schools by standardized tests.

Charles E. Smith, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, said many state officials tell him they are moving toward the national benchmarks.

A senior Maryland education official, for instance, said the state’s standards are aligned with some of the NAEP benchmarks. Some, he said, but not all.

“The gaps will generate differences in performance,” said Ronald A. Peiffer, Maryland’s deputy superintendent for academic policy. “If NAEP were the national test to which all states taught and tested, then there would be no gaps, and I would expect Maryland students to do much better on NAEP.”

Last week, the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released a report from several experts, including advisers to Republican and Democratic administrations, that outlined ways to move toward national standards.

First, the federal government could order a new national testing program. The report said that surely would raise standards but would be unlikely to win congressional approval. Second, Washington could fund an expanded, voluntary national testing system. The report said that probably would raise standards and could be passed.

Third, states could build on efforts to share test items among themselves. That would be less likely to raise standards but politically feasible, the report said. Fourth, the federal government could take steps to ensure that state standards and test results could be easily compared with one another and with NAEP.

The experts in the report include Texas lawyer Sandy Kress and former deputy U.S. education secretary Eugene W. Hickok, both key education advisers to Bush, as well as Ravitch and former Clinton advisers Michael Cohen and Andrew J. Rotherham.

Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Fordham Foundation, a former Reagan administration official and one of the architects of the NAEP standards in 1990, said creating a national test would be difficult. “But I think it’s a manageable hurdle, especially with presidential leadership,” he said.

“There’s an assumption around that national standards are political suicide even if they make educational sense,” Finn said. “We need to bust through that.”

Musick said he believes the best way to introduce national tests would be in a few high school subjects, such as first- and second-year algebra.

Some educators see comparisons with NAEP as unrealistic. Gerald W. Bracey, an educational psychologist who writes frequently on testing, noted that 1996 NAEP results found only 30 percent of fourth-graders to be proficient or better in science, even though an international study that year ranked American fourth-graders third in science among 26 nations.

Others want to cut back on standardized testing entirely.

Deborah Meier gained fame for starting schools in low-income areas of New York City’s Manhattan that had experts rate students by viewing their schoolwork and discussing it with them. The schools did not rely on standardized tests. Instead of a national test, Meier said, the country should adopt “a combination of in-depth local instruments, independent review of schools and student work.”

She also said there is value in limited testing to sample student progress.

Skeptics of national testing have long noted the influence of politics on proficiency standards. Put simply, how many kids will voters allow to score below proficiency? Some policymakers are tempted to keep standards low so that schools will look successful; others seek to set them high to spur schools to improve.

New evidence that exit exams increase dropout rates and exacerbate educational inequalities.

High-school exit examinations—which are becoming more widely adopted as a part of standards-based education reform—are correlated with increases in the dropout rate, according to research papers issued recently by two teams of scholars. One of the papers found that the dropout effect is especially strong among black male students.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today:

High-School Exit Exams Are Associated With Higher Dropout Rates, Researchers Find

By DAVID GLENN

Since 1979, a growing number of states have required high-school students to pass exit examinations before they can receive diplomas. For nearly as long, scholars and policy makers have debated whether such exams do more harm than good.

Proponents of exit exams say that they improve learning and future employment by giving both students and school districts better incentives to succeed. Skeptics say that the exams needlessly prevent decent students — who have otherwise completed all of their course work — from receiving diplomas. They also warn that the exams could prompt some students to drop out of high school as early as the 10th or 11th grade, if they foresee that they will fail the tests.

The latest battleground over the issue is California, where on July 25 an appeals court will consider a lawsuit that claims the introduction of the state’s new exit exam should be delayed because certain low-income districts allegedly do not teach much of the material on the exam.

Now two teams of scholars have written papers whose findings might provide support to those on the more-harm-than-good side. In a recent working paper, Thomas S. Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College, and Brian A. Jacob, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University, report that students in states with relatively easy exit exams are roughly 4 percent more likely to drop out of high school than similar students in states with no exams. In states with relatively difficult exit exams, students are 5.5 percent more likely to drop out than their counterparts in states with no exams.

The effects are stronger among African-American men, Mr. Dee and Mr. Jacob found. In states with easy exit exams, black male students are 5.2 percent more likely to drop out of high school than their counterparts in states with no exit exams. In states with more-rigorous exit exams, they are 7.3 percent more likely to drop out than are their counterparts in states with no exit exams. (On the other hand, Mr. Dee and Mr. Jacob found strongly positive results for native-born Hispanic women, who are significantly more likely to complete high school and to enter college if they live in states with exit exams.)”Our experience with this has been that it exacerbates achievement gaps,” Mr. Dee said in an interview last week. “The more stringent exams seem to have more-serious effects in terms of reducing educational attainment.”

Mr. Jacob added, however, that the jury is still out on whether exit exams have, over all, a positive effect on students’ learning or on their ability to find jobs. (In their study, Mr. Dee and Mr. Jacob found tentative evidence that African-Americans’ post-high-school wages are higher in states with exit exams, and that white workers’ wages are lower. They emphasize, however, that those patterns might apply only to workers whose wages are very close to the statewide average, and more study remains to be done.) “It’s possible that these policies are having beneficial effects that we just haven’t been able to detect,” Mr. Jacob said.

Mr. Dee and Mr. Jacob used data from the “long form” of the 2000 Census, which allowed them to work with an extensive amount of data. They looked at the experiences of nearly three million people who turned 18 between 1980 and 1998. The census data also allowed them to look at relatively recent high-school graduates; certain other recent studies of exit exams have been criticized because they rely on the National Education Longitudinal Study, which looked at students who were scheduled to graduate from high school in 1992 — a long time ago in terms of evaluating policy.

The second new paper, which appears in the summer issue of the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, reports that rates of high-school completion are lower in states with exit exams than in states without such exams. In what may be a consequence, states with exit exams have higher rates of General Educational Development test-taking.

“If exit exams are having an upside — if, on average, kids are learning more or earning higher wages — then they might be worthwhile despite causing dropouts,” said the paper’s lead author, John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. (Mr. Warren wrote the paper with Krista N. Jenkins, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Rachael B. Kulick, a graduate student in sociology at Minnesota.)

By contrast, Mr. Warren continued, “if the upshot of this policy is only to deny diplomas to some kids, and there’s no real upside for anyone else, then we should realize that this is purely a punitive policy.” Mr. Warren is now studying exit exams’ effects on learning and future employment, and at this point he is skeptical that many strong positive effects exist.

Not everyone agrees. “How bad is it if there’s a 1½-percent reduction in the rate of people who get a regular high-school diploma?” asked John H. Bishop, an associate professor of human resource studies at Cornell University, in an interview on Friday. Mr. Bishop said that most students who fail to pass exit exams have such poor skills that they are not likely to do well in the labor market, with or without a diploma. He argued that the benefits of such exams outweigh the costs borne by students who do not win diplomas.

“What counts is, Do these policies result in more people learning more?” Mr. Bishop said. “In the long run, it’s knowing stuff, not having a high-school diploma, that will help you in the labor market.” In a 2005 study, Mr. Bishop found that, over a period of roughly a decade, states that began to use exit exams raised their eighth-grade mathematics scores significantly, whereas states that cruised along with no exit exams did not see such gains. That finding suggests, Mr. Bishop said, that introducing an exit exam can have far-reaching consequences on a school system’s effectiveness.

Dim view of public schools?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a poll by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) shows “Americans are increasingly worried about the quality of elementary and secondary schools and students’ preparedness to compete in the global economy, and college faculty members are among the public-education system’s greatest critics.”

College professors tended to view the public schools more negatively than did Americans in general. Over all, 44 percent of Americans gave the nation’s schools a C grade, while 15 percent thought the schools deserved a D. But 49 percent of the professors gave the schools a C, and 23 percent gave them a D.

Similarly, only 11 percent of adults said they thought the schools had high expectations for students and significantly challenged them, but even fewer college professors (2 percent) thought students were significantly challenged.

The ETS poll concludes that there is widespread support for education reform.

There’s no doubt that public schools can and should be transformed, the big questions are who should the schools be accountable to and in what ways should they be transformed.

The “global competitveness” argument is corp-speak for making public schools serve the interests of big business as opposed to engaging students in developing meaningful understandings of their world.

The engine of NCLB-style reforms of public education in the US are standardized tests, so you draw you on conclusions about the relationship between the poll’s sponsor (one of the largest test-pushers in the world) and its findings.

High-Stakes Tests in Florida Are Mostly Graded by Poorly Qualified Temps

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that high-stakes tests in Florida are mostly graded by poorly qualified temps. In the era of supposed “high-standards” is is not an uncommon occurrance.

The AP report notes that the majority of graders have no experiences as educators nor do they have a degree in a field related to the academic subjects they are grading.

Harvard study shows that NCLB hasn’t improved achievement or reduced achievement gaps

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University (CRP) released a new study yesterday that reports the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) hasn’t improved reading and mathematical achievement or reduced achievement gaps. The study also revealed that the NCLB won’t meet its goals of 100 percent student proficiency by 2014 if the trends of the first several years continue.

The report, Tracking Achievement Gaps and Assessing the Impact of NCLB on the Gaps: An In-depth Look into National and State Reading and Math Outcome Trends, compares the findings from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) to state assessment results and concludes that that high stakes testing and sanctions required by NCLB are not working as planned under the NCLB. The findings contradict claims of the Bush Administration and some previous studies that showed positive results under NCLB.

Under the NCLB, states can decide which tests to use for accountability and proficiency. In turn, states are required to look at their results and sanction low-performing schools. NCLB requires yearly progress of all groups of students toward the state proficiency levels. The report demonstrates how over the past few years since the NCLB’s inception, state assessment results show improvements in math and reading, but students aren’t showing similar gains on the NAEP—the only independent national test that randomly samples students across the country.

“Students should perform well on both tests because they cover the same subjects,” said the study’s author Jaekyung Lee, professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “What we are seeing is, the higher the stakes of the assessment, the higher the discrepancies in the results. Based on the NAEP, there are no systemic indications of improving the average achievement and narrowing the gap after NCLB.”

The report also shows that federal accountability rules have little to no impact on racial and poverty gaps. The NCLB act ends up leaving many minority and poor students, even with additional educational support, far behind with little opportunity to meet the 2014 target.

“This report is depressing given the tremendous amount of pressure schools have been under and the damage that a lot of high poverty racial schools have undergone by being declared as failing schools,” said Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and professor of education and social policy at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We have not focused on the kinds of serious long-term reforms that can actually produce gains and narrow the huge gaps in opportunity and achievement for minority students.”
Key Findings

The report compares the NAEP results with state assessment results during the pre-NCLB period (1990-2001) with the post-NCLB period (2002-2005). It compares post-NCLB trends in reading and math achievement with pre-NCLB trends among different racial and socioeconomic groups of fourth and eighth graders from across the nation and states.

NCLB did not have a significant impact on improving reading and math achievement across the nation and states. Based on the NAEP results, the national average achievement remains flat in reading and grows at the same pace in math after NCLB than before. In grade 4 math, there was a temporary improvement right after NCLB, but it was followed by a return to the pre-reform growth rate. Consequently, continuation of the current trend will leave the nation far behind the NCLB target of 100 percent proficiency by 2014. Only 24 to 34 percent of students will meet the proficiency target in reading and 29 to 64 percent meeting that math proficiency target by 2014.
NCLB has not helped the nation and states significantly narrow the achievement gap. The racial and socioeconomic achievement gap in the NAEP reading and math achievement persists after NCLB. If the current trend continues, the proficiency gap between advantaged White and disadvantaged minority students will hardly close by 2014. The study predicts that by 2014, less than 25 percent of Poor and Black students will achieve NAEP proficiency in reading, and less than 50 percent will achieve proficiency in math.
NCLB’s attempt to scale up the alleged success of states that adopted test-driven accountability policy prior to NCLB, so-called first generation accountability states (e.g., Florida, North Carolina, Texas) did not work. It neither enhanced the first generation states earlier academic improvement nor transferred the effects of a test-driven accountability system to states that adopted test-based accountability under NCLB, the second generation accountability states. Moreover, both first and second generation states failed to narrow NAEP reading and math achievement gaps after NCLB.
NCLB’s reliance on state assessment as the basis of school accountability is misleading since state-administered tests tend to significantly inflate proficiency levels and proficiency gains as well as deflate racial and social achievement gaps in the states. The higher the stakes of state assessments, the greater the discrepancies between NAEP and state assessment results. These discrepancies were particularly large for poor, Black and Hispanic students.

Bathroom breaks vs. grades—The abursidy of schooling in the NCLB era

Here’s a story about the absurdity of schooling in an era where test scores have trumped anything close to what might be considered authentic learning. Schools are actually giving “extra-credit” for unused hall passes!

Washington Post: How bad to you have to go?

At Some Schools, It’s Bathroom Breaks vs. Grades
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 6, 2006; Page A01

Even though Daniel Thornton occasionally needed to go to the bathroom during his AP history course last year, he also needed a B on the midterm to maintain his grade. So he did what lots of students at Forest Park Senior High School in Woodbridge do in their Darwinian pursuit of academic success: Thornton endured a full bladder and instead hoarded his two restroom passes, which, unused, were worth six points of extra credit.

It was enough to bump the 18-year-old’s midterm grade from a C-plus to a B.

“Occasionally it made days unpleasant, but I was just very careful. I would try to go in the five minutes beforehand or afterwards, between classes,” said Thornton, who will graduate this month. “Some of my classmates definitely had a lot of trouble. People around me would fidget, especially girls.”

Bladder control, especially in an era of 90-minute classes, is a vital skill in many Washington area high schools, where administrators often limit access to restrooms during class to reduce interruptions and quash potential mischief in areas without adult supervision.Restrooms, of course, have been a choice milieu for school scofflaws since the advent of indoor plumbing. With school security a top priority, administrators have become vigilant enforcers as they try to block loitering, bullying or drug use in student restrooms.

At many schools, doors to boys and girls restrooms have been removed altogether. In Montgomery County’s Montgomery Blair High School, students can see boys standing at urinals and girls entering and exiting stalls in the bathrooms near the front office.

Teachers have whipped up creative ways to minimize restroom visits during class. Some schools have an extra-credit incentive program, which is not universally embraced among parents or within academic circles. Although advocates say the passes — which can be used for numerous destinations — maximize classroom time, critics say it is unfair to give anyone an academic advantage based on something as unacademic as bathroom habits.

“What’s the correlation between holding your urine and succeeding on a history test?” asked Kevin Barr, principal of Georgetown Day School, a private school in the District. “My basic assumption is always that kids need to be comfortable and safe to excel in the classroom.”

The Spanish class Carol Wesley’s 15-year-old daughter takes at W.T. Woodson High School in Fairfax County offers hallway extra credit. Although Wesley sympathizes with teachers trying to maintain order, she said, “It’s absurd to reward people for not taking care of simple human bodily functions when necessary.”

Public schools in the District, Virginia and Maryland do not have systemwide policies about bathroom rules but leave it to individual schools or classroom teachers to decide. Many teachers opt for the simple and venerable hall pass, which has been around for decades. In that case, students carry a visible pass so hallway monitors can immediately tell that they are authorized to be out of class.

Other schools use a more archival approach to keep track of students and their bathroom habits: log sheets on which students must jot down the time they need to leave class and their destination. A teacher’s initials are also needed.

The log sheets — in a small agenda book given out at the beginning of the year — help teachers check how often students use the restroom during class — indicating which ones may be cadging a break. In one agenda book, the log sheet is euphemistically called the Hallway Passport.

Some students who use the log sheets prefer them because they don’t have other people’s germs and they’re never scrounging for a pass. Other students, such as Samantha Mosquera at Forest Park, find the log absurd.

“Sometimes, I’ll just go through the book, and I’ll see how many times I’ve gone to the bathroom in the year, and I’m like, ‘What the heck?’ It’s a lot,” said Mosquera, 18, a senior on the crew team, who noted that she has to drink water all day to stay hydrated for her tough afternoon practices. “It should be like college, especially for seniors. We can vote. We can go to war. We should be able to pee whenever we want.”

Bathroom rules have become so ingrained in students’ psyches that they affect hallway culture. With only five or so minutes between classes, students must make potentially life-altering decisions: Should I go, or should I flirt with my locker neighbor?

At Albert Einstein High School in Montgomery, students find any scrap piece of paper — or a hand will suffice — on which to sign a teacher’s name and time. But Principal James Fernandez said he wants to order agenda books with log sheets for next year.

“The agenda books provide accountability,” Fernandez said.

Sometimes a game of cloak and dagger ensues. At Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County, some students have gotten in trouble for swiping blank passes off of teachers’ desks and forging teachers’ signatures, said Robynne Prince, an assistant principal.

At other times, students get in trouble when they sneak off to a restroom nowhere near their class but within shouting distance to a friend in an another room. Recently, Prince caught a student in the cafeteria who had a pass for the restroom only.

“He said, ‘Well I just stopped in to talk to someone,’ so I followed him from table to table,” she recalled. “I questioned him and said, ‘What class do you belong to?’ He said, ‘English,’ but that was on the second floor — and we were on the first floor, so I know he passed three bathrooms.”

That’s why, at schools such as Forest Park in Prince William County and W.T. Woodson in Fairfax — some teachers offer extra credit if students stay put. “It gets the students to plan ahead and organize. It’s grown in popularity because teachers feel that it cuts down on disruptions,” said Beverly Ellis, an AP history teacher at Forest Park. “I discourage them from leaving unless it’s a real emergency. They’ve got to convince me.”

For Daniel Thornton, one of Ellis’s students, the system played a minor role in his success. He got a full tuition scholarship to Washington and Lee University. And this week, he expects to be named valedictorian.

Racism on NYS Regents Exams

New York Daily News
Testing boundaries
By ERIN EINHORN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, May 15th, 2006

Black students and educators are denouncing a series of questions on the most recent global history Regents exam that they charge were racially biased and insensitive.

At least one student – Chantelle Jones, a junior at Bushwick Community High School in Brooklyn – said she was so outraged by the questions on the January test, she complained to the exam proctor.

She then ran out of time on the test’s final essay, never finished it, and failed. She’ll have to take the required test again in June.

“It makes me so upset,” said Jones, 18. “It’s disrespectful to me and my people.”

The questions – which asked students to describe how Africa benefited from imperialism – were on a section of the exam that gave students historical passages to read, then asked them to describe the arguments made by the author.

The first was based on an 1893 passage from “The Rise of Our East African Empire,” by Frederick Lugard, who, while working for the Imperial British East Africa Co. in the 19th century, helped colonize Uganda and other African countries.

On the exam, students were asked to read Lugard’s account of British projects in Africa like digging wells and building irrigation systems, then to “state two ways British imperialism would benefit Africans.”

Next up was a passage from Lugard’s “The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa,” from 1922. It described British efforts to end the slave trade and reduce famine and disease.

“We are endeavoring … to teach the native races to conduct their own affairs with justice and humanity, and to educate them alike in letters and in industry,” Lugard wrote.

Students were asked to name “two ways the British improved the lives of Africans.”

“This is just beyond the pale,” said Esmeralda Simmons, the executive director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College.

“It’s basically asking students of African descent, and all students, to justify European or British imperialism as if Africans were either culturally or genetically inferior,” added Simmons, who sent a formal letter of protest to the Regents.

Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the state Education Department, noted that the test was put together by educators of “diverse backgrounds.”

But he added the Lugard portion of the exam “should have been worded in a way that clearly instructed students to respond based on the perspective of the author.”

Still, he said, “In order to teach history, we have to use passages that reflect history’s reality. … Kids have to learn the skills of historical analysis, which includes the ability to investigate different and competing interpretations of the theories of history.”

But that argument doesn’t fly with Brian Favors, who teaches a course on slavery and counts Jones among his students.

He called the questions, “very racist,” adding: “It’s the equivalent of asking a Jewish child to state two ways the Holocaust benefited Jews.”

Favors is a member of Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence, which is sponsoring a rally to “end institutional racism” on Wednesday – the 52nd anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The rally will be at the city Education Department.

Simmons said she wants to see the Regents void students’ answers on the controversial questions.

That wouldn’t help Jones, though – she said she answered those questions correctly.

“I picked something out of all those lies and put it down,” she said. “I was kind of sarcastic with my answer. I let it be known to whoever was grading the exam that I was upset, but I had to pass the exam.”

Florida to hire $10-per-hour temp workers to grade high-stakes exams

As outrageous as it sounds, this is not an uncommon practice. In fact, it makes lots of sense with schools focusing like a laser beam on raising test scores (instead of, say, helping kids learn to think critically and make sense of the world for themselves), minimum-wage test scoring will be one of the hot new information-society careers school grads will have to look forward to.

The Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale, FL): State to hire $10-an-hour temporary workers to grade FCAT exams

TALLAHASSEE — Critics of Florida’s high-stakes FCAT exam are lashing out at the state for hiring thousands of $10-an-hour temporary workers to score tests that are so critical in determining school grades and student promotions.

“Florida students and their parents need assurance that their tests are being scored fairly and competently by people actually qualified to grade them and by people who have actual educational experience,” said Senate Democratic Leader Les Miller of Tampa, who Wednesday called on the state to investigate the hiring practice.

The uproar comes in the wake of a Kelly Services ad announcing 300 part-time openings in Central Florida for “scoring evaluators.” Duties include “electronically scoring essay-style questions for grades K through 12 on standardized student achievement tests.”

Those who apply get one week of training under the guidance of the state education department and CTB/McGraw Hill, which is under contract to grade the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests being given this month and next.

“It’s scandalous and demoralizing for teachers,” said Rep. Shelley Vana, D-Lantana, former president of the Palm Beach County Classroom Teacher Association and currently a science curriculum coordinator for the School District. “The question of who is scoring the test is important because of its high-stakes nature and the fact that parents don’t get to see the test.”

FCAT scores determine whether a student will receive a high school diploma. They also are used to determine whether a school is failing and affect school funding.

“If you’re holding highly educated teachers accountable, the same should be done for grading the exam,” said Pat Santeramo, president of the Broward Teachers Union. “It was always believed that professional educational companies with experience in this would be doing the grading. This is definitely one step below.”

State officials defend the practice — even though the FCAT Handbook states “professional scorers” will grade the test — and claim half the workers are retired teachers. Test scorers work eight hours a day for five weeks.

“They must have at least a bachelor’s degree to get a foot in the door,” said Cathy Schroeder, spokeswoman for the Department of Education. “And we make sure they understand how each question should be scored.”

She compared the hiring of temporary workers to hiring preparers of tax returns. At the end of the training week, the workers are given an exam in which they are asked to score 60 actual essays. If they don’t accurately grade the essays, they’re not hired. About 25 percent are winnowed out.

“We’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from parents who are really concerned,” Schroeder said. “The misconception is if [the scorers] are part-time, they’re not qualified. These are well-qualified evaluators.”

Each essay is evaluated by two workers. If there is a major difference in their grades, a supervisor is called in.

Some legislators say they’re concerned about discrepancies in FCAT grades that can’t be explained because parents and teachers aren’t allowed to see students’ tests.

“I’ve had teachers tell me students who were failing their class aced the FCAT but when they tried to find out why, they couldn’t. A father told me his son, an A student, flunked it but he couldn’t find out why,” said Sen. Skip Campbell, D-Fort Lauderdale. “This is happening throughout the system.”

Linda Kleindienst can be reached at lkleindienst@sun-sentinel.com or 850-224-6214.

Educational Testing Service to pay millions for errors in teacher tests

The Educational Testing Service has agreed to pay $11.1 million to settle a class action suit over errors in its primary teacher-licensing test, The New York Times reported. The funds will be used to compensate teachers who lost jobs or some wages because of their incorrect test scores. The Times reported that 27,000 people who took the test in 2003-4 received scores that were incorrectly low, and that more than 4,000 of these people were incorrectly told that they had failed.

As with student testing in schools, states have increased testing for current and prospective teacher, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support the claim that standardized tests predict who will be a good teacher.

There is also a long history of cultural bias on teacher licensure tests, which are typically taken upon exit from teacher education programs. A recent National Research Council report on teacher tests concludes that raising cut-off scores on these tests will reduce racial diversity in the teaching profession without improving quality. The differences in average scores among racial/ethnic groups on teacher licensure tests are similar to the differences found among these groups on college admission tests, showing substantial disparities between the passing rates of white and minority test takers.

Most importantly, the NRC found that these tests (including the PRAXIS, which is an ETS product and is the most widely used teacher test in the US) do not predict who will become effective teachers. The NRC concluded that by their design and as currently used tests like the PRAXIS fall short in their use as accountability tools, as levers for improving teacher preparation, and encourage erroneous conclusions about the quality of teacher preparation. Nevertheless, over 40 states rely on standardized tests for teacher licensure.

Current efforts to improve learning and teacher quality rest on a misguided use of standardized tests. Rather than improving learning or increasing teacher quality, the latest research indicates that an emphasis on testing results actually lowers student academic performance, increases dropout rates, and serves as a barrier to diversifying the teaching profession with improving teacher quality.

For more information on teacher testing check out FairTest.org.

NYT: FairTest, watchdog of test industry, faces extinction

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.