High Stakes Testing

by Janelle Weiner
–USA–

Johnny realized late in his high school career he needed to make a change or face the fate of not graduating with his class. After cutting school regularly his first two years, he decided he didn’t want to struggle like his mother and father, both of whom never graduated.

Once he made that decision, his behavior changed.

“I started coming to school a lot and not getting into fights,” he said. “Stayed away from the bad behavior and drugs.” Johnny’s turnaround is exactly what every teacher and administrator in the Sacramento public school Johnny attends wants to see.

However, Johnny has a major hurdle remaining: the California High School Exit Exam. (CAHSEE). He has failed it four times.

At 18, Johnny is committed to graduating. It’s a promise he made to his father. But his discouragement over failing the test so many times is obvious.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” he said recently, “because we gotta do all of our finals in six classes and then they give us this big ol’ test, saying here’s your ticket out of high school. If you pass it you graduate, but if you don’t, you don’t get your high school diploma.”

The advent of high-stakes testing

When the national education reform movement started in the early 1990s, it was largely in response to low achievement among the country’s minority students like Johnny. High-stakes tests were supposed to be an accountability measure that would motivate students, teachers and school districts to raise standards and buckle down to meet them.

Some studies show, however, that although there may be some slight gains in scores, the most disadvantaged students are leaving the schools in increasing numbers. In Boston, where minority students make up 86% of the public school population and 73% are considered low income, the dropout rate is expected to hit 31% by 2007, up from a projected 25% in 2005. There also is evidence that students in Texas, one of the two states (the other being California) with the most culturally diverse student populations, have dropped out of school in growing numbers in recent years.
Many state school superintendents, like Jack O’Connell in California, are reluctant to make a connection between exit exams and high-school dropouts.

“Contrary to the fears and dire predictions, fewer students in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades are dropping out of high school. I believe this is a direct result of the Exit Exam bringing attention and resources to those students struggling the most,” he said in a written statement in November, six months after the class of 2006 became the first required to pass the CAHSEE.

The state superintendent of New York schools could have made a similar assessment in 1996, the first year his state’s exit exam was instituted, but two years later the dropout rate in nearly half of the state’s low-performing schools increased. In New York City, the dropout rate increased by five percent between 1998 and 2002. The same occurred in Massachusetts, which lost 1,000 students two years after the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) became a graduation requirement in 2002.

Although inconsistent state reporting of dropout rates sometimes creates a murky data set, it is clear that exit exams are not preventing students from leaving school prematurely. A learning environment dominated by high-stakes tests, which took over the educational reform movement with their efficiency and public appeal, may be to blame.

“It doesn’t necessarily produce motivated learners or learners who care about the material,” said Peter Sacks, author of Standardized Minds and, his latest book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education. “The way the paradigm is currently being employed, it will worsen the achievement gap between low- and middle-class families. Middle-class families learn because they are told to learn. Those are not the behaviors that low-socioeconomic children acquire from their families. Without understanding where all these English–language-arts skills and algebra skills are going to lead them there is no reason to believe they are going to stick with the program.”

Moreover, Sacks said, withholding a diploma and discounting a student’s entire high-school effort because he or she fails is a sign of a flawed system. “It strikes me as very unethical.”

Are some students shortchanged?

At the same time that high-stakes exams create a motivation void for many students, some educators say they often can do further damage by narrowing the curriculum so students in disadvantaged schools don’t get the well-rounded, genuine learning experience those in already successful schools in wealthier areas enjoy.

According to a recent study by Audrey Amrein and David Berliner of Arizona State University, “Training rather than learning or general education is taking place in communities that rely on high-stakes tests to reform their schools.”

School districts across the country have designed tests that mimic those given by the state to both prepare their students for actual test material and to diagnose which areas to remediate. Class time then must be spent “teaching to the test.” Test-prep courses also are offered for students like Johnny who previously have failed the exam. Although these courses benefit students who may not graduate otherwise, they come at a cost, often taking the place of electives such as computer, foreign-language, and drama courses.

There may be an ironic sacrifice at schools where pressure to perform on all-or-nothing exams is high. A recent finding by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, that 50% of four-year college students could not perform complex literacy tasks, suggests something may indeed be taking the place of learning.

As Sacks puts it, “I think there’s a huge difference between how students perform on genuine learning tasks and applying math and language skills in a meaningful way. Those are all really valuable things. And I don’t think that doing well on a standardized test means that one will do well on these genuine tasks and vice versa.”

Finding a balanced measure

“Exams do not prepare students for life,” Marcia Gentry, a professor of education at Purdue University, pointed out.

Yet everyone from students, their parents, and teachers to administrators to politicians agree schools need high academic standards and a way to measure whether or not they are being met. So what are the alternatives to a standardized test? The key seems to be balance.

Gentry suggested using “a model of individual student education plans with a growth model for students,” which would involve tracking where a student started and how far the student’s education took him/her. “This holds educators accountable for individual students and helps to consider variables that educators can control, rather than those they cannot.”

Similarly, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics supports using a balance of classroom assessments along with standardized tests to determine whether a student should graduate high school.

Many educators and experts in the field fear that if the focus remains on the tests, findings like those about today’s college students and their difficulty with higher-level thinking may become more common.

“Schools have put the emphasis on the wrong things,” Sacks said. “You’re not going to develop fully trained critical-thinkers. We’ll get what we pay for. We’re teaching them about the wrong things—that accomplishment and achievement are equal to a score on a test.”