Fwd: Testing Industry Buckling...

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

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  4444,4444,4444IN TESTING, THE INFRASTRUCTURE IS BUCKLING

  Education Week -- July 24, 2007

  by Thomas Toch

  While most public school students enjoy the idle days of summer, the

  nation’s testing companies are working around the clock to help states

  get the results of millions of standardized state tests to parents

  before the start of the new school year, a deadline under the federal No

  Child Left Behind Act that many states may not make.

  The tests are the linchpin of Washington’s efforts to promote higher

  standards in public education by cracking down on schools where students

  don’t measure up. But No Child Left Behind is overwhelming the nation’s

  testing infrastructure, and the result has been troubling: Instead of

  encouraging schools to raise the level of rigor in classrooms, the law

  is giving them powerful incentives to do just the opposite.

  The testing system is beset by a host of problems: a shortage of the

  experts who ensure test quality, intense competition among testing

  companies that has led to below-cost bidding, underfunded state testing

  agencies, and the sheer scale of the NCLB testing requirements.

  Together, 23 states added more than 11 million tests in the 2005-06

  school year to comply with the law, pushing the total number of NCLB

  tests to 45 million. Test booklets have to be sent to and collected from

  nearly every public school in the country, and the results scored and

  reported back to the parents of every tested student under super-tight

  NCLB timelines—a massive logistical challenge.

  Instead of encouraging schools to raise the level of rigor in

  classrooms, the law is giving them powerful incentives to do just the

  opposite.

  Evidence that the system is buckling under this pressure isn’t hard to

  find: Beset by misprinted tests, faulty student information, scoring

  glitches, and other troubles, Illinois earlier this year released its

  2006 No Child Left Behind results just days before students sat for the

  state’s 2007 tests; more recently, Florida announced that it had

  misreported the results of 200,000 reading tests.

  But arguably the most damaging consequence of the testing crisis has

  taken place off the public stage: The problems plaguing testing have led

  states to gravitate to tests under the No Child Left Behind law that

  mainly measure low-level skills. They are using tests with a surfeit of

  questions that require students to merely recall or restate facts rather

  than do more demanding tasks like applying or evaluating information,

  because such tests are cheaper and faster to produce, give to students,

  and score.

  The problem is that these dumbed-down tests encourage teachers to make

  the same low-level skills the priority in their classrooms, at the

  expense of the higher standards that the federal law has sought to

  promote. Teachers and principals are rational people. If their

  reputations, and even their jobs, are tied to their students’ test

  scores, as is true under No Child Left Behind, they are going to feel

  tremendous pressure to stress the rote skills that the exams test most

  often.

  Testing-industry leaders say that states are backing away from or

  abandoning outright open-ended questions, which stretch students by

  requiring them to produce their own answers, because they are more

  costly and more time-consuming to use than multiple-choice questions. As

  a result, close to half the students tested under NCLB nationwide in the

  just-completed school year saw only multiple-choice questions.

  In addition to lowering teachers’ sights for their students, such tests

  produce an inflated sense of student achievement. Scores on reading

  tests that measure mostly literal comprehension are going to be higher

  than those on tests with a lot of questions that measure whether

  students can make inferences from what they read.

  The same is true in math. In a study by the University of Colorado at

  Boulder testing expert Lorrie Shepard, 85 percent of 3rd graders who had

  been drilled in computation for a standardized test picked the right

  answer to the problem 3 x 4 = ___, but only 55 percent answered

  correctly when presented with three rows of four X’s and asked how many

  that represented.

  By the measure of how much money states spend on No Child Left

  Behind-law testing, it’s hardly surprising that we’re getting

  simple-minded tests.

  Workforce experts, of course, say American students will need

  higher-level skills to compete successfully for good jobs in the new

  global economy.

  By the measure of how much money states spend on No Child Left Behind

  testing, it’s hardly surprising that we’re getting simple-minded tests.

  Despite testing’s tremendous importance to school reform, under the law

  states typically spend about one-quarter of 1 percent of combined

  federal, state, and local school revenues on their statewide testing

  programs, or about $20 of the more than $8,000 spent per student.

  Next year, things are likely to be worse, when states have to administer

  another 11 million standardized tests after an NCLB science-testing

  requirement goes into effect.

  But so far, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has

  sidestepped the testing problem. Testing under the law is a state issue,

  she has said, and ensuring that tests measure high-level skills goes

  “beyond what was contemplated by NCLB.”

  But the Bush administration can’t have it both ways. It can’t say it

  wants high standards for all students and then sit on its hands when it

  becomes clear that a key part of the No Child Left Behind reform plan is

  working against that goal.

  Thomas Toch is a co-director of Education Sector, a Washington-based

  think tank.

  Priscilla Shannon Gutierrez

  Outreach Specialist

  New MexicoSchoolfor the Deaf

  ...change is inevitable, growth is optional...

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