Can the Standards Movement be Saved?
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Can the Standards Movement be Saved?

Teachers are finding that high-stakes testing is too often undermining learning.

Brian LeCloux knows how to stretch students' minds. To be accountable, he wants to put his classroom on cable.

Social studies teacher Brian LeCloux believes in high standards--and knows how to inspire his students to reach them. In his government classes at Wisconsin's Richland Center High, LeCloux has students research and debate issues that matter to them, hot-button topics like the death penalty, gun control, abortion, and the local teen curfew.

These students are hooked on learning.

"Some days, the kids amaze me," says this six-year teacher.

"I want to run around the building and tell everybody."

LeCloux has the freedom to spend time on debates and other high-intensity teaching strategies because teachers in Wisconsin don't have to devote endless hours prepping anxious students for mandated, high-stakes tests.

In 1999, Wisconsin repealed its high-stakes test mandate, after a parent-led campaign supported by the NEA state affiliate, the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

But Wisconsin is bucking a national trend. Half of the states so far have adopted high-stakes tests that will decide whether students can graduate. In some states, schools can be closed if scores are low.

Wisconsin will still have a state test, but each district will set its own graduation requirements. In Richland Center, LeCloux will be on the committee that develops the standards.

LeCloux is proud of what he's been able to achieve, and he's eager for parents to know what happens in his classes. He plans to videotape his student debates for later broadcast on cable.

"I'd like to see classroom videos announced in the local paper," he says. "Instead of just saying there's a two-point change in SAT scores, I'd like them to say there's a new social studies classroom tape. That would be real accountability."

Ohio, by contrast, seems to define accountability strictly by high-stakes tests. Next year, Ohio is scheduled to introduce a "fourth grade guarantee," under which children will have to pass a state reading test to be promoted to fifth grade.

NEA member Karen Sternberg, a reading specialist in the Cincinnati suburb of Woodland, says this test doesn't guarantee good reading. In fact, she says, it will lead students to read less.

"The children see reading as a testing situation." she explains. "They're not going to pick up novels as adults."

Last year, 29 percent of the children failed the reading test in Sternberg's school, Woodland Elementary. Statewide, 42 percent failed.

Should all these students be held back? The Ohio education department's Patti Grey says this is not at all what the department had in mind when it originally set a target passing score. The idea was to help slow readers, not keep them back.

"We set the score high so more kids would get extra help," she says. "The legislature turned it into a retention score."

Passing rates on high-stakes tests vary wildly from state to state.

In Texas, for instance, 86 percent of students passed the state 10th grade math test last year. In Massachusetts, only 55 percent passed. Yet Massachusetts students far outpace Texas on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The difference? The Massachusetts test is much tougher than the Texas test.

How tough? Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci, an ardent backer of his state's test, refuses to take it himself. When students sat in at his office to force the issue, he escaped out a back door.

At Springfield High School, an inner-city school in western Massachusetts, social studies teacher Lenny Lapon points out that three-quarters of the graduates have been going on to higher education, and yet three-quarters of the students failed the test that the class of 2003 will have to pass to graduate.

That means, notes Lapon, that the test could block half of the school's students from becoming better educated.

The Massachusetts Teachers Associa-tion recently launched a television ad campaign to help citizens understand what the testing is doing to children.

Increasingly, teachers who believe in high standards are turning against high-stakes tests.

Many supported them at first, believing they would make students buckle down--and might bring badly needed resources to schools with low scores. But now, teachers are finding that such tests do more harm than good.

Last September, the Ohio Education Association organized public forums on the tests in every state senate district, asking candidates for office to come and listen. Well over 5,000 people attended, mostly parents and educators, and some students as well.

The candidates heard about children who can't sleep, who throw up on test days, who now hate school. OEA is working to change Ohio's testing regimen.

Meanwhile, Ohio teachers do the best they can. At Madge Youtz Elementary in Canton, Theresa Barbato still has her children write journals, even though, she notes, that kind of writing is not tested.

"I haven't given up everything yet," she said last fall. "I still hold on to what I believe in."

But then this veteran teacher hesitated.

"It's October," she said. "Talk to me in January and I'll be feeling the pressure. Even my voice will sound different. I'll know I've got just two months to get them ready for the big test."

--Alain Jehlen

High-stakes questions you won't find on the test

1. What country has the most child poverty in the industrialized world?

1. France
2. Ireland
3. United States

2. Recently, researchers compared the percentage of uncertified teachers in wealthy and poor communities in California. What did they find?

1. Many more uncertified teachers in rich communities
2. No difference between rich and poor
3. Many more uncertified teachers in poor communities

3. How does the time children spend watching TV compare with the time they spend doing homework?

1. Nearly three times as much for TV
2. Twice as much for TV
3. About the same

4. Which country pays teachers the lowest salaries, given its ability to pay?

1. United States
2. Germany
3. Japan

5. One danger of high-stakes testing is that students may give up and drop out. After Texas mandated a graduation test, the number of students who dropped out:

1. decreased
2. stayed the same
3. went up by nearly half

Answers

1. C. The United States has seven times the child poverty rate of Finland. Other countries have more effective anti-poverty programs than the United States. See www.aecf.org/kc1996/summary.htm#chipov.
2. C. 22 percent in the poorest communities, compared with only 2 percent in the richest. See www.ppic.org/publications/
   PPIC128/ppic128.press.html.
3. A. 17.2 hours per week watching the tube vs. 6.1 hours doing homework for 14- and 15-year-olds. See http://stats.bls.gov/pdf/
   nlsy97r1.pdf.
4. A. See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/
   eiip/eiipid40.html.
5. C. See the paper by Walter Haney of Boston College at http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/
   v8n41/part8.htm.

Q & A
A Senator Challenges the Tests

Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota has introduced legislation that would require schools that get federal funds, if they use tests in graduation or promotion decisions, to consider other measures of student achievement as well.

Wellstone taught at Carleton College in Minnesota for 21 years before winning election to the U.S. Senate in 1990.

What inspired you to get involved in the high-stakes testing issue?
In some ways, all politics is personal. I did very poorly on standardized tests. It was really a nightmare. I barely had a combined 800 SAT score. I had an advisor at the University of North Carolina who said to me in my first year, "You're predicted to not graduate."

But I worked hard and did really well. Then I took the Graduate Records and did really poorly. I had to almost fight my way into graduate school. But then I got a doctorate when I was 24. So I've been through it myself.

I've also been in a school every two weeks for the last 10 years--I love to be in schools--and my daughter Marcia is a teacher.

The best teachers just hate being in a testing straightjacket. High-stakes testing is channeling teaching to the kind of rote memorization drill that isn't education.

Why are high-stakes tests so popular with some politicians?
Politically, high-stakes testing is the easiest thing in the world to do. You can pump up your chest and say you're all for rigor. And, you know, it sells. But it leaves untouched all of the key variables that explain why students do well or don't do well.

What about the argument that high-stakes testing is "tough love"?
Even if you could get the testing right, before you start flunking students, you ought to at least make sure that each of them has the same opportunity to do well.

We're not meeting that test. Many of these kids have teachers who aren't certified, decrepit buildings, heating that doesn't work, classes that are too big--never mind what goes on in their lives before they go to school and when they go home.

We're not going to change any of that, but we're going to flunk them!

These kids, some as young as eight, are going to be held back, and they're going to be utterly defeated. They'll be on their way to dropping out of school.