CTA President on state assessment system

[George Sheridan <learn@JPS.NET>]

This is the latest column on standardized testing by Wayne Johnson,
president of the California Teachers Association.

Make no mistake about it
California Educator
November 2002

Standardized testing has spun out of control. Large numbers of children are
not prepared to take these tests due to their poverty-stricken backgrounds
and limited English language skills.

"Poor children are much more likely [than middle-class children] to suffer
developmental delay or damage," says Ruby Payne in her book A Framework for
Understanding Poverty.

Policy Analysis for California Education agrees. In 1999 it reported, "Poor
children are two or three years behind their more affluent peers on several
measures long before their first year of school."

In 2000, poverty was defined by Julian Palmer at Columbia University as a
family of four earning $17,524 a year. According to 1998 figures from
Columbia, the United States leads the industrialized world in child poverty.

Twenty-five percent of children under 18 and 33 percent of Latino children
live in poverty, and EdSource reports that 42 percent of California's 6.4
million K-12 students are Latino.

"Well-off white kids continue to outperform their disadvantaged or minority
peers, often by a sizable margin," says a January 2002 article in U.S. News
and World Report.

California's Star program test scores reveal this sad reality and little
else. Scores reflect almost perfectly the socioeconomic status of the
children who are tested. And despite this knowledge, teachers are being
pushed to the limit to raise test scores. It has become the political and
administrative mantra in California: Teachers, raise those test scores!

We are given no assistance to help the 40 to 45 percent of our children
whose families are low-income or are living below the poverty line.

In California last year, we tested 4.5 million kids in grades 2 through 11.
Their test results were published in every newspaper in the state. The
state then used the Academic Performance Index (API) to rank every school
from the bottom 10 percent to the top 10 percent. Guess who was at the top
and who was at the bottom?

Two years ago, CTA had the API scores analyzed. We were shocked to find
that in the bottom 10 percent of API schools, 86 percent of the students
were poor while in the top 10 percent of schools, only 7 percent came from
impoverished backgrounds. In the bottom 10 percent of schools, 46 percent
of the students were English language learners whereas in the top 10
percent, only 2.6 percent had to overcome language difficulties.

In April 2001, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported
that 60 percent of America's fourth-graders from poverty families read
"below basic" on its fourth-grade reading test. Simply put, they can't
read. Again, there's no special help for an identified group of children
who aren't making it despite the best efforts of their underfunded schools
and overworked teachers.

Now let's take a look at the reality of testing and what it is doing to our
schools.

The SAT-9 test, the major component of the STAR test, is a norm-referenced
test. That means no matter how the 4.5 million kids score, there will be a
top 50 percent and a bottom 50 percent. Half the kids and half the teachers
lose no matter what! Absurdly, this test is not aligned to curriculum or
textbooks. It is aligned with some of the more than 400 academic standards.
Experts on testing tell me that setting 30 academic standards would be
good, but 400 is a joke. One referred to them as California's "wish list"
of academic standards.

The test is not aligned to what we do in the classroom. That's bad enough,
but then we make 25 percent of the kids take the test when they don't
understand English, and people are appalled that these kids score poorly.
We make another 10 percent of students - those with learning disabilities -
take the test with no accommodations. That's 35 percent of the kids taking
the test who are virtually assured they will not do well. Guess who is
going to be in the bottom 50 percent of test scores?

A series of news articles by Sarah Tully Tapia, Keith Sharon and Ronald
Campbell in the Orange County Register, citing research by Richard Hill,
David Rogosa and others, reported that API scores have a 20-point margin of
error. Despite this, schools have been put on the list of underperforming
schools on the basis of one point. You certainly wouldn't trust an opinion
poll with a margin of error of 20 points. Why would you drive an entire
education system on the basis of a test with such a huge margin of error?

The reporters also wrote, "Students who traditionally score lower, African
Americans and special education students, are excluded [from the API
results at their school] at a higher rate than white and Asian students."

James Fleming, superintendent of Capistrano Unified School District,
excluded 1,259 of the district's 3,201 special education students from his
district's API scores.

The reporters also wrote that Thomas J. Kane of UCLA and Douglas Staiger of
Dartmouth studied the API bonus awards system and found it had a "perverse
effect on diverse schools." Fifty-eight percent of schools, mostly those in
affluent white areas, won bonus awards. Only 29 percent of schools with
four or more ethnic groups won awards.

One year a school in San Bernardino County raised its test scores by 102
points and won bonus awards. The next year its scores dropped by 105
points. This is not uncommon.

As the Public Policy Institute of California revealed in 2000, "Much of the
variation in [STAR] test scores among urban, suburban, and rural schools
that appear in raw data can be accounted for by variation in students'
socioeconomic status and school resources."

One of the major problems in California and the U.S. is that the perception
of public schools is based on these tests. A strong case can be made that
these STAR Test results are totally invalid, yet they are driving public
education in California. Teachers are forced to administer them. Despite
the fact that 50 percent of the students will always score in the bottom 50
percent, teachers are threatened with repercussions if they don't raise the
test scores when it is virtually impossible to do so. In this testing
system, the rule is if someone goes up, someone else must go down. We
already know who will be at the bottom.

We must reform this testing nightmare in California. The educational
propaganda suggests that all children can score well on the STAR Test when
it is impossible. It reminds me of the carnival hustlers when I was a kid.
"Step up and win a prize." It was impossible to win! This system of testing
guarantees that 50 percent of our kids and teachers will be losers.

CTA and teachers must fight to change this terrible system. We must have
tests that are aligned with textbooks and curriculum. We must have a
criterion-referenced test. Then if 100 percent of the kids scored in the
top 10 percent, that is what would be reported. We must do away with a
system that requires 50 percent of kids to score in the bottom 50 percent
of test scorers.

Last year, CTA sponsored legislation for that exact reform and Assembly
Member Jackie Goldberg led our fight.

Make no mistake about it. CTA will be back! We will continue to fight to
bring sanity and fairness to California's testing system. With your
support, 330,000 CTA members will win this battle.

George Sheridan
Northside School

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