Multiple Choices

Students at Harbor Day School in Corona del Mar got a respite from grueling homework assignments last week. But it wasn’t a preview of summer vacation.

Instead, each morning for a week they took an arduous standardized test called the Comprehensive Testing Program III, the private school equivalent of the Stanford 9.

The scale--and the stakes--of the tests are quite different. Although 11.5 million public school students in California and nine other states take the Stanford 9 achievement test, a mere 260,000 pupils each year sweat through this private school test.

Those private schools that use standardized achievement tests--and some do not--have a number of options, ranging from the Stanford 9 to the Iowa test to customized state exams.

Public school results are published on the Internet and in newspapers and are closely scrutinized by everyone from parents to governors to home buyers scouting for neighborhoods with good schools.

Private schools, meanwhile, tend to keep their test scores private. They have the luxury of using the results as intended: as a snapshot to identify strengths and weaknesses and guide teachers toward needed adjustments.

“It’s one piece of the puzzle,” said Sidney DuPont, headmaster of the 400-student Harbor Day School, serving kindergarten through eighth grade. “Just as a report card is important here and teacher comments are important here, the test is important to see if progress is or isn’t being made. . . . But we do no special preparation for the test. Children prepare for it all year through the regular curriculum.”

Still, many parents of private school students wring their hands at test time. And when scores come out, some feel compelled to compare notes with other parents and to tell their children’s scores to each other. That goes against the urging of most private school administrators, who advise parents to keep quiet so that students don’t become stressed out and unhealthily competitive.

At the 465-student Pegasus School for bright and gifted children in Huntington Beach, director and founder Linda Hathaway doesn’t even send test results home to all families. Her school uses the marks to identify students who are struggling and those who are so gifted that they need more enrichment activities. For the rest, scores are available if parents wish to come in and talk about them.

“We’ve found we have to help parents understand the scores as a snapshot of a certain point in time,” said Hathaway, whose school accepts students in preschool through eighth grade. “If it’s not put into perspective, the wrong kind of importance can be placed on scores. Parents can put undue pressure on children when they’re doing very well in class but may not be good test takers. We stress that the results are an individual indicator, not a comparison.”

The test used by Harbor Day School and the Pegasus School is developed by Educational Testing Service, the same company that devises such college entrance exams as the PSAT and the SAT. It is distributed by Educational Records Bureau, a 72-year-old nonprofit corporation in New York that also helps schools analyze and interpret scores. The company’s acronym, in fact, provides the test’s widely used nickname--”the ERBs.”

The ERBs are geared for college-bound high achievers, most of whom have had every educational advantage.

“It’s a little more rigorous than a nationally normed test,” said Thomas Maguire, president of Educational Records Bureau. “We don’t see it as appropriate for urban or rural schools.”

To say that the ERBs are a little more rigorous is like saying it’s a little colder in January in Anchorage than in Miami. One educator who has experimented with giving the ERBs to Southern California public school students has found that they consider them extremely tough, if not incomprehensible.

Educational Records Bureau can provide schools with several comparisons: against a national norm of test takers from all kinds of schools, against a norm from suburban public schools that use the ERBs and against the independent school norm. The comparisons get increasingly difficult.

For example, Maguire said, a fourth-grader who scores in the 97th percentile nationally would score in the 82nd among suburban students and in the 76th among private-school students.

Comparing private-school students against each other can jar parents, Hathaway said. That’s one reason her school sits down with parents personally to discuss results.

“People refer back to their own experiences, where getting a 65 or 70 was failing or barely passing,” she said. “They need to understand that, if you skew the population toward high achievers, and you’re in the 65th or 70th percentile of high achievers, that is very high indeed. But it doesn’t look that way if you view the scores in isolation.”

About 1,300 independent and suburban public schools nationwide and 40 international schools give the ERBs; 90% of the total are private schools. They include Episcopal and Jewish day schools and a small number of Catholic schools. All told, they represent a small percentage of private schools nationwide.

Elementary schools that belong to the 170-member California Assn. of Independent Schools--a small handful of Orange County’s private schools--are required to administer the ERBs, and many continue to give the test through middle school.

Many other private schools in Orange County use different measurements, including the same Stanford 9 exam that public-schoolers take.

The Fairmont Private Schools in Anaheim and Tustin used to administer the ERBs, but this year, the six-campus chain switched to the Stanford test to get a better gauge of how students perform in areas not covered by ERBs, including science and social studies.

There’s another reason for private schools to adopt the Stanford 9: parent interest.

“If you’re not giving the same test as public schools, you can’t draw comparisons,” said Jackie Kearsing, director of a 700-student Fairmont campus in Anaheim. “Parents started to ask; they would see [public school] results in the newspaper. Parents want to know how [their children] stack up, pure and simple.”

The Stanford 9 and the ERBs measure student achievement in many of the same subject areas: reading comprehension, language arts and math. And the format for both is primarily multiple choice.

But differences abound. For starters, private schools are not required to administer the ERBs at every grade, and many schools test pupils every two or three years. In public schools, nearly every student in second through 11th grade must take the Stanford 9.

Unlike Educational Records Bureau, the publisher of the Stanford 9 provides schools with booklets for drilling students. Test preparation has surged in California, reflecting the prominence that test scores have attained because of state and local efforts to rank schools and make them more accountable for student performance.