Standardized Testing
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Teachers Rejecting Test Score Bonuses -- Hundreds Donate 'Bribe' in Protest
San Francisco Chronicle, 7/30/01In a remarkable twist, Gov. Gray Davis is handing out extra money, and hundreds of teachers are turning him down.
Teachers at more than 4,800 public schools won bonuses totaling $350 million this year for raising Stanford 9 test scores by a specified amount.
But hundreds of them -- in San Francisco, Piedmont, San Jose and elsewhere across the state -- are putting principle above their meager pocketbooks by donating the dollars to scholarships, programs and charities. The average starting salary for teachers hovers in the mid-$30,000 range.Teachers Want to Alter Script
Hartford Courant, 7/19/01
From Connecticut to California to the White House, their foes are gaining - standardized tests, "drill-and-kill" style teaching and a national mania over achievement have seized hold of public education.
So the hundreds of teachers gathered for two weeks at the University of Connecticut are plotting a rescue. Their mission seems oddly quaint in this era of uniform standards, results and accountability: Make learning fun.
"We aren't radicals," says Christina Jurgens, a fifth-grade teacher from Wrentham, Mass. "But we know the difference between teaching to learn and teaching kids to be tested."
Schools' Difficult Search for 'Just Right' Standards
New York Times, 6/17/01
It's a kind of educational Goldilocks syndrome.
Set the tests and standards too high, and many children cannot reach them. Set them too low, they become meaningless, and risk boring the smarter children.
The quest, then, is for a standard that is just right. But is "just right" possible — or even palatable?
Possible Cheating Scandal in Michigan
New York Times, 6/9/01Michigan school officials were scrambling yesterday to investigate irregularities on the state's standardized tests in what appears to be the largest of a recent spate of cheating scandals across the country as the use of high-stakes tests has risen.
At least 71 schools — most in Detroit but scattered among 22 districts in the state — have been alerted to possible cheating after test graders found remarkable similarities among students' written responses on science, social studies and writing exams, which determine how millions of dollars in scholarships and school awards will be distributed.
In some cases, several students in the same classrooms submitted paragraphs that were practically identical to open-ended prompts, raising questions of whether they inappropriately worked together or were even fed answers by adults.
A Rebellion is Growing Against Standardized Tests
New York Times, 5/30/01HARWICH, Mass. -- In this Cape Cod town where children of service workers and the leisure class attend school together, a substitute now teaches eighth-grade social studies. The regular teacher, James Bougas, has been suspended for three weeks after refusing to give a state exam.
Mr. Bougas is part of a growing antitest backlash that challenges state officials to match reality to their rhetoric. Most officials agree that tests tell only part of what we should know about achievement. They concede that if the stakes attached to tests are too high, schools may distort curriculums to prepare for exams and little else. Policy makers recognize that it is more expensive to assess high standards than the basics — it costs more to score an essay than to scan bubble-in answers.
But in many states, testing ignores such complexity. Without adjustments, the push for higher standards may be stalled or even reversed.
Marin County Students Boycott State Test
San Francisco Chronicle, 4/4/01Administrators of an affluent Marin County school district were stunned this week by a student protest against standardized testing that will leave two of California's top high schools ineligible for state reward money.
More than 35 percent at Sir Francis Drake High School's and more than 22 percent of Tamalpais High School's ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade students got their parents to sign waivers excusing them from the annual Stanford-9 achievement test.
"This extraordinary rate of refusal . . . will be heard in the state capital," said Richard Razikov, a school board trustee who supported an organized student campaign against the test.
The boycott reflects a small but growing movement among teachers, parents and students who believe standardized tests are dumbing down school curriculums and adding unnecessary stress for overworked students and teachers.
Measuring Minds -- Backlash Hits High Stakes Test
San Francisco Chronicle, 4/20/01Mandy Hixon, a junior at Tamalpais High School in Marin, has filled in her last bubble for the state of California.
While students across the state right now are taking the annual Stanford-9 achievement test, Hixon has retired her No. 2 pencil, using a waiver to boycott the exam.
"The test measures how well you can listen to facts and spit them back out, not if you comprehend anything," said Hixon, who helped form Marin Students for Liberating Education.
She's not just some upstart teenager who doesn't like to do what adults say.
After three years of standardized testing in California, a growing grassroots network of teachers and parents believes the exams are turning classrooms into basic fact factories where teachers teach to the test to win reform bonuses.
Top-Scoring Suburb Set to Boycott Tests New York Imposed
New York Times, 4/13/01
SCARSDALE, N.Y. -- Parents and school officials in this affluent suburb, where test scores are among the highest not only in the state but also in the nation, are planning a coordinated revolt against state standardized tests, saying they have stifled creativity and forced teachers to abandon the very programs that have made the schools excel.
High Stakes Testing Fails to Get Support
Boston Globe, 2/16/01Parents and teachers have unleashed a blitz of complaints, saying high-stakes exams like the Reading Guarantee consume excessive classroom time, unfairly punish students, and have little to do with learning.
A 5th Grade Pressure Cooker
Charlotte News Observer, 2/16/01Three months remain before North Carolina fifth-graders face a first-time testing hurdle that stands between them and middle school -- and, already, teachers and students are cramming hard for passing scores. Letters are being sent to the parents of children who may fail. Students are going to school early or remaining late for extra help. Saturday classes aren't uncommon. And for the children who will fall short, summer sessions are being planned.
Across North Carolina this year, school principals are under marching orders to hold back fifth-graders who do not pass the state's end-of-grade tests in reading and math. North Carolina's four-year drive to make schools more accountable for student learning is hitting the students themselves, with fifth-graders feeling the first sting this year. Next year, third- and eighth-graders also will have to pass year-end reading and math tests to advance to the next grade.
The Testing Obsession
Howard Gardner, Los Angeles Times, 12/31/00CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
-- With California leading the way, the nation is going through a frenzy of testing its public school students. Never before have so many students been given so many formal standardized tests. The college-bound student can expect to take the PSAT, the SAT and an assortment of achievement and advanced placement tests; college-bound or not, students also take state-mandated tests, as well as nationally normed instruments like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills or the Stanford 9. The stakes for students, faculty, administrators and even politicians have never been higher. Admission to college, cost of student housing, jobs and promotions for those in the teaching profession, and election to office--all hinge on whether the all-important scores have gone up, or up enough. But few have even posed the central question: What is the relation between test scores and a quality education? State Orders SAT-9 be Given Later
Los Angeles Times, 11/10/00The State Board of Education on Thursday adopted new regulations that require schools to give the Stanford 9 exam later in the year so students spend more time in the classroom before facing the exam.
The change will cause headaches for many districts, forcing them to rearrange intricate schedules and seek new dates for other tests, such as the Golden State exams. The shift could also delay the release of statewide scores on the Stanford 9 basic skills exam, the sole component of California's fledgling school accountability program.
"Districts will be extremely inconvenienced, but it's the right thing to do for children and the curriculum," said John Mockler, state interim secretary for education. "We recognize the pain it will cause."
Stanford-9 Protests Gaining Support
Contra Costa Times, 11/4/00If sales of T-shirts designed by East Bay teacher Susan Harman are any indication, a backlash against California's high-stakes testing program is gaining momentum.
An educator at San Pablo's Lake Elementary School, Harman has sold more than 1,000 protest shirts since the idea for their design came to her while gardening last fall.
"High stakes are for tomatoes," the front of the shirt reads. On the back -- "Stop high-stakes testing."
Harman has sold the shirts all over California, including at anti-test meetings in Oakland, Salinas and Santa Cruz this year. The special-education teacher expects her shirts and their message to gain popularity as state policymakers attach greater consequences to the annual tests given to students in grades two to 11 each spring.
Hundreds of parents and educators are speaking out. They fear that schools are narrowing the curriculum to teach what is on the test -- one that is the sole measurement in the state's carrot-and-stick accountability program. They also speak of the pressure students are under to answer questions on material they've not been taught. They say it's cruel to test students still learning English.
State Fears Cheating by Teachers
San Francisco Chronicle, 10/4/00As schools across the state check their new state rankings today to see if they qualify for cash rewards, a handful of Bay Area schools will be missing from the list because their teachers may have cheated to boost pupil test scores.
Fifty-one California schools that turned in tests with too many eraser marks or with scores that eclipsed last year's scores were notified last month by the state that they won't be on the Academic Performance Index list because something might be wrong.
State Rewards for Schools are Delayed
Los Angeles Times, 9/13/00Flawed and inconsistent data are creating headaches for state education officials as they attempt to sort out which schools will qualify for big payouts based on improvements in Stanford 9 test scores.
The state had hoped to issue the eagerly awaited results on Sept. 26 but has pushed the date to Oct. 4.
The problems raise questions about the reliability of the state's fledgling accountability program, which determines how the state will distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in rewards.
McNeil, Linda L. Contradictions in School Reform -- the Educational Costs of Standardized Testing. Routledge, June 2000.
Parents and community activists around the country complain that the education system is failing our children. They point to students' failure to master basic skills, even as standardized testing is employed in efforts to improve the educational system. Contradictions of Reform is a provocative look into the reality, for students as well as teachers, of standardized testing. A detailed account of how student "improvement" and teacher "effectiveness" are evaluated, Contradictions of Reform argues compellingly that the preparation of students for standardized tests engenders teaching methods that vastly compromise the quality of education.
Economic Disparity Seen in Student Test Results
San Francisco Chronicle, 8/15/00Highlighting the vast gap between rich and poor -- and the difficulty politicians and educators will have closing it -- California's neediest children again scored far worse than wealthier kids on the state achievement test.
The results, to be released today, show the performance of specific groups on the Stanford 9 test of reading, math, spelling and other subjects, taken by 4 million students last spring.
1998 and 1999 Sub-Group Reports (2000 reports to be available at 10 am today -- probably at this same link)
A Gap in Test Scores Becomes a Talking Point
New York Times, 8/14/00
Once it was the great taboo.
Now, most American schools and policy makers are talking about it openly: the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students on the one hand and whites and Asians on the other, which persists even among the ranks of the most well off and well educated. Fourteen racially diverse suburbs in different parts of the country have joined to share what appear to be successful strategies for closing the gap. As a way of forcing school districts to deal with the disparity, some states are requiring them to break out their test score data by race.
Test Cheating Scandal Leaves Town Unable to Fill in the Blanks
Los Angeles Times, 8/10/00CODY, Wyo.
-- The meeting room was jammed. Some parents had dashed in during their lunch hour. Others stopped off in between errands. Many clutched folders stuffed with petitions and newspaper clippings. Men and women unable to find seats stood against the walls, arms crossed. This was not just any meeting of the Cody school board. How could it be, given the recent odd events at nearby Eastside Elementary: the principal's abrupt resignation, followed by a rapid retraction and, then, the board's eager acceptance of his latest resignation letter.
Then there was the matter of the altered tests. More than half the national standardized exams taken by Eastside's first-, second- and third-graders last spring had been tampered with. Someone had meticulously corrected the children's answers, causing such a remarkable one-year improvement--from a 42nd-percentile national ranking to 87th in one particular class--as to arouse suspicions. All the scores have been declared invalid, pending further investigation by the testing company, CTB/McGraw-Hill.
Oh, and the state assessment tests. Taken by the fourth-graders. Lost by Federal Express en route to another testing company. Last seen somewhere in New Hampshire.
Teachers Disciplined in Cheating
Fresno Bee, 7/26/00It's one of the most basic lessons drilled into students school year after school year: Cheating is dishonest, wrong and not allowed.
Apparently, a handful of Fresno and Central Unified teachers need a refresher course on the subject.
RISING MATH SCORES SUGGEST EDUCATION REFORMS ARE WORKING
STATE ACHIEVEMENT DIFFERENCES TIED TO SPENDING, POLICIES
TEXAS FIRST, CALIFORNIA LAST IN TEST SCORES OF SIMILAR STUDENTS
Rand Corporation Press Release, 7/25/00WASHINGTON, D.C., July 25 - The education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s seem to be working, according to a new RAND report, but some states are doing far better than others in making achievement gains and in elevating their students' performance compared with students of similar racial and socioeconomic background in other states. Texas and Indiana are high performers on both these counts.
Los Angeles Times Article
7/26/00But the eagerly awaited Rand Corp. analysis of state-by-state data from the early 1990s also says that what has made the biggest difference for students in Texas and nationwide is not necessarily the tough accountability measures that Bush has featured in his campaign. Rather, the report says, the most effective way to help students, especially the poor and minorities, is simply by spending more money, particularly on preschool, classroom supplies and smaller class sizes in early grades.
Improving Student Achievement: What NAEP State Test Scores Tell Us (full text)
David W. Grissmer, Ann Flanagan, Jennifer Kawata, Stephanie Williamson
Rand CorporationHigh Stakes are for Tomatoes
Atlantic Monthly, August 2000
Statewide testing of students, with penalties for failure, has run into opposition from parents across the political spectrum
By now it's hardly news that as education has risen to the top of the national agenda, a great wave -- some would say a frenzy -- of school reform has focused on two related objectives: more-stringent academic standards and increasingly rigorous accountability for both students and schools.
In state after state, legislatures, governors, and state boards, supported by business leaders, have imposed tougher requirements in math, English, science, and other fields, together with new tests by which the performance of both students and schools is to be judged. In some places students have already been denied diplomas or held back in grade if they failed these tests. In some states funding for individual schools and for teachers' and principals' salaries -- and in some, such as Virginia, the accreditation of schools -- will depend on how well students do on the tests. More than half the states now require tests for student promotion or graduation.But a backlash has begun.
Test Scores Up, Test Takers Down
San Francisco Chronicle, 7/22/00Reading and math scores rose significantly at more than 50 Bay Area schools -- but student participation at the same schools plummeted, raising concerns among experts at the California Department of Education and across the state.
"One of the historical tricks that schools have used to increase their scores is by somehow eliminating the lowest-scoring kids,'' said Joan Herman, associate director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at the University of California at Los Angeles. "That may or may not be what's going on. But it's a cause for concern, and it merits a whole lot of additional attention.''
That is exactly what testing experts at the state Department of Education plan to do between now and November, when a decision will be made about which schools receive lucrative rewards for test-score gains.
State Offers Schools Cash to Improve
San Francisco Chronicle, 7/13/00Banking on the idea that people will do almost anything for money -- even raise student test scores -- the California Board of Education announced yesterday it will pay $150 per student to schools that meet academic performance goals.
Teachers in low-scoring schools that make great leaps forward could earn as much as $25,000 each as a reward for their classroom miracles.
Even janitors can win big in California's new ``if you pay them, they will learn'' system. They, along with school secretaries and every other school employee, could receive at least some financial bonus if schools make the grade.
Testing Pressures
Washington Post, 7/13/00The push to hold schools and students accountable for their performance based primarily on test scores has put unprecedented pressures on state testing systems, according to attendees at the Council of Chief State School Officers' annual conference on large-scale assessment. A number of sessions at the recent gathering here were devoted to finding better ways to communicate with policymakers and the public about the appropriate and inappropriate uses of tests.
"We have rushed far too quickly, in my opinion, to assessments with high stakes to them, never giving a chance for standards to have meaning in the classroom," asserted Douglas Christensen, the commissioner of education in Nebraska. "What I think we're getting across the country is not standards-driven reform, it's assessment-driven reform and, too often, test-driven reform."
"We're all just going crazy," added Gerry Shelton, an administrator in the California Department of Education, "because as we move to higher and higher stakes, it just intensifies all the issues we've traditionally faced."
Those issues, he said, range from test security, administration, and scoring to broader questions about whether tests are aligned with a state's academic standards or with classroom instruction. "The technical burden associated with all our testing programs has increased dramatically," Mr. Shelton said.
Internet Book List Linked to STAR
Contra Costa Times, 7/13/00In an effort to boost performance on standardized tests, the state has given parents a new tool -- book lists linked to a child's latest state reading scores.
The lists, generated by the test publisher from a state-approved reading list, are available on the Internet.
Rather than being geared to a child's age or grade level, books are grouped by how the student did in latest round of the state's Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program, a series of multiple-choice exams given to 4.5 million public schoolchildren this spring. Fourth-graders and high school sophomores could end up reading books from the same list, for example.
For the record, Harry Potter didn't make the lists. Neither did another children's favorite, the Goosebumps series.
That's because the state still needs to update the list of books it gave to test publisher Harcourt Educational Measurement. The company used an old list to come up with the books linked to STAR achievement levels.
STAR Scores May Be Meaningless, But They Can Only Go Up
San Francisco Chronicle, 7/12/00
ON MONDAY, the California Department of Education will release the results of the third annual Stanford 9/STAR series of tests of second- through 11th-grade public school students. These test results tell us virtually nothing about how our children are doing in school.
The Department of Education violated rule No. 1 of meaningful test giving: Make sure the test is secure and that test-takers don't know the questions in advance. Every question on this year's Stanford 9 test has been repeated from the previous two years. Old copies of the test are easily available, having passed through the hands of about 250,000 teachers.
Teachers Union Chiefs Assail 'Testing Mania'
Contra Costa Times, 7/4/00The leaders of the nation's two teachers unions harshly criticized the movement to raise academic standards in public schools Monday, saying in separate speeches that politicians and educators should focus more on developing a challenging curriculum and less on testing students.
Opening the American Federation of Teachers biennial convention here Monday morning, Sandra Feldman, the president, said her members were the only professionals expected to invent "their most basic tools" while practicing their craft, and she called for a national consortium to develop curriculum on all subjects. Nearly 800 miles away in Chicago, Robert Chase, the president of the National Education Association, told some 10,000 convention delegates that enactment of standards had been "absurd" and "perverse" in some cases and urged "a massive infusion of common sense -- common sense based on real classroom experience."
Chase and Feldman said they continued to support the drive for higher standards that has swept statehouses and schoolhouses in the past decade. But they also said they have begun to worry about a backlash against the high-stakes standardized tests meant to monitor progress.
Skills Tests Breed Bad Teaching, Critic Says
St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Planet, 6/23/00Standardized testing, which Minnesota schools have been conducting increasingly, isn't just a nuisance to Alfie Kohn. It's a cancer eating away at the bone of public education.
Kohn, 42, has become one of the best-known crusaders against standardized, high-stakes testing and the bad teaching he says it has bred throughout the country. His 1999 book, "The Schools Our Children Deserve,'' attacks the rise in the volume of testing and the rewards and consequences states and districts increasingly place on the results.
As Stakes Rise, Definition of Cheating Blurs
Education Week, 6/21/00A Reston, Va., teacher was suspended for drilling students on questions that appeared on the state's social studies test. Yet teachers at a Chicago school weren't reprimanded for using a test-prep manual that included questions bearing a striking resemblance to ones that appeared on the city's 10th grade reading exam.The difference?
The Virginia teacher illegally obtained the test, school administrators allege, in an attempt to raise students' scores. The Chicago teachers taught from a test-preparation guide they did not know included questions similar to ones that would appear on the reading portion of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills their students would be taking.
That contrast shows the difficulties administrators face in defining—let alone investigating—cheating in the age of high-stakes testing. Relief is not likely to come anytime soon, warn school officials and testing experts, who forecast that the amount of cheating will rise along with the stakes.
Backlash Growing Against High-Stakes Testing
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 6/21/00The backlash against the high-stakes testing movement intensified Monday when the nation's school administrators released a new study that said the public "profoundly disagrees" that a student's academic progress can be summarized by a single test.
"Only on 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' can people rise to the top by rote memorization and answers to multiple-choice questions," said Paul Houston, executive director of American Association of School Administrators, which includes 14,000 educational leaders.
At a news conference on Capitol Hill, the group said it is backing a bill that would allow students to receive diplomas or advance to another grade even if they couldn't pass state-mandated exit tests, such as Minnesota's basic-skills exams.
The bill, proposed by Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and Rep. Robert Scott , D-Va., would stop states from giving "determinative weight" to such a test. It would instead require them to use other indicators, such as grades or attendance.
Even though at least 26 states have passed laws requiring exit exams, Wellstone called the testing movement "bumper-sticker politics at its very worst." And Scott said simply relying on testing isn't improving schools.
Using a farm analogy, Scott, a member of the House Committee on Education and the Work Force, said: "Weighing the pig doesn't fatten the pig."
School Testing Companies Score It Big
St. Petersburg (FL) Times, 6/19/00Florida's move toward increased school accountability has fostered a lot of debate between lawmakers and educators over whether more testing leads to smarter kids.
The two sides agree on one clear winner, though: the testing companies.
Calls for more precise measurements of school performance -- in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and across the nation -- inevitably lead to more testing. And that means states are willing to pay testing companies millions of dollars to write, score, interpret and deliver all those results.
What once was a quiet, though productive, niche has exploded into a booming and lucrative industry.
When Teachers are Cheaters
Newsweek Magazine, 6/19/00This spring has been a season of embarrassment for the nation's public schools. In suburban Potomac, Md., an elementary-school principal resigned last month after parents complained their children were coached to give the right answers on state tests. In Ohio, state officials are investigating charges of cheating by teachers at a Columbus elementary school that was recently praised by President Clinton for raising test scores. And in New York City, more than four dozen teachers and administrators from 30 schools stand accused of urging their students to cheat on various standardized city and state tests.
It's bad enough when kids get kicked out for cheating. But as the school year ends, an alarming number of teachers and principals face charges of fixing the numbers on high-stakes tests that determine everything from whether an individual kid gets promoted to an entire district's annual budget. Although there are no firm statistics, school officials agree that the problem has become much worse in the past few years as more states have adopted testing as a way to audit national and state educational standards. In theory, the exams ensure that teachers pass on the right lessons. The problem is that high scores —not high standards —have become the holy grail.
Pressure to Perform
Washington Post, 6/11/00
At Rock Creek Forest Elementary School, teachers decorate bulletin boards and hallways with special words found on the Maryland state test line. (Juana Arias - The Washington Post)
When allegations that a principal helped students cheat on a state test erupted at a top-ranked Montgomery County elementary school recently, parents were first stunned, then angry. The tests have become the focus of school, many complained. And teachers are teaching to the test.
They're right.
And not just at Potomac Elementary School. But across the country, as politicians, corporate leaders, communities and parents call for higher standards at public schools, and states use standardized tests to judge if they're measuring up.
To raise the ante, schools and students get money, awards, visits from dignitaries, bonuses or trips if they score well – and the threat of takeover if they don't.
As a result, the high-stakes tests are not only responsible for a rash of cheating scandals in New York, Chicago and Texas as well as recent allegations at a Fairfax County middle school, they are redefining education across the country, fundamentally changing what goes on in classrooms every day.
Test Case -- Now the Principal's Cheating
U.S. News & World Report, 6/12/00It's one of the most basic lessons kids learn, right up there with the ABCs and the three Rs: Cheating is wrong. But it seems a number of educators have yet to master that. Last week, the principal of Potomac Elementary School, a top-ranked school in one of Maryland's lushest suburbs, resigned and a teacher was placed on administrative leave amid charges that they had rigged a statewide achievement test. The whistleblowers? Fifth graders, who allege that they were prompted to modify essay responses, provided correct answers, and given extra time to finish.
"I can't even imagine why anyone would do this, especially at the third-highest-achieving school in the state," says Patricia O'Neill, president of the local Montgomery County Board of Education, noting Potomac Elementary's affluent, high-achieving student body. "Was it so important to be No. 1?"
Study Finds State Exams Don't Test What Schools Teach
Washington Post, 6/8/00...a forthcoming study by researchers from the University of Wisconsin suggests there may be little overlap between what state assessments test and what teachers teach. In one of the 10 states studied, the overlap in one subject was found to be just 5 percent.
The findings raise questions about the implementation of a basic premise of standards-based accountability: States should delineate what students should know and be able to do, teachers should match instruction to those standards, and state tests should measure how well students meet those expectations.
"It's a very sloppy system right now," said John F. Jennings, the director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research group. "Teachers are teaching what they think is best, and that might not be aligned" with the state standards or assessments.
Illinois Experiment Put Teaching Methods to Test
Los Angeles Times, 6/4/00NORTHBROOK, Ill.
-- As the nation's public schools cast about for ways to bolster student achievement, a small group of affluent school districts in suburban Chicago is delivering some lessons on what it takes to improve. The 18 districts on Chicago's North Shore, already among the best in the country, have spent the last five years and well over $1 million trying to figure out how to get even better. And, if their experience is any guide, California may be heading down the wrong path by building its reform program around rapid improvements in test scores. [emphasis added]
More Students Claim They were Helped on Tests
Washington Post, 6/3/00More parents at a top-ranked Montgomery County school came forward yesterday with allegations that their children were helped to cheat on a high-stakes assessment test last month.
Investigators said they spent Friday interviewing parents of more fifth-graders at Potomac Elementary School as well as parents of third-graders--the two grades that are required to take the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program test--to determine if the testing was tainted.
Allegations included teachers tapping on third-graders' desks to call attention to problems or work that needed checking, investigators confirmed.
"We've gotten more parents wanting to come in and talk, based on what their children have told them at home," said Pamela Hoffler-Riddick, an associate superintendent who is directing the investigation. "We're asking only about incidents that happened to them. Specific examples. Not just what they've heard."
Investigators said they want not only to dispel rumors, but also to reassure worried children that they did nothing wrong. "This is not about the children," Hoffler-Riddick said.
More Standardized Tests Wrong Answer for Public Schools
San Francisco Chronicle, 6/4/00THE GOOD NEWS about education has become obvious: The quality of public schools is now on center stage in national politics. From Al Gore and George W. Bush down to aspirants for state and local office, all politicians have embraced the cause of high standards and excellence. The bad news is that the remedy everyone but teachers and pupils wants to prescribe is more testing.
The mistrust of schools and teachers has become so widespread that the only politically viable solution seems to be to impose more standardized tests. Forty-nine states have now adopted curriculum standards that explicitly require testing in order to measure the performance of pupils, teachers, principals, and superintendents; by 2003, 26 states will have mandatory statewide tests for high school graduation. As a nation, we now administer at least 500,000 different kinds of standardized tests a year.
Comparing Test Scores is Hot Topic of the Suburbs
New York Times, 6/3/00LARCHMONT, June 2 -- Lee McTeigue can see them coming already.A real estate broker in the Westchester suburbs, Mrs. McTeigue will arrive at the commuter station Saturday morning to pick up her weekly batch of Manhattanites come to find their suburban castles.
"They'll all have seen them," she said, sounding slightly ominous despite the sunshine beaming over the outdoor cafe where she was enjoying her Friday lunch. "They'll all have their newspapers under their arm. They'll get in the car, open it up, point to it and say, 'I only want to look in this neighborhood.' "
She referred, as anyone in the suburbs might explain, to the scores on the New York State reading and writing tests, which were listed by school and district in newspapers statewide this morning. For suburban parents -- and would-be suburban parents -- these are not simply scores. They are the beacons that come to represent the entire worth of a community.
School Allegedly Cheated on Test
Washington Post, 6/1/00The principal of the elementary school that ranked third on Maryland achievement tests last year abruptly resigned yesterday after allegations that students were pointed to the correct answers and helped in rewriting answers to essay questions. Parents at the affluent school said the help ranged from teachers pointing students to improperly answered questions and advising, "You might want to look at this one again," to the principal asking individual students to change answers after the testing period was over.
Some students alleged that Karch, principal since 1993, had walked around the room with a map during a social studies test and pointed to the country students were to write about.
"We've had things in the past that were unintended mistakes, sloppiness or innocent slip-ups, but nothing on this scale," said one school official. "This appears to be a deliberate pattern of behavior to manipulate test results."
Fear of Cheating on Statewide Tests as Stakes Rise
Sacramento Bee, 5/29/00As Gov. Gray Davis offers greater rewards -- and sanctions -- for scores on California's standardized achievement test, education officials are growing increasingly concerned about cheating on the exam.
Officials say recent testing irregularities on California's Stanford 9 achievement test have highlighted the need to more clearly define what constitutes cheating, particularly in the area of test preparation.
Earlier this month, after a hearing on glitches that occurred during this year's round of tests, the state Board of Education asked staff members to clarify what constitutes appropriate student preparation for the Stanford 9. State education officials expect to report back to the board this fall.
"These are high stakes . . . and that's why the issues of security and test preparation are imperative," said Monica Lozano, president of the state Board of Education.
This year, 12 of California's 992 public school districts reported confirmed instances of testing irregularities to the California Department of Education. Department officials say they also have received scores of calls from teachers, parents and local school officials who said they had heard about or witnessed cheating. Those reports have not been substantiated.
Testing the Market
Washington Post, 5/30/00Five years ago, National Computer Systems did only one thing--score tests. The Minneapolis-based company had 400,000 square feet of office space devoted to processing the answer sheets that primary and secondary school students covered with little black pencil marks every spring.
Then the demand for student testing soared. States raised their educational standards and instituted rigorous exams to measure whether students and schools were meeting the new benchmarks. And each state wanted a different battery of tests, customized to assess how much students had learned of its particular curriculum.
Life at NCS changed. Its total office space has jumped 150 percent to more than a million square feet. Its scanners, computers and human test-scorers are working at permanent facilities in six states and temporary ones in 10 more, compared to a total of three facilities in 1995. And the demand for more tests is so great that NCS no longer just scores exams--it writes some of them, too.
Third Grade Relives the Trying Times of the SAT-9
Los Angeles Times, 5/24/00Is the Stanford 9 achievement test too hard, too easy, too long, too stressful? The answers, of course, depend on whom you ask. Shana Frazin, a third-grade teacher in Pasadena, asked her students to keep journals during the eight days they took the test, which covers reading, math and other subjects. She gave them three questions to consider: How do you think you did? What do you feel good about? What, if anything, caused you trouble or frustration?
TESTING ONE, TWO, THREE!!
My dentist is great! He sends me reminders so I don't forget checkups. He
uses the latest techniques based on research. He never hurts me, and I've
got all my teeth, so when I ran into him the other day, I was eager to see
if he'd heard about the new state program. I knew he'd think it was great."Did you hear about the new state program to measure the effectiveness
of dentists with their young patients?" I said."No," he said. He didn't seem too thrilled. "How will they do that?"
"It's quite simple," I said. "They will just count the number of cavities
each patient has at age 10, 14, and 18 and average that to determine a
dentist's rating. Dentists will be rated as Excellent, Good, Average, and
Below Average and Unsatisfactory. That way parents will know ,which are the
best dentists. It will also encourage the less effective dentists to get
better," I said. "Poor dentists who don't improve could lose their licenses
to practice.""That's terrible," he said.
"What? That's not a good attitude," I said. "Don't you think we should try to
improve children's dental health in this state?"Sure I do," he said, "but that's not a fair way to determine who is
practicing good dentistry.""Why not?" I said. "It makes perfect sense to me."
"Well, it's so obvious," he said. "Don't you see that dentists don't all
work with the same clientele; so much depends on things we can't control?""For example," he said, "I work in a rural area with a high percentage of
patients from deprived homes, while some of my colleagues work in upper
middle class neighborhoods. I don't get to do much preventive work. Many of
the parents I work with can't afford to bring their children to see me until
there is some kind of problem.""Also," he said, "many of the parents I serve let their kids eat way too
much candy from an early age, unlike other parents who understand the
relationship between sugar and decay.""To top it all off," he added, "so many of my clients have well water which
is untreated and has no fluoride in it. Do you have any idea how much
difference early use of fluoride can make?""It sounds like you're making excuses," I said. I couldn't believe my
dentist would be so defensive. He does a great job."I am not!" he said. "My best patients are as good as anyone's, my work is
as good as anyone's, but my average cavity count is going to be higher than
a lot of other dentists because I chose to work where I am needed most.""Don't get touchy," I said.
"Touchy?" he said. His face had turned red and from the way he was clenching
and unclenching his jaws, I was afraid he was going to damage his teeth."Try furious. In a system like this, I will end up being rated average,
below average, or worse. "Some of my patients who see these ratings may
believe this so-called rating actually is a measure of my ability and
proficiency as a dentist. They may leave me, and I'll be left with only the
most needy patients. And my cavity average score will get even worse.On top of that, how will I attract good dental hygienists and other
excellent dentists to my practice if it is labeled below average?""I think you are overreacting," I said. "Complaining, excuse making and
stonewalling won't improve dental health'...I am quoting from a leading
member of the DOC", I noted."What's the DOC?" he asked.
"It's the Dental Oversight Committee," I said, "a group made up of mostly
lay persons to make sure dentistry in this state gets improved.""Spare me," he said. "I can't believe this. Reasonable people won't buy it,"
he said hopefully.The program sounded reasonable to me, so I asked, "How else would you
measure good dentistry?""Come watch me work," he said. "Observe my processes."
"That's too complicated and time consuming," I said. "Cavities are the
bottom line, and you can't argue with the bottom line. It's an absolute
measure.""That's what I'm afraid my parents and prospective patients will think. This
can't be happening," he said despairingly."Now, now," I said, "don't despair. The state will help you some."
"How?" he said.
"If you're rated poorly, they'll send a dentist who is rated excellent to
help straighten you out," I said brightly."You mean," he said, "they'll send a dentist with a wealthy clientele to
show me how to work on severe juvenile dental problems with which I have
probably had much more experience? Big help.""There you go again." I said. "you aren't acting professionally at all."
"You don't get it," he said. "Doing this would be like grading schools and
teachers on an average score on a test of children's progress without
regard to influences outside the school, the home, the community served and
stuff like that. Why would they do something so unfair to dentists? No one
would ever think of doing that to schools."I just shook my head sadly, but he had brightened. "I'm going to write my
representatives and senator," he said. "I'll use the school
analogy--surely..." He walked off with that look of hope mixed with fear and
suppressed anger that I see........ in the mirror so often lately.-----------
John S. Taylor Superintendent of Schools for the Lancaster County School
District
Standardized
Tests Called Unfair
Contra Costa Times, 5/5/00
The last straw for one Bay Area educator was the day her daughter returned from elementary school dejected by the state's standardized exams.
"Mommy, I'm stupid," the girl told her mother.
"My daughter's No. 2 pencil will never touch a (state achievement test) again," said P.J. Hallam, a reading teacher and UC Berkeley doctoral student.
Hallam is among a growing number of parents and educators upset by the state exams. She calls the multiple choice tests "inhumane" and says they are especially unfair to students not yet proficient in English and students tested on material they have not been taught.
High Stakes
Tests Lead Debate at Researchers Gathering
Education Week, 5/3/00
The national movement to establish "high stakes" tests for students, and the widely publicized problems in several states with the implementation of such policies, provided a dominant theme last week as education researchers gathered here for their annual meeting.About half the states now use tests to make such important decisions as whether students will move on to the next grade or graduate from high school, and which schools qualify for rewards or penalties. But in many of the conference sessions devoted to state assessments and accountability programs, researchers expressed concerns that such tests are being widely misused.
Rather than improving student learning, some of the scholars suggested, high-stakes tests may be narrowing the curriculum, stultifying teaching practices, and driving some teachers and school administrators to cheat.
Incentives for Test-Takers Run the Gamut
Education Week, 5/3/00
What if the schools gave a test and nobody—or at least not many of the students taking it—cared?That's the situation educators and policymakers around the country believe they face as new state-mandated tests arrive in classrooms without built-in consequences for students.
Too often, educators complain, many older students, especially high school sophomores or juniors, find little to motivate them on the tests, even though their scores may determine whether a school looks good in the local press, keeps its accreditation, or qualifies for financial rewards.
Educators
Accused of Encouraging Students to Cheat
New York Times, 5/3/00
A seventh-grade teacher was accused of leaving a sheet of answers to a citywide math test near a pencil sharpener, then urging the class to sharpen their pencils and leaving the room. More than half the students marked the answers correctly.A fourth-grade teacher was accused of sneaking a peek at the state English test, discovering that the essay question concerned Cubist art, and giving her students a lecture on Cubism on the eve of the test.
They were among nine educators -- seven teachers, one paraprofessional and one librarian -- at eight schools in New York City accused of encouraging students to cheat on standardized tests, in a report issued yesterday by the special investigator for schools, Edward F. Stancik.
Teaching
to the Test
San Jose Mercury News, 4/20/00
Under enormous public pressure to boost their scores on statewide tests, California public schools are leaving nothing to chance.
They're spending thousands to buy computer programs, hire consultants, and purchase workbooks and materials. They're redesigning spelling tests and math lessons, all in an effort to help students become better test takers.
It's the age of school accountability in California. If the threat of state takeover isn't enough to keep educators on their toes, toss in the embarrassment of posting a score lower than the school next door, and you've got angst times 10.
Test
Preparation Boom
San Jose Mercury News, 4/20/00
California's new focus on standardized testing is helping fuel a boom in the test preparation market.
Companies from Massachusetts to California offer schools everything from workbooks to computer programs. For as little as $1.25 districts can buy booklets and worksheets that promise to make their students better test takers. For $100 a head, their teachers can get instruction on test-taking strategies to pass on to their students.
Revised
School Rankings Show Range of Quality Within School Districts
Sacramento Bee, 4/27/00
Several large districts around the state have both schools with the state's best test scores and schools with the state's worst scores, according to new rankings being released by the state.
Such a range of quality within districts, even large ones with diverse students, is raising questions about educational equality. The new data comes as lawmakers decide how to spend billions of dollars in education funding.
"Something's just not right," state schools Superintendent Delaine Eastin said Wednesday. "If I were one of those parents, I would be mad and they should be."
Teachers'
Abilities, School Rank Tied
New, More Accurate Data Compare Similar Schools
San Francisco Chronicle, 4/27/00
Newly revised rankings that show how well California schools perform compared with similar schools reveal that those at the bottom often have far higher rates of uncredentialed, inexperienced teachers.
The "similar-school rankings'' are being released today, six weeks after the state Department of Education yanked an inaccurate version. The new version, said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, "is only as accurate as the demographic data that go into it,'' which are supplied by school districts. Eastin said she thinks the numbers are right this time.
Blue
Books Closed -- Students Protest State Tests
New York Times, 4/13/00
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., April 12 -- The blue test booklet, stamped with the imprint of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and distributed this morning to 10th-grade classrooms throughout the state, contained a lone essay question that students had two hours to answer: describe why a supporting character in a favorite novel was essential to the plot.But Jake Levin, 15, a sophomore at Monument Mountain Regional High School in the state's northwest corner, chose instead to vent his fury at the high-stakes tests sweeping the country. He closed the booklet, pulled out six sheets of looseleaf notebook paper and wrote an essay about how a standardized exam could never measure the breadth of his abilities.
He was not alone in his defiance.
A
Test is Born
New York Times, 4/9/00
How is a standardized test made? In a politically charged environment in which several tests have been challenged in court, the quick answer is: Very carefully. And, it must be added, with much secrecy -- not only to prevent questions from reaching students before test time, but because the companies that dominate the testing market are intensely leery of surrendering any competitive advantage, real or perceived.
The
Trouble with Tests
New York Times, 4/9/00
"Put down your pencils and close your books. Time's up!'' This may be the most memorable instruction your child hears from a teacher this year.
For New York City fourth graders, who last heard that admonition in February in the final seconds of the state's reading and writing exam, failure could mean another year of fourth grade. While city officials brace for the throngs that are expected to be relegated to mandatory summer school, the stakes are high for school principals, too: under their new contract, test scores can translate into bonuses or unemployment.
State
Will Disclose School Ranking Data
Contra Costa Times, 4/8/00
Faced with a public-records lawsuit by a Southern California father, the state Department of Education has finally agreed to release information on how it calculated the botched "similar schools rankings."
The only catch? Pasadena parent René Amy won't get what he wanted most -- the lists of 100 "peer" schools the state used to devise an apparent apples-to-apples ranking in the state's first Academic Performance Index. Instead, Amy will have to crunch the numbers himself with a "how to" packet supplied by the Department of Education, said Deputy General Counsel Mike Hersher. The reason, he said, was that education officials never created the lists of schools, but instead asked the department's computers to generate only the ranking results.
Auditor
Says STAR Mediator Needed
Contra Costa Times, 4/6/00
Squabbles and lack of communication between the two agencies that oversee California public schools are hurting the state's high-stakes student achievement test program, a new audit says.
A mediator is needed to resolve disputes between the State Board of Education and the superintendent of public instruction over the Standardized Testing and Reporting program, now in its third year, said the report released Wednesday by the state auditor.
Full Text of Auditor's Report from the State Auditor's Web Page
Call
to Arms
Education Week, 4/5/00
Warren Beatty is the hot ticket this fall night at Harvard. For weeks now, the actor-cum-liberal activist has been hinting that he might run for president—a ridiculous notion, perhaps, but one that has splashed color on a campaign featuring candidates who favor beige at all costs. So with the media hyping the prospect of the once-randy Beatty bedding down in the White House, it's standing room only for the talk he's to deliver at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
A few blocks away, another liberal holds forth before another packed room, a liberal who, at least in education circles, is also something of a celebrity. Writer, lecturer, hectorer, and rabble-rouser Alfie Kohn is speaking before more than 100 students, teachers, and guests at Harvard's graduate school of education. Known for his quixotic crusades against competition in schools, Kohn is a pious populist cut from the same cloth as Ralph Nader. And in recent months, he's been as omnipresent as Nader after the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez. A new book (his seventh), op-eds in major papers, and coast-to-coast lectures have given Kohn a visible pulpit from which to rain down fire and brimstone.
The
Economic Root of Low Test Scores
Los Angeles Times, 3/26/00
Reports that 88% of California's 6,700 elementary, middle and high schools failed to meet the state's Academic Performance Index (API) goals stirred new calls for reform. Yet, the results conceal even more troubling issues. As the "new economy" spawns unprecedented disparities in wealth, social class increasingly determines academic achievement. Public schools cannot hope to improve unless the markedly unbalanced, socially divisive economic-development patterns transforming society are also corrected.
At first blush, the API rankings, which are based on last year's Stanford 9 test results, appear to be more about ethnicity than economics. Statistically, school ratings most closely correlate with the ratio of white and Latino students, the two groups that make up more than 82% of the K-12 population. API scores increase sharply as the proportion of white students rises, but fall as the ratio of Latinos grows.
Sacks, Peter. Standardized Minds : The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It. Perseus, 2000.
In the well-researched and compelling Standardized Minds, former journalist and economist Peter Sacks launches an exhaustive attack on the national obsession with testing--and lands a few hits. If you think you've heard every argument against standardized tests, think again. Sacks methodically picks away at our feeble attempts to measure the mind, reaching back into the history of testing with unsettling revelations about the creation of the first intelligence test and its many flaws. He deftly illustrates how the belief of inferior cultures motivated the creator of the SAT college entrance exam and takes on all that standardized testing has wrought: ability grouping, gifted programs, state accountability efforts--even the effect on parents whose perceptions of their own children are often shaken by scores on a sheet of paper.
Sacks peppers his critique with personal anecdotes and tales from testing "victims," whether they be the highly educated, well-to-do parents whose children struggle with Manhattan's preschool "baby boards" or the successful New York Times business reporter whose career-center test scores suggest he try another line of work. Once labeled a "lefty education gadfly" by the National Review, Sacks lives up to his nickname as he makes a case for replacing standardized test scores with academic portfolios that include essays, schoolwork, and more comprehensive examples of a student's performance. But his argument should give even his most conservative critics pause: Standardized Minds is a persuasive must-read for parents, educators, and lawmakers that challenges our basic assumptions about intelligence and pays homage to the talented minds we may have overlooked in our fervor to rate the human brain.
Ohanian, Susan. One Size Fits Few -- The Folly of Educational Standards. Heinemann, 1999.
Stephen Krashen, Author of Every Person a Reader:
Ohanian asks us to consider a sane, powerful alternative to the insanity of streamlined, sanitized, standard Standards for all: listen to and trust teachers and kids!Jon Scieszka, Author of Squids Will Be Squids:
Here, in one smart, funny, loving book, is everything you need to know about the dangers of educational standards. Read it before it's too late.Jim Trelease, Author of The Read-Aloud Handbook
Let's save everyone a lot of trouble, money, and effort: Make Susan Ohanian the Secretary of Education.Jim Hightower, Author of There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos
Ohanian's brilliant polemic [is] sure to make you howl with laughter, scowl with anger, and rethink everything you ever thought you believed about Standards.
More
Kids Should Take STAR
Contra Costa Times, 3/25/00
Chalk up one more pressure for educators involved in this spring's STAR tests: Hundreds of California schools may have to test more of their students -- sometimes far more -- to qualify for the $96 million improvement program linked to the state's multiple-choice exams.
A committee advising the state Board of Education on California's new carrot-and-stick accountability program recommended early this month that only schools testing at least 95 percent of their students be eligible for the awards.
Get
it Right -- The API's Stakes are Too High for Faulty Data
Sacramento Bee, 3/19/00
The latest snafu with the state's hastily cobbled Academic Performance Index (API), the new ranking system for public schools, underlines again the folly of basing a high-stakes accountability program on faulty or incomplete data. The program's most recent problem comes with the portion of the API that initially promised to provide the most enlightening information about school performance, the "similar-schools ranking."
Trustee
Decries STAR Test
Marin Independent Journal, 3/14/00
A trustee of the Tamalpais Union High School District thinks students should not have to take the state-mandated STAR test because they already have enough tests and enough pressure on them.
Richard Raznikov had planned to go to Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo at lunch time yesterday to urge students to refuse to take the test tomorrow and Thursday. But he backed off after a district official told him that as a trustee, he cannot legally discourage students from taking the test.
Just Say
'No' to STAR Test
Richard Raznikov, Marin Independent
Journal, 3/14/00
The STAR test is yet another in the rapidly multiplying standardized examinations created by professional educators and shoved down the constricted throats of students. It has no actual educational purpose other than to enrich its creators and give politicians and bureaucrats a lot of data, which they will then misinterpret before using it as a club to enforce greater conformity in the state's classrooms.
Wiggins, Grant P. Educative Assessment : Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. Josey-Bass, 1998.
Assessment For Excellence answers the challenging questions surrounding the design of new performance-based assessments, written by the nation's foremost expert on the subject, Grant P. Wiggins. He provides guidance on how to design performance-based assessments for use in the classroom. According to Wiggins, such assessments must be designed to provide useful feedback to students, not just to help them gain knowledge and skills, but to help them "understand" what they're learning.
More
Money Hasn't Meant Better Test Scores
Boston Globe, 3/10/00
WALTHAM, MA - Seven years after the state embarked on a multibillion-dollar spending plan to turn out better students, there is still no clear link between the education reform money and improved test scores, a report released yesterday found.
Saying it may be too early to expect dramatic results, proponents of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act, including Governor Paul Cellucci and Senate President Thomas F. Birmingham, renewed pledges to continue funding the mammoth school experiment and most of all, to make sure districts are following the letter of the 1993 law.
Rankings
of Similar Schools Full of Errors
San Francisco Examiner, 3/10/00
A ranking that compares more than 7,000 public schools in California is invalid because it is filled with mistakes, state education officials said Friday.
The "similar-schools ranking" - one part of the Academic Performance Index - was pulled Wednesday from the state Department of Education's Web site. The ranking had been touted by local and state education officials as the only accurate and fair way to compare, for example, inner city schools with other inner city schools, rather than with schools in the suburbs.
State
Pulls School Rankings -- Miscount of Poor Kids Skewed Statistics
San Francisco Chronicle, 3/10/00
A much-ballyhooed ranking of how California public schools stack up academically against similar schools was filled with mistakes and will have to be refigured, state education officials said yesterday.
But Wednesday, state education officials yanked the similar-schools ranking off the Education Department's Web site after administrators at about half the state's schools said they had incorrectly filled out a questionnaire attached to last year's statewide achievement test. The ratings under the Academic Performance Index were not affected.
Standardized Testing Not for Everybody
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 3/10/00
Maybe in an ideal world, Alfie Kohn would be in charge of education and Tommy G. Thompson would be the dissident voice.
In that world, classrooms would be filled with intellectual growth and eager exploration of new paths in learning. The teacher would be the enabler, the coach, the guide who helps point the student in the right direction, then watches the student proceed in rewarding fashion.
In that world, standardized testing would occupy a small and much revamped part of educational life.
And in that world, the governor might sound like a grumpy guy, demanding that students be held accountable for meeting fixed standards and that teachers be judged, at least in part, by how their students do.
Today's announcement: It's not an ideal world.
States Face
Limited Choices in Assessment Market
Education Week, 3/8/00
Harcourt Educational Measurement has not had a stellar year. California slapped the testing company with a $1.1 million fine for administrative errors committed last summer. Then this winter, Vermont received rebates from Harcourt because of mistakes in scoring state exams in 1998 and 1999.Despite such problems, the San Antonio-based company recently landed a $76 million contract to direct Massachusetts’ assessment program next fall.
At a time when state officials are under increasing pressure to implement high-stakes assessments, they typically turn to the same pool of testing contractors again and again—regardless of some embarrassing glitches—because of the dominance of a few large companies. "The fact that we got three substantial bids was actually great. Some states face the problem of putting out proposals and not getting any," said Jeff Nellhaus, the Massachusetts state testing director.
Parent
Sues to Get Schools Ranking Data
Contra Costa Times, 3/4/00
The Department of Education has been sued for refusing to release information on how it ranked more than 7,000 schools in the state's first Academic Performance Index.
The state Department of Education, believing that its similar-schools groupings were erroneous, has refused to disclose the information.
Merit
Pay Proposed for L.A. Teachers
Los Angeles Times, 3/4/00
Los Angeles school officials are proposing a new teachers contract that for the first time would link pay to student achievement, an idea that is likely to trigger a bitter confrontation with the teachers union.
The bulk of the incentives would be targeted at the district's lowest-performing schools, about 300 campuses that landed at the bottom of the state's recent academic rankings.
Teachers at those schools could earn as much as $7,000 a year in additional income if schoolwide scores rose by a prescribed amount and they developed specialized skills in math, science or other subjects. Individual teachers also could be rewarded if their students demonstrated marked success or improvement on the Stanford 9 exam and Advanced Placement tests.
Focus
on Testing Sparks Industry Boom
San Jose Mercury News, 2/21/00
California's new focus on standardized testing is helping fuel a boom in the test preparation market.Companies from Massachusetts to California offer schools everything from workbooks to computer programs. For as little as $1.25 districts can buy booklets and worksheets that promise to make their students better test takers. For $100 a head, their teachers can get instruction on test-taking strategies to pass on to their students.
Teaching
to the Test
San Jose Mercury News, 2/21/00
Under enormous public pressure to boost their scores on statewide tests, California public schools are leaving nothing to chance.
They're spending thousands to buy computer programs, hire consultants, and purchase workbooks and materials. They're redesigning spelling tests and math lessons, all in an effort to help students become better test takers.
It's the age of school accountability in California. If the threat of state takeover isn't enough to keep educators on their toes, toss in the embarrassment of posting a score lower than the school next door, and you've got angst times 10.
Study Links
School Size, Test Scores
Dallas Morning News, 2/5/00
Lower-income students in Texas and three other states have done better academically in smaller schools than in larger ones, according to a study published Thursday.
The study conducted by education researchers at Ohio University and Marshall University found that school size is a significant factor in achievement levels for children from lower-income families.
Study: School Size, Poverty, and Student Achievement from the Rural School and Community Trust Website
- View a summary of the Georgia study results.
- View a summary of the Montana study results.
- View a summary of the Ohio study results.
- View a summary of the Texas study results.
Grim.
Giddy. Scared. -- New York's 4th Grade Test
New York Times, 2/4/00
When Lily Sacharow got to her fourth-grade classroom yesterday, she was met with an eerie sight. Brown paper wrapping and black plastic garbage bags covered the walls of the girl's classroom as if something improper were underneath.
It was the last day of the three-day standardized reading and writing test for fourth graders, and everything the children had lovingly placed on the walls, from book charts to writing tips in a childish scrawl, was off limits for fear it might be used to cheat. A Board of Education monitor patrolled the halls.
Eastin
Refuses to Release 'Similar Schools' Data
Contra Costa Times, 2/3/00
State Superintendent of Instruction Delaine Eastin has refused to release data used to compile the "similar schools rankings" portion of the week-old Academic Performance Index until the information is "cleaned up."
In denying a public-records request for the data, Eastin said its release now would make people angry because the Department of Education might have placed schools in the wrong peer groups. She blamed inaccurate data about student demographics that were supplied by local districts last year. "We are damned if we do, and we are damned if we don't," said Eastin, adding that 400 schools had reported potential problems with their peer ranks. "We are in the process of amending the data."
State
Begins Review of Missing School Results
Los Angeles Times, 1/28/00
The state Department of Education began a review Thursday of what to do about seven Los Angeles schools, including Palisades Charter High School, that were left off the statewide Academic Performance Index in an apparent mix-up over their classification as "alternative" schools.
'Similar
Schools' Ranking Puzzles Many Educators
Contra Costa Times, 1/27/00
The number compares a school's scores to 100 others with like student bodies -- but the selection of those groups also raises eyebrows .
...but neither Neary nor other principals across the state know exactly how the Department of Education arrived at the second 1-to-10 label, referred to on API reports as the similar schools ranking. That index feature was one intended to group 100 campuses with similar demographics and teacher staffs to offer a fairer comparison.
Schools won't know much more about their peer rating until March. That's when the state Department of Education says it will release on the Internet the list of 100 schools it chose to group with each school before handing out a comparative ranking.
Statewide
Ranking Highlights Inequality in School Districts -- List Shows Two Tiered
Education System
San Francisco Examiner, 1/26/00
At Starr King Elementary at the base of Potrero Hill, Principal Jonetta Leek said it's discouraging to struggle daily to make improvements only to be given the lowest school ranking in the state.
Across town, School of the Arts' Principal Yvonne McClung said her staff took time out to exult in their perfect 10 ranking, the top score given to a school.
Whether in San Francisco, where 27 percent of schools scored from 1 to 3 - in a ranking of 1 to 10 in which 10 is the highest - or in Oakland, where 67 percent of schools scored from 1 to 3, the index highlights a two-tiered system of public education. At one end are schools that are succeeding with an 8, 9 or 10; at the other are schools earning the state's equivalent of an F.
Rankings
in on California Test Results
San Francisco Chronicle, 1/26/00
Wealthy South Bay and Peninsula schools emerged as some of the highest performers in the state yesterday, with San Francisco's Lowell High not far from the top, according to California's first-ever school-by-school rankings.
For the first time, parents, teachers, home-buyers -- anyone -- can see a ranking of each school, how it stacks up against those with similar demographics and how much it is expected to improve in a year.
Reports from California Department of Education Website
Vast
Majority of State Schools Lag in New Index
Los Angeles Times, 1/26/00
Eighty-eight percent of California's public schools fell below the state target for achievement, according to the state's first-ever ranking of elementary, middle and high schools, released Tuesday.
Pockets of excellence emerged in predictable areas, notably the affluent, high-tech mecca of Santa Clara County in the Bay Area. In Los Angeles County, the best-performing districts included those in Manhattan Beach and San Marino and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
Demand
for School Data Overwhelms State's Low-Tech System
Los Angeles Times, 1/26/00
The first-ever ranking of California's public schools is part of an effort to prepare students for the high-tech 21st century.
But the California Department of Education, the agency responsible for releasing the much-anticipated comparison over the Internet, apparently needs its own computer lessons.
The department's low-tech Web page, designed to accommodate only about 800 visitors at a time, was quickly overwhelmed Tuesday as thousands of school officials, parents and media outlets throughout the nation's most populous state attempted to see how their schools stacked up.
By midday, it was clear to state officials that downloading the voluminous statistics had become impossible amid the massive overload, and state schools Supt. Delaine Eastin ordered them to do "whatever it takes" to get a grip on the situation. They took the Web page down.
To Help
Lift Dismal Test Scores, California Ranks Public Schools
New York Times, 1/26/00
SACRAMENTO, Feb. 25 -- California ranked its nearly 7,000 public schools today for the first time as part of an ambitious effort to raise dismal test scores, and those with high numbers of minority and poor children drew the lowest marks
Teachers
in Creating Probe Face Discipline
Los Angeles Times, 1/22/00
A dozen teachers at Banning High School in Wilmington will be disciplined after school officials determined that they showed copies of the Stanford 9 exam to their students before last spring's testing. Another teacher resigned after being confronted with evidence of the cheating on the standardized basic skills exam, said Shel Erlich, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Testing experts have long warned that cheating can be an outgrowth of the pressure educators feel when standardized test scores are used to make important decisions about students and schools. (Emphasis added) California is embarking on a statewide school accountability program that will, for at least a couple of years, have scores on the Stanford 9 exam as its sole measure.
Test
Attendance Uneven
Contra Costa Times, 1/21/00
More than a half-million California schoolchildren did not take the full battery of standardized tests that will be used to rank and reward or sanction their schools, according to statistics obtained by the Times.
Of the state's 4.47 million students in grades two to 11 last year, 3.84 million, or 86 percent, took all sections of the high-stakes Stanford 9 achievement test, figures from the state Department of Education show. State law requires all students in those grades take the Stanford 9 as part of California's Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program, unless excused by parents or special-education plans. About 130,000, or 3 percent, received waivers in 1999. The others did not have approved exemptions.
Nagging Problems of STAR
Contra Costa Times, 1/9/00
Thousands of students didn't take all or part of last year's tests, casting doubt on the state's reward program for improvement
Sporadic student participation in California's 1999 standardized testing program casts doubt about how reliable the test scores will be as the sole basis for a high-stakes statewide ranking of schools to be released this week, a Times analysis of test data indicates.
At Castlemont High in Oakland, for example, half the students did not take the tests. In an act of protest, administrators exempted students with limited English ability, saying it wasn't fair to test them. And, voila, the school's average scores rose over the previous year.
New
Test-Taking Skill -- Working the System
Los Angeles Times, 1/9/00
The number of students who get extra time to complete the SAT because of a claimed learning disability has soared by more than 50% in recent years, with the bulk of the growth coming from exclusive private schools and public schools in mostly wealthy, white suburbs.
The predominance of rich, white teenage boys among those claiming disabilities troubles members of the College Board, which owns the examination. Their fear is that the accommodations, rather than helping those with real disabilities, have increasingly become a way of gaming the system--allowing privileged families to gain advantage on a high-stakes exam.
Report
Finds Standards Movement Weak
Los Angeles Times, 1/6/00
The decade-old national movement toward adopting academic standards for public school students is more form than substance, with most states still expecting far too little, a new report from a conservative think tank concludes.
Although there are exceptions--California being one of them--most states' standards are weak, vague, difficult to measure or are not linked to policies that reward success and punish failure, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation says in a report to be released today.
Davis
Vows to Lift Poor Schools
San Francisco Chronicle, 1/6/00
Declaring "war on mediocrity in our public schools,'' Gov. Gray Davis called last night for greater incentives to increase the number of skilled teachers, particularly in low-performing schools.
Scholarships
for Test Scores Criticized
San Francisco Chronicle, 1/6/00
Teachers and other education experts last night praised Gov. Gray Davis' proposals to attract more teachers to tough schools, but they slammed his plan to shower scholarship money on students with top test scores.
School Cheating
Up as Stakes Rise
Christian Science Monitor, 12/14/99
The increased emphasis on standardized-test scores is driving more students, and staff too, to break the rules.
It used to be simple: Students stowed crib notes on a piece of paper in a shoe, scrawled answers on their arm, or looked over the shoulder of the smart person nearby. The idea was to get good grades without staying up all night studying.
Today, while many of the same practices persist, cheating in American schools has become far more sophisticated - and the stakes far higher. In an era of standardized testing, everything from teachers' pay to principals' jobs is linked to student performance - intensifying the pressure to "do anything" for high scores.
A Message from Educational Testing Service
Welcome to the Educational Testing Service/The Advertising Council campaign to discourage academic cheating. Several months ago ETS entered into a partnership with the Ad Council to develop a national campaign to increase awareness about the prevalence of academic cheating and to spark a national discussion of this serious issue.
In both our schools and workplaces, cheating undermines integrity and fairness at all levels. In fact, studies show that up to 92% of high school students say that cheating is "commonplace." Cheating is a barrier to learning that can lead to weak performance in many areas of life.
The ultimate goals of this campaign are to persuade children not to cheat and to not accept cheating among their friends. ETS and the Ad Council hope to reach students ages 10 - 14 through a series of national public service announcements for TV, print and radio. The campaign slogan is "Cheating is a Personal Foul." Each ad conveys the message that doing what's right brings a feeling of pride and a sense of accomplishment.
We are confident that this campaign will have a powerful, measurable, and long-term beneficial impact on our children, our nation's educational system and society as a whole.
NYC Probe
Levels Test-Cheating Charges
Education Week, 12/15/99
More than 50 New York City educators face dismissal after an independent auditor accused them of helping students cheat on standardized tests given by the city and the state.City Schools Chancellor Rudolph F. Crew said he would use the evidence collected by city investigators in upcoming administrative hearings to determine whether the tenured employees will be fired.
"I want to make an example of people who have cheated," Mr. Crew said in an interview. "I'm going to be as harsh as the day is long on the people who are culpable. I will fire them as quickly as I possibly can."
Graduates
with Portfolios, Not Test Scores
New York Times, 12/15/99
Alec I. Reinstein built an I.B.M.-compatible computer from scratch. Luis Cabrera explored the inner workings of the Manhattan borough president's office. And Walamais Cherdkethawut created her own number system.As tens of thousands of high school seniors across New York State prepare for the newly required English Regents exam to earn their diplomas, students in about 40 alternative high schools, most of them in New York City, are working on individually tailored projects, known as portfolios, to meet alternative state graduation requirements.
Board
Names 9 Dismissed Over Test Cheating
New York Times, 12/15/99
The New York City Board of Education yesterday identified nine employees -- four regular teachers, two substitute teachers and three teachers' aides -- who were dismissed last week for helping students cheat on standardized tests.
School
Cheating Inquiry Brings New Stain on Districts with Troubled Histories
New York Times, 12/13/99
When investigators charged last week that teachers and principals in 18 of New York City's 33 school districts had helped students cheat on standardized tests, it came as no surprise to veteran school officials that several of the implicated districts had long histories of corruption.
The
Higher the Stakes, the Greater the Temptation?
New York Times, 12/12/99
Last week, investigators in New York City said they had uncovered the most widespread public-school cheating scandal in the nation, encompassing 32 schools, dozens of teachers and two principals. The methods -- from teachers using palm cards to overzealous test coaching -- were so varied and so widespread that they might only be the tip of the iceberg, investigators contended.
Nine
Fired and Eleven Others Face Dismissal in Cheating Scandal
New York Times, 12/12/99
Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew has fired 9 educators and taken steps to dismiss 11 others in the latest fallout from a cheating scandal in New York City's public schools.
Dr. Crew fired three teachers' aides and six teachers who did not have tenure on Thursday evening after concluding that they helped students cheat on standardized tests, said Pam McDonnell, a spokeswoman for the Board of Education.
Union
Challenges Investigator's Finding on Teacher Cheating
New York Times, 12/10/99
The New York City teachers' union Thursday called an investigator's finding that dozens of teachers had helped students cheat on standardized tests exaggerated and unfair, and officials at the Board of Education suggested that the report was aimed at undercutting Chancellor Rudy Crew while his future was being decided.
Leaders of the United Federation of Teachers said the report unfairly implied that cheating was rampant in the city's 1,100 schools, and they asserted that some of the 43 teachers charged with cheating appeared to have been wrongly accused. At a news conference, Randi Weingarten, the union's president, announced that the union had hired its own investigators to study the report's allegations.
High
School Exit Exam Hits Roadblock
Los Angeles Times, 12/10/99
California's plans for a high school exit exam, intended to be the centerpiece of Gov. Gray Davis' ambitious education reform efforts, have been thrown into turmoil because of the state's muddle over what should be tested and the resulting unwillingness of commercial companies to develop the exam in time for field-testing next spring.
Particularly at issue, state officials say, is algebra. Davis has insisted that students be tested on their knowledge of that subject, yet state law does not make algebra a condition of high school graduation.
New York
School Officials Helped Students Cheat
Los Angeles Times, 12/9/99
Teachers and administrators at 32 New York City schools helped students cheat on standardized tests by providing them with questions in advance and even marking test forms for them, a special investigator for city schools charged Tuesday.
His report describes crude cheating schemes designed to improve elementary and middle schools' performance on city and state tests.
Scandal's
Three R's -- Read, Right, Wrong
New York Times, 12/9/99
Valerie Wright, 37, of the South Bronx said she began to suspect that her sons' school was encouraging cheating two years ago when her older boy came home one day and said his practice test was a lot like the citywide reading exam.
"It was after the fact, so I didn't do anything about it," she recalled Wednesday as she dropped her younger son off at the school, Community Elementary School 90.
"But I told him it wasn't right and that it was cheating."
Parents like Ms. Wright said they often found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to teach their children that what their teachers were doing was not right.
Answers
Allegedly Supplied in Effort to Increase Test Scores
New York Times, 12/8/99
School investigators charged Tuesday that dozens of teachers and two principals across New York City's public school system had given students the answers on the standardized reading and mathematics tests that help determine how schools are ranked and whether students move on to the next grade.
The cheating, over five years, involved more students and more educators than any recent cheating case in American public schools, the investigators said.
Teachers
Tell How Cheating Worked
New York Times, 12/8/99
A year after he arrived at Community Elementary School 90, Jon Nichols, a mathematics teacher, was approached by the principal, Richard Wallin, with what seemed at first an unusual pep talk.
"I was taken into the office at the beginning of the school year and told that the students were expected to do well -- no matter what it takes," Nichols recalled Tuesday at the school in the Concourse section of the Bronx. "At the time, I didn't know what that meant exactly."
He learned soon enough. It meant cheating, and Nichols and other teachers were provided with detailed instruction, down to palm-sized crib notes to check against students' answer sheets as they took city and state examinations, according to accounts from Nichols, other teachers and Edward F. Stancik, the special investigator for New York City schools. Stancik released a report Tuesday asserting widespread cheating on city and state exams over the last four years.
Calkins, Lucy M. et al. A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests. Heinemann, 1998.
In recent years, the increasingly high stakes attached to norm-referenced reading tests have made it harder to hold onto what we believe about language arts education. Now, Lucy Calkins, Kate Montgomery, and Donna Santman meet us in the true trenches, offering companionship and guidance in the most lonely, complex, and sometimes heartbreaking area of our teaching: preparing students for standardized reading tests.
Written with the intimacy, inspiration, and classroom-based practicality we've come to expect from The Art of Teaching Writing, A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests reflects the authors' belief that in order to be less victimized by tests, we need to be more knowledgeable about them. To that end, their book:
"If our students do well on tests," write the authors, "we are in a far stronger position to be critical of those same tests." With A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests, educators can achieve these results, and advocate for and use forms of assessment that inform teaching and support student learning.
- provides a complete overview of tests, showing us how to use this information to be more powerful and more articulate participants in today's political conversations and in our interactions with colleagues, parents, and our students
- demonstrates how the methods we've come to trust in the reading and writing workshop can be built upon and adapted as we do test-preparation work with our students
- rethinks the reading workshop in light of standardized tests, describing predictable challenges children will face when taking tests and ways we can help children develop the capabilities to meet those challenges
- provides guidelines for reading and interpreting test results, enabling us to minimize the damage caused by troubling scores.
Emphasis
on Scores Comes at a Price
New York Times, 11/24/99
There is a national consensus that students need more competency in reading, math, science and history.
But Americans also want schools to teach citizenship, healthful lifestyles and creativity. When people rely mostly on test scores to assess school quality, do they unwittingly sacrifice these other goals?
Stanford-9
Publisher Wins New, Larger Contract
Los Angeles Times, 11/10/99
A company that has written California's statewide school test for the last two years and was plagued with problems this year will get more money for its third effort.
State
Retains Testing Firm Despite Errors
Contra Costa Times, 11/10/99
The publisher responsible for a series of errors and delays in this year's STAR test results got a $28 million nod -- including a raise -- from the state Tuesday to administer the test to California's 4 million public-school students again next year.
State officials said they were anything but happy with Harcourt after all the problems this year, but had little choice but to use it another year -- and increase its pay for the effort. The state Board of Education approved a state contract that will pay Harcourt $6.53 for each student, for a total of about $28 million, a more than $5 million increase from the previous year.
The state board also voted to let Harcourt off the hook from additional punishment for its earlier errors by agreeing to return a $2.2 million performance bond that had been posted for the 1999 exams. Harcourt risked losing some or all of that money after several errors prompted delays in the release of school and district reports on the 1999 STAR and some students to receive inaccurate reports.
Davis
Gets Okay on Plan to Rank Schools
San Francisco Chronicle, 11/10/99
Gov. Gray Davis made a rare appearance before the state Board of Education yesterday and secured approval of an academic performance index, the cornerstone of his education package.
The index will rank all schools and measure their performance annually. Schools that perform well will receive financial rewards, while those that fail to improve face a state takeover and being shut down.
Grilling
Our Young
Salon Magazine, 11/8/99
The SAT test coaching industry goes after kindergartners. Little blank slates mean great big bucks.
Needed:
A Watchdog for Standardized Test Makers
Editorial -- Larry Cuban, Stanford University
Los Angeles Times, 11/7/99
For schools facing escalating pressures of an accountability system harnessed to test scores, the temptation to engage in shady practices also runs strong. Over the years, there have been instances of schools and districts tampering with student scores, underreporting low results, preventing certain groups of students who would probably drag down results from taking tests and other unsavory practices.
Because of these instances and because public schools are now viewed as a national instrument for keeping the U.S. competitive in the global economy, why not establish a SEC-like federal agency for schools that would ensure the integrity of standardized-test scores?
Another
Mistake in New York Standardized Test Scores
New York Times, 10/23/99
The company that miscalculated the test scores of thousands of New York City students last spring has fumbled again, printing math scores for all of the state's eighth graders on the wrong forms.A spokesman for the company, CTB/McGraw-Hill, said the error was discovered after the test scores were sent to school districts throughout the state this week. Each report should have included a brief description of the student's performance level in math, but instead they described reading levels.
Stanford
Report Questions Accuracy of Tests
Education Week, 10/6/99
How often will a student who really belongs at the 50th percentile according to national test norms actually score within 5 percentile points of that ranking on a test?
The answer, a Stanford University statistician says in a new report, is only about 30 percent of the time in mathematics and 42 percent in reading.
Students
Skip School to Avoid Test
Sacramento Bee, 10/1/99
About 150 to 200 students stayed home from Foothill High School on each of three days this week to avoid taking a standardized test that is being given throughout the Grant Joint Union High School District.The test is not part of the regular, state-mandated testing program, but is part of the national norming process for the Stanford 9 achievement tests that are given in California public schools each spring, said John Parks, interim principal at Foothill.
Assessment
Experts Fret Over Limitations of High-Stakes Testing
Education Week, 9/29/99
Many of the nation's top testing experts gathered here recently to ponder the question: "Benchmarks for Accountability: Are We There Yet?" The experts say no, even though they know policymakers want them to say yes.Researchers spent most of the two-day conference explaining the technical limitations of test-based accountability. But they need to stop being "academic naysayers," Lorraine M. McDonnell, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told more than 300 researchers, state testing directors, and local officials at the annual conference of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, or CRESST.
How
Accurate are S.T.A.R. Testing Results for Individual Students?
David Rogosa, Stanford University, 8/99
National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards,
and Student Testing (CRESST)
Schools
Learn Perils of Using a Single Test
Los Angeles Times, 9/25/99
With public education in New York City thrown into disarray by a test scoring flub, educators are sounding the alarm anew: It is dangerous to rely on the scores from a single standardized test to make life-altering decisions about students or schools.
Davis Links
Bonuses to SAT-9 Scores
Los Angeles Times, 9/19/99
Gov. Gray Davis told a conference of 6,000 teachers and other educators Saturday that the state will provide $150 bonuses per student to every public school in California that improves its scores five percentile points on next spring's Stanford 9 test.
The state will also offer cash awards of $5,000 to 400 elementary and middle schools that win a reading contest, based not on performance but on the number of pages their students read, he added.
Newsweek
Cover Story: The Truth About Testing
Newsweek Magazine, 9/6/99
High-stakes tests are becoming a rite of passage in American schools. But do they get in the way of actual learning?
Inside Chicago's top-ranked Whitney Young High School, the posters started appearing last December. LET'S BE #1! GIVE IT 110%! Usually this sort of rah-rah propaganda supports the basketball team, but this campaign by the principal had a different aim: urging kids to score high on the Illinois Goal Assessment Program, a standardized test that students would take in February. Tests are nothing new to the kids at Whitney Young — they already take three other batteries of standardized exams each year. But for a group of high-achieving 11th graders, the pressure was just too much. These kids say real learning is being shoved aside as teachers focus on boosting test scores. Creative writing? Forget it. Instead, they say, teachers emphasize a boilerplate essay format that exam scorers prefer. So on Feb. 2, eight juniors purposely failed the social-studies portion of the test. The next day 10 failed the science test. Then they sent a letter to the principal: "We refuse to feed into this test-taking frenzy."
State
Still Hasn't Settled on a Testing System
Los Angeles Times, 8/25/99
Earlier this summer, state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin emerged somewhat surprisingly as a staunch advocate of the main element of the state's student testing system, the Stanford 9 exam.
Never a fan of the tests, Eastin nonetheless defended them amid a tidal wave of bad news about scoring screw-ups and faulty data.
To have any hope of making progress on its journey toward improving its public schools, she said repeatedly, California must stop changing its testing program every year and "stay the course."
Now Eastin seems to have forgotten her own admonition. She is proposing not only to change direction on testing but, many in Sacramento believe, to blow up the ship.
Standardized
Tests Flunk Common Sense 101
San Francisco Examiner, 8/23/99
The people who make decisions about California's public schools are enraptured at the moment by the notion that scoring every kid nationwide on the exact same test will make our schools great.This idea is propelled by a weird political whirlwind rather than by common sense or educational know-how.
This op-ed piece ends with the following paragraph:
But we don't want our kids' time wasted on a frenzy of meaningless tests — especially when they're produced, processed and scored in a dither of comical ineptitude.
State Board
Fines Test Maker $1.1 million
Sacramento Bee, 8/3/99
The publishers of California's statewide student achievement test were slapped Monday with $1.1 million in penalties by the state Board of Education, the result of a flawed testing process dogged by delays and miscounts.By a 6-0 vote, board members also warned the San Antonio-based Harcourt Educational Measurement that if its assessment program is not fixed by fall, $2.2 million in fines will follow.
Limited-English
Students Boost Test Scores
San Jose Mercury News, 7/23/99
In the first year under a new law banning most California bilingual education programs, students who are not fluent in English improved their performance on the statewide achievement test, according to results released Thursday.
SAT-9 Test Scores Due Out Today
According to a report in this morning's S.F. Chronicle, SAT-9 scores are due to be posted on the California State Department of Education's website by 10 am today -- 22 days late. Education reporter Nanette Asimov states the news bluntly:
Test scores for every California school and district are due out today after a three-week delay caused by blunders as bald-faced as those of any careless student.
Test
Maker Could Lose Money because of Mistakes
S.F. Examiner, 7/13/99
Slawski (Ed Slawski, a senior research scientist for Harcourt) said that "one employee for one shift reversed two codes," so the students in year-around schools "were compared to the wrong norm group." Slawski acknowledged that the mistake and resulting delay give Harcourt a black eye. "Any kind of error has people questioning the integrity of the results, and we don't want that to happen," Slawski said. "We're taking such actions as are necessary to make sure this won't happen again."
Harcourt
Screws Up Again
S.F. Chronicle, 7/13/99
This time, publisher Harcourt Educational Measurement miscalculated results for about 190,000 children in year-round schools. The error means that test scores for each school and district will be released next week rather than Thursday, as the company had promised.
More
on the California Testing SNAFU
S.F. Chronicle, 7/12/99
For the second year in a row, Harcourt mixed up scores for limited-English-speaking children, delaying the release of test results. The publisher also miscalculated results in at least a dozen districts with year-round schools, which may postpone the promised release of the data this week.
And, earlier this spring, Harcourt's late delivery of test booklets threatened the testing season in 136 of California's 1,100 school districts. The company also sent blank data disks to about 600 districts before discovering the problem.
"There's no one in charge,'' said a source within Harcourt, who declined to be named. "This thing is out of control. You've got the California Board of Education, competing voices in the state Department of Education, the governor -- and 1,100 separate contracts.''
Error May
Have Skewed State Test Results
L.A. Times, 6/30/99
The private company that is paid $34 million to administer statewide achievement tests admitted Tuesday that it had misclassified about 300,000 students as not being fluent in English, a blunder that may have skewed school district reports across California for the past month.
LATEST INFORMATION FROM THE CALIFORNIA STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION:
TEST RESULTS:
RELATED WEB PAGES
California State Department of Education's Homepage
FairTest -- The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) is an advocacy organization working to end the abuses, misuses and flaws of standardized testing and ensure that evaluation of students and workers is fair, open, and educationally sound.
Harcourt Brace & Company's STAR Program Website
BOOKS
McNeil, Linda L. Contradictions in School Reform -- the Educational Costs of Standardized Testing. Routledge, June 2000.
Sacks, Peter. Standardized Minds : The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It. Perseus, 2000.
Sacks peppers his critique with personal anecdotes and tales from testing "victims," whether they be the highly educated, well-to-do parents whose children struggle with Manhattan's preschool "baby boards" or the successful New York Times business reporter whose career-center test scores suggest he try another line of work. Once labeled a "lefty education gadfly" by the National Review, Sacks lives up to his nickname as he makes a case for replacing standardized test scores with academic portfolios that include essays, schoolwork, and more comprehensive examples of a student's performance. But his argument should give even his most conservative critics pause: Standardized Minds is a persuasive must-read for parents, educators, and lawmakers that challenges our basic assumptions about intelligence and pays homage to the talented minds we may have overlooked in our fervor to rate the human brain.
Ohanian, Susan. One Size Fits Few -- The Folly of Educational Standards. Heinemann, 1999.
Ohanian asks us to consider a sane, powerful alternative to the insanity of streamlined, sanitized, standard Standards for all: listen to and trust teachers and kids!Jon Scieszka, Author of Squids Will Be Squids:
Here, in one smart, funny, loving book, is everything you need to know about the dangers of educational standards. Read it before it's too late.Jim Trelease, Author of The Read-Aloud Handbook
Let's save everyone a lot of trouble, money, and effort: Make Susan Ohanian the Secretary of Education.Jim Hightower, Author of There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos
Ohanian's brilliant polemic [is] sure to make you howl with laughter, scowl with anger, and rethink everything you ever thought you believed about Standards.
Wiggins, Grant P. Educative Assessment : Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. Josey-Bass, 1998.
Calkins, Lucy M. et al. A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests. Heinemann, 1998.
Written with the intimacy, inspiration, and classroom-based practicality we've come to expect from The Art of Teaching Writing, A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests reflects the authors' belief that in order to be less victimized by tests, we need to be more knowledgeable about them. To that end, their book:
"If our students do well on tests," write the authors, "we are in a far stronger position to be critical of those same tests." With A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests, educators can achieve these results, and advocate for and use forms of assessment that inform teaching and support student learning.
- provides a complete overview of tests, showing us how to use this information to be more powerful and more articulate participants in today's political conversations and in our interactions with colleagues, parents, and our students
- demonstrates how the methods we've come to trust in the reading and writing workshop can be built upon and adapted as we do test-preparation work with our students
- rethinks the reading workshop in light of standardized tests, describing predictable challenges children will face when taking tests and ways we can help children develop the capabilities to meet those challenges
- provides guidelines for reading and interpreting test results, enabling us to minimize the damage caused by troubling scores.
Rothman, Robert. Measuring Up: Standards, Assessment, and School Reform. Jossey Bass, 1995.
If educational assessment reform proceeds on schedule, students of the '90s need
never fear that standardized test results will be forever emblazoned on their
permanent records. An educational revolution is under way to promote the use, in
elementary and secondary schools, of performance-based outcomes that would be
measured against predetermined standards in lieu of input-based assessments,
such as multiple-choice tests. Rothman agrees it is time for schools to discard
traditional means of determining what students know and to replace them with
methods that assess metacognitive thinking skills useful in the real world. As
adults, all students will need to make decisions, solve problems, communicate,
and work in teams. Therefore, schools need to devise methods to teach and test
these skills in practical ways. This general overview of learning assessment is
for parents, teachers, and policy makers and is written by a journalist with
expertise in educational practice and policy. If Rothman is right, future
students will see multiple-choice and true-and-false questions go the way of the
dinosaur. Make way for oral reports, groups projects, and portfolios. A
well-researched, balanced portrayal of a hot educational topic.
MEDIA ARTICLES
Note: Some links to articles remain valid for a limited period of time after their publication date (e.g. one week to a month). This is due to the fact that they are placed in the newspaper's or magazine's "archives." If you encounter an error message retrieving one of these articles from this site, you can usually go to their site and search for it in their archives. Most often, this is a free service although there is occasionally a small charge.
Oakland
Schools Acknowledge Test Gains were Overstated
S.F. Chronicle, 7/3/99
Oakland school officials have acknowledged that they made a mistake this week by overstating gains in student scores on this year's statewide performance tests.
Student
Scores Improve is Statewide Test -- California Still Below National Average
S.F. Chronicle, 7/1/99
California students are better at reading, grammar, spelling and mathematics than they were a year ago -- but still score below the national average, according to results of the second annual statewide achievement test.
And for the second year, controversy surrounded the release of the Stanford 9 test scores, as state Superintendent Delaine Eastin abruptly announced yesterday that she is withholding the test scores of every school and district until July 15 because of a publisher's error.
Error May
Have Skewed State Test Results
L.A. Times, 6/30/99
The private company that is paid $34 million to administer statewide achievement tests admitted Tuesday that it had misclassified about 300,000 students as not being fluent in English, a blunder that may have skewed school district reports across California for the past month.
School
Districts Expect Better State Test Scores
L.A. Times, 6/28/99
Some announce improved Stanford 9 results early as 'high-stakes accountability' begins.
Davis
Ties Re-Election to Jump in Test Scores
San Diego Union Tribune, 6/19/99
Gov. Gray Davis, who has made education the cornerstone of his young administration, yesterday made it the cornerstone of his political future by saying he will not run for re-election if student test scores do not improve.
Interpreting
the Stanford 9 Test
L.A. Times, 6/17/99
Curious about how well your 16-year-old has mastered "geometry from a synthetic perspective"? Or is your burning desire for information focused more on "geometry from an algebraic perspective"?
Fret not.
A little bit of insight on those two questions and many more will show up in a report from your son or daughter's school, arriving in the mailbox or your kid's backpack sometime before the end of July.
School
Officials Distressed After SAT-9 Testing
Los Angeles Times, 5/5/99
Eagle Rock Elementary School tried several known brain-enhancers--exercise, Mozart, healthful breakfast fare--but even some of its brightest lights struggled through parts of the Stanford 9 achievement test over the last two weeks of April.
"There were some questions that were just whoppers," said Nancy Scher, who teaches fifth- and sixth-graders in the school's small magnet program for highly gifted students.
How the
SAT-9 Test Institutionalizes Unequal Education
Los Angeles Times, 5/2/99
I teach at one of the "100 worst" schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Superintendent Ruben Zacarias placed my school, John Muir Middle School, on probation last September primarily because its students scored low on the Stanford 9 test, along with not meeting other "key indicators" such as attendance and parent participation. The school's average scores are significantly below the 25th percentile. If student scores on this test do not improve by one to two percentile points, the district may take over John Muir. Eventually, the state could forcefully remove all staff.
Testing
Taken Seriously -- Bay Area Schools Go All Out
San Francisco Chronicle, 4/20/99
Bay Area students have spent months analyzing past fumbles and running practice plays for the biggest event of the year, and now that it is here, their schools are pumping them up with rap songs, sugary foods and promises of rewards for hard work.
The warm-up is not for a big game but for the second year of statewide testing being played out in California classrooms this month.
The Big
One -- Stanford 9 -- Puts Schools to the Test
Los Angeles Times, 4/20/99
It's spring make-or-break time, and the pressure's on teachers and principals as well as students.
Panel
OK's STAR Test Exemptions
S.F. Examiner, 4/9/99
The Assembly Education Committee has approved, 11-4, a measure to exempt students with limited English skills from taking the mandated STAR assessment test in second through 11th grades.
Stanford
9 a Test of Nerves as Well as Achievement
Los Angeles Times, 4/6/99
It's not how most boys would have chosen to spend a Saturday morning, but there
was Erich Burciaga Ruiz perched beside his mother at a parents workshop on
standardized testing. And he was getting worked up at the mere thought of
tackling the Stanford 9 on April 17.
"It makes me very anxious," said
the fifth-grader from Brentwood Science Magnet School in Los Angeles. "I'm
scared of failing. I'm worried about the future."
If that sounds like
awfully cosmic thinking for a 10-year-old, chalk it up to the pressure cooker
atmosphere surrounding the Stanford 9 achievement test, which is being given
this spring to about 4.1 million students in more than 8,000 California schools.
Why the
Testing Craze Won't Fix Our Schools
Rethinking Schools, March 1999
The long arm of standardized testing is reaching into every nook and cranny of U.S. education. High-stakes tests, which threaten dire consequences for students and schools that don't produce the "one correct answer," are a powerful force shaping curriculum and instruction. And it's getting worse.The current issue of Rethinking Schools examines the current infatuation with standardized tests, and explains why they're poor tools for achieving the high standards that testing advocates claim are their goals.
Reading
Test for 2nd Graders Cancelled After Protests
New York Times, 3/14/99
N ew York City's Board of Education has canceled a citywide reading test for second graders after a barrage of objections from parents and principals who complained that children were already being tested too much, school officials said.
Making
the Grade After Raising the Bar
Los Angeles Times, 3/13/99
As California and other states press for better performance from public schools, they may soon discover a lesson that Virginia learned this year the hard way: If you raise academic expectations, prepare at first for failure.
Schools Attack
Weak Spots -- Districts Hire Diagnostic Experts in an Effort to Improve Performance
San Jose Mercury News, 9/7/98
Each year, public schools spend millions of dollars on new, creatively designed educational programs and curriculum packages, looking for that elusive ``magic bullet'' that will boost lagging test scores.
Testing
Results Defy Glib Analysis
Oakland Tribune, 9/6/98
The good news is, this is the last story you'll have to read about test scores in Oakland -- for a while. Perhaps your first reaction on learning that Oakland's SAT scores are out is not unmitigated joy and fascination. In fact, Oakland parents could be excused if they complained of a bit of test overload over the last few months.
Scores
on SAT's Expose Student Flab, Muscle -- Results shows gains in math; suburban youth
outpace those in urban, rural areas
S.F. Examiner, 9/1/98
Revealing strengths and weaknesses in America's education system, SAT scores show college-bound students improving in math and making no gains in reading and writing, with scores from suburban areas significantly higher than those from urban and rural regions, according to a study released Tuesday.
Innovation
Boosts Student Test Scores
Contra Costa Times, 8/31/98
Schools in disadvantaged communities see improved academic performance as a result of sometimes creative, sometimes tough programs.
Software
Firm's Standardized Tests a Hit with Parents
Los Angeles Times, 8/26/98
Educators make no secret of their deep skepticism about standardized testing. But parents--especially many affluent, overachiever types--don't tend to share those doubts. They want to know, as precisely as possible, if their kids are keeping up or falling behind.
Data
Foul-Ups Delay Analysis of State Tests
Los Angeles Times, 8/25/98
Major foul-ups in the handling of score sheets are hampering efforts to analyze results from the most ambitious student testing program in California history, state officials say. The worst problems affect as much as 18% of the test data statewide and could sharply limit the value of a program that cost taxpayers about $35 million and was intended to give them a public school report card.
Oakland
Schools Show Big Gains In Early Grades -- But test scores fall for older kids
San Francisco Chronicle, 8/17/98
Oakland's latest test scores show that the city's youngest students improved during a year of major classroom reforms but that older students' performances slipped. The mixed results indicate that at least in Oakland, the state's emphasis on reducing class size in the crucial years from kindergarten through third grade -- when children learn to read -- is paying off. But older children in middle and high schools are not reaping the same benefits.
Money
Doesn't Always Equal High Test Scores
Riverside Press-Enterprise, 8/10/98
Six Inland area school districts have bucked conventional wisdom that says families with more money produce children who score better on school tests.
S.F.
High School Test Scores Drop in Reading, Math Elementary, middle schools fare better
S.F. Chronicle, 7/29/98
Reading and math scores dropped among San Francisco high school students from last year -- but remained above the national average -- on a local exam that lets educators and parents monitor annual student progress.
Antioch
Hopes to Remedy Test Scores
Contra Costa Times, 7/24/98
Abysmal test scores by Antioch students have the board, staff and parents searching for answers. They've also given at least one back-to-basics advocate ammunition to criticize the newer methods of instruction.
Hits and
Misses for (Sacramento) Area Schools in State Test
Sacramento Bee, 7/23/98
Student achievement at schools in the four-county Sacramento metropolitan area largely reflect their students' socioeconomic status and English language abilities, judging by scores of California's first statewide achievement test in four years.
Tug-of-War
Over Schools With Low Test Scores
S.F. Chronicle, 7/23/98
If California's worst-performing school districts can't raise their scores on the new achievement test, they may soon face a state takeover -- or lose students and funds to private schools under a voucher proposal being pushed by Governor Pete Wilson.
Test
Scores Reveal 2-Tiered Education
S.F. Examiner, 7/22/98
Posing a staggering challenge to the state, scores on a new achievement exam show students who are fluent in English do dramatically better than their limited-English speaking peers in every subject and grade. "These results clearly indicate that what we have in the state of California is a public education system that is separate and unequal," (State Board of Education President Yvonne) Larsen said. "We have one system for those with English skills and one for those without."
Culprit
for Drop in Test Scores Sought
Los Angeles Times, 7/19/98
Now educators and testing experts are struggling to identify the culprit responsible for the weak performance of ninth- and 10th-graders, who consistently scored below all other grade levels.
Theories include inadequate teacher training, the failure of students to read and even poor physical fitness. Several school officials said they will take a close look at vocabulary instruction as a potential culprit.
It's also possible the apparent collapse of student performance represents a fluke in the test itself, a theory that testing experts said they doubted, but could not yet disprove.
Harcourt Brace Educational Measurement, which faces a public relations nightmare if its Stanford 9 test administered at 8,000 California schools this spring proves flawed, discovered the phenomenon last week, said Tom Brooks, manager of research for the company. Brooks said it might take a month to determine a cause.
City
(Sacramento) Schools' Test Scores Reveal Woes
Sacramento Bee, 7/18/98
Sacramento City school officials went public Friday with the first campus-by-campus test scores in recent history, releasing new state data they say will help identify trouble spots in the generally low-performing district. Put simply, neighborhoods with the fewest economic and language problems tended to fare best.
Judge
OKs Release of Statewide Scores But They Won't Go in Student Files
S.F. Examiner, 7/17/98
San Francisco Superior Court Judge David Garcia, who determined that the scores are public record, said he may let school districts keep individual students' scores out of their permanent records.
State
Can Post All National Test Results
Judge lifts ban on scores of non-English speakers
S.F. Chronicle, 7/17/98
State educators can release achievement test scores of more than 1 million non-English-speaking children who took the exam in English, a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled yesterday. But Judge David Garcia said he may prevent schools from including the results in the children's academic records.
Controversial
School Scores Could Soon Be Made Public
San Jose Mercury News, 7/16/98
A San Francisco Superior Court judge issued a tentative ruling late Wednesday afternoon that may allow the state Department of Education to release test scores of more than a million students who speak little or no English as soon as Friday. The ruling, by Judge David Garcia, is not binding. But it offers insight into the probable outcome of a hearing today on whether the state should be allowed to release the test scores of students who speak little or no English.
Judge
Says State Can Release Test Scores
Contra Costa Times, 7/16/98
A San Francisco Superior Court judge tentatively ruled Wednesday that the state is free to release the scores of limited-English-speaking students on California's latest standardized achievement exam. Judge David Garcia made his tentative ruling in the case before hearing oral arguments scheduled for today. Garcia could change his mind after hearing from Oakland and Berkeley school district lawyers who won a temporary restraining order June 25 to block the release of test results June 30.
Test
Scores Yield Mixed Results for L.A. Students
L.A. Times, 7/14/98
The scores are the first to include all of the district's limited-English students. Consequently, the results were significantly lower than those released two weeks ago by the Los Angeles Unified School District, which showed that the district as a whole scored in the 32nd percentile. At that time, the district factored in only a selected number of students with limited English. Complete L.A. Unified Scores -- including school-by-school breakdown
Expected
Result: Division Over Test Scores
Contra Costa Times, 7/12/98
Even though a San Francisco judge has stopped the state Department of Education from posting standardized test results on the Internet, there's little mystery about what those results will show: Students in poorer schools with lots of limited English speakers don't score as well, on average, as students in affluent suburbs.
Tests
Reveal Disturbing Trend in State Public Education
S.F. Examiner, 7/12/98
The last two statewide achievement exams reveal a disturbing trend in California public education: The longer kids are in the system, the worse they seem to do.
Test
Score Suppression Is Upheld
State Supreme Court sides with exam foes
S.F. Chronicle, 7/9/98
In a legal victory for Bay Area educators hoping to suppress achievement test scores of non-English-speaking students, the California Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling yesterday that has kept the scores secret.
Court Won't
Remove Order Blocking Test Score Release
Sacramento Bee, 7/9/98
The California Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to overturn a lower court order, making it highly unlikely the state Department of Education will release further statewide achievement test results prior to a July 16 court hearing.
Meanwhile, state testing officials said Wednesday that a technical problem with test scoring may have affected the results of as many as 15 percent of the 4.1 million students tested.
High Court Urged
to Join Fray Over State Test Scores
Sacramento Bee, 7/7/98
Attorneys for the state Board of Education and the state Department of Education have asked the California Supreme Court to limit a temporary restraining order that has prevented the release of statewide test results that include scores of limited-English students.
San
Francisco shifts stance on test scores
S.F. Examiner, 7/7/98
After flatly refusing to release district scores showing student performance on a new statewide achievement exam, San Francisco school officials now say the results will be made public -- eventually.
Bilingual
Surprise In State Testing
Many native-English speakers outscored in S.F., San Jose
S.F. Chronicle, 7/7/98
Achievement test scores from two of the Bay Area's largest school districts reveal a surprising result: Graduates of bilingual education programs out- scored native English speakers in most subjects and in most grades.
For more information on California's bilingual controversy, click here.
Test
Scores Matter, But How Much?
Many factors affect quality of schools
S.F. Chronicle, 7/6/98
If you wonder why the scores on California's new student achievement test are important, ask Walnut Creek real estate broker Micky Gill. Gill had to pull out a tape measure to prove to a worried family that the house they were about to buy was in the Acalanes High School attendance district in Lafayette -- a school they wanted because of its scores on various standardized tests.
``The test doesn't measure very much, and California parents ought to know that. It compares students to each other and not to a standard of what they ought to learn,'' said Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest in Cambridge, Mass., a watchdog of standardized testing practices across the nation. ``The best predictor of test scores is family income. Put your child in school with rich kids, and they will get a good education,'' said Neill, noting the continuing disparities in educational quality among communities.
S.F.'s
"secret" scores
S.F. Examiner, 7/3/98
The scores of roughly 32,000 English-fluent students were leaked to The Examiner late Thursday evening, a day after San Francisco school officials refused to release the results of student performance on a new statewide achievement test.
S.F. schools refuse to air test scores -- District will turn raw results
into reports if deemed "meaningful'
S.F. Examiner, 7/2/98
Although many other school districts across California have released results of the new Stanford Achievement exam - the first statewide test to be given to students in four years - San Francisco school officials say they feel no compunction to release scores because they don't like the test.
Dan
Waters: Test Results Spark Conflict
Sacramento Bee, 7/2/98
More than anything, schools are supposed to be training students in critical analysis -- the ability to absorb, comprehend and analyze words, numbers and other data. It was, therefore, more than a bit ironic that two politicians, Gov. Pete Wilson and state schools chief Delaine Eastin, could reach two radically different conclusions about the state's new student achievement tests.
Trying
to get a read on test results: Dip between grades puzzles educators
Sacramento Bee, 7/2/98
California's educators Wednesday found themselves searching for reasons why student achievement in reading dropped precipitously between the eighth and ninth grades on the first statewide test in four years. Theories ranged from the advent of "whole language" in the late 1980s to the fact that reading instruction is not stressed at the high school level, but there were no concrete answers to be had the day after the scores were released.
State kids below national average in most subjects
They don't measure up in 28 of 43 categories on test
S.F. Examiner, 7/1/98
California public school children scored below the national average in reading, math and science and lagged far behind in spelling, according to results of a controversial and highly anticipated new statewide exam released Tuesday by the Department of Education.
Superintendent Eastin: "Yes, we can do a lot better, but please give us the resources to do that."
Gov. Wilson said the "disappointing but not surprising" scores were the byproduct of years of failed attempts at reforms such as new math and whole language, coupled with weak policies on social promotion and accountability.
State's Kids Score Low in School Tests
Bilingual controversy limits release of figures
S.F. Chronicle, 7/1/98
Most of California's English- speaking students scored below the national average on the state's controversial new achievement test, according to results released yesterday.
Low Scores On Contra Costa Tests Are Examined
Highest school reports in Lafayette, San Ramon
S.F. Chronicle, 7/1/98
Students in most Contra Costa school districts performed worse than expected on California's new achievement test. Scores were predictably highest in more affluent areas such as Lafayette and San Ramon, where rankings reached into the 70th and 80th percentiles. They dipped drastically in lower income cities such as Pittsburg and in parts of Concord, where they were in the 30th and even 20th percentiles.
Student Test Scores
Yield No Surprises
Contra Costa Times, 6/28/98
Even though a San Francisco judge has stopped the state Department of Education from posting standardized test results on the Internet, there's little mystery about what those results will show: Students in poorer schools with lots of limited-English speakers don't score as well, on average, as students in affluent suburbs.
S.T.A.R.
(Standardized Testing & Reporting) Program, In Brief
Contra Costa Times, 6/28/98
State
to Seek Court's Help on Test Scores
S.F. Chronicle, 6/27/98
State education officials plan a last-ditch plea Monday to the state Court of Appeal in a bid to publish scores next week from California's first statewide achievement test in four years.
Wilson,
Eastin Testy on Exam -- Governor Blasts Legal Steps; Education Chief Calls Him
"Hysterical"
S.F. Examiner, 4/13/98
State
Begins Student Assessment Tests
New exam will allow head-to-head comparison of scores
S.F. Chronicle, 4/7/98
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