EDUCATION / REFORMS DOUBTED : Frequent Testing to Gauge Student Progress Is Getting a Failing Grade

It seemed like an obvious educational reform less than a decade ago: If you want to make sure that kids all over the country are learning the basics, test them and test them often. But now a growing number of politicians and educators are not so sure.

The reaction against standardized testing has set in.

In early May, for example, James J. Florio, the new Democratic governor of New Jersey, decided to end the practice of forcing public school students to take statewide proficiency tests. The tests--imposed a few years earlier as an educational reform--were designed to ensure that New Jersey students meet minimum standards. But, according to the critics, teachers spent so much time preparing students to pass the tests that the kids learned little else.

TIME WASTED: A few weeks later, the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy, made up largely of prominent educators, found that an overdependence on testing wasted the time of educators and developed simplistic skills at the expense of the more complicated “problem-solving skills the nation wants for its graduates.”

Test results were often unfair and misleading, the commission went on, and, therefore, “tests scores should not be used by themselves to determine kindergarten entry, grade promotion, graduation or employment opportunities.”

Critics say that some of the distortions of standardized testing are made clear by the practices of Maryland’s Prince Georges County, where the school superintendent, John A. Murphy, promised five years ago that he would push up the county’s test scores to the top quarter of the nation by the end of 1990. The scores are almost that high now, but the methods for achieving this goal raise questions.

Children in kindergarten are taught how to color in circles with crayon--much the way they will have to darken circles later in the multiple-choice questions of the standardized tests. In first grade, the children learn to wrestle with multiple-choice questions. In second grade, they practice the tests. In fourth grade, they take the test required of every Maryland school child.

This whole approach is deplored by George F. Madaus of Boston College, the executive director of the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy.

“Rather than fill in the bubbles,” he said, “we have to encourage them to produce things for us.”

Georgia even has a test that kindergarten pupils must pass to enter first grade. “We must stop this nonsense of testing kindergarten children and preschoolers,” Madaus said.

Some educators worry that the national education goals set earlier this year by President Bush and the nation’s governors might lead to an increase in testing. In fact, these critics envision pressure for a standardized, nationwide examination that every student would have to pass to receive a high school diploma.

FRENCH USE TESTING: France has such an examination--the baccalaureate--and high school seniors there must pass it to enter college or to qualify for a host of jobs. Many students spend at least a full year doing little else but studying for the examination.

A little more than half of the French students usually fail the examination, diminishing their life’s prospects in a few hours (although there have been some distinguished failures like Minister of Finance Pierre Beregovoy, Communist leader Georges Marchais and actors Gerard Depardieu and Alain Delon). American educators have long rejected the baccalaureate system as unsuitable for the United States.

At issue in the current American debate are not all tests, but the standardized, multiple-choice examinations that states or school districts make mandatory for all their students. The National Commission on Testing and Public Policy estimates that American schools devote 20 million school days every year to these tests. In 1972, only New York required such tests; now, all states do. Some students take from seven to 12 of these tests every year.

Although they deplore the proliferation of standardized exams, the critics are not against all testing. But the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy says that educators and politicians should not depend on them alone to evaluate schools and students. Instead, it recommends a wide battery of assessments based on such things as a child’s ability to create a school project or prepare a portfolio of work.