Stanford 9 Drilling Puts Dent in Learning, Teachers Say

California’s massive standardized testing program is having some unintended effects both in and outside the classroom, results that have little to do with lawmakers’ goals of improving education and boosting accountability.

At some schools, teachers have students read short passages instead of entire books because that’s what’s on the test. At other schools, lessons on science and social studies have been abandoned to make more time for drilling on test-related material. At an extreme end, the test scores are even reaching beyond the classroom and cropping up in custody disputes.

“There’s less and less teaching happening, and more and more test preparation,” said Lorna Karagiozov, president of the Santa Ana Educators Assn. “It’s administrative anxiety coming down on the teachers: ‘You must do this; otherwise our school looks bad.’ ”

In Santa Ana, many elementary school teachers have forsaken science, art and music in favor of spending hours drilling students on reading, grammar and math, Karagiozov said. Linda Kaminsky, the district’s head of curriculum, defended the district, saying that the students are learning science, art, music and history--but they are also practicing reading when learning those subjects.

As the state this week releases a new round of school rankings based on the test, it’s easy to understand the anxiety that accompanies the Stanford 9 exam, given each spring to most students in second through 11th grades. Money and careers are on the line.

The Stanford 9 scores are, for now, the only measurement used to create the state’s Academic Performance Index, which publicly ranks schools. Low-ranking schools can be taken over by the district or the state, their principals and teachers reassigned. But schools that do well, or improve substantially, are eligible for huge financial bonuses, including $25,000 to individual teachers. On Wednesday, the state will publicize API data on how similar schools fared when compared with each other and how well they must do next year to qualify for rewards.

Comparative Scores Go Public This Week

State officials and lawmakers are thrilled with the results of their new accountability program. They cheer about the rising scores across California. For the first time, the API has made schools accountable to the public, they say, and schools have responded by working harder.

But better scores don’t equal better education, said Wayne Johnson, president of the 300,000-member California Teachers Assn. “And serious damage is being done to the quality of public education.”

Still, public belief in the test scores runs so strong that lawyers in custody disputes sometimes use the Stanford 9 to bolster their arguments for placing a child.

In an Orange County case last year, a court-appointed psychologist cited Stanford 9 scores as one reason to place a 6-year-old child with his Laguna Beach father instead of his Los Angeles mother.

Psychologist Russell Johnson wrote in his report, obtained by The Times, that he felt that Top of the World school in Laguna Beach would offer the boy a better education than Franklin Avenue Elementary School in the Los Feliz area. As his backup for that assertion, he explained that the “mean [Stanford 9] scores for all students are higher at Top of the World than at Franklin Avenue in all categories.” In an interview, Johnson said he could not discuss the case because of confidentiality.

Even one of the architects of the API program, Jerry Hayward, called such a statement a “terrible misuse of test scores.”

“The court-appointed psychologist should know more about testing than to use such a crude instrument,” said Hayward, a consultant with Policy Analysis for California Education.

It wasn’t an isolated case, though: Ronald Anteau, a prominent family law attorney in Los Angeles County, said he uses Stanford 9 scores to evaluate schools for custody cases.

“It’s a tool,” Anteau said. “One of the things that a good family law practitioner is going to do is use every tool that is out there.”

More commonly, the Stanford 9’s power is dramatically altering what goes on behind the classroom door. For teachers, high scores equal money and prestige; declining ones spell shame and occasionally reassignment. For students, low scores can mean stints in summer school or Saturday school, and in some districts, even repeating a grade, adding to the pressure teachers feel for their students to pull off good scores.

The result is test obsession that has robbed them of the joy and creativity in their work, the teachers said. Long-trusted lesson plans that enthuse students have been ripped up and new ones frantically created to meet the demands of the multiple-choice exam. Some worry that they are transforming students into a generation of nervous, Scantron-obsessed drones, incapable of creative or analytical thought.

“I’ve been here 30 years, and I’ve never before felt this kind of terror,” said Margaret DeArmond, a math resources teacher in the Kern High School District. “There’s a sense of feeling threatened, but not knowing what they should do.”

DeArmond got out of the classroom and now serves as a math resources teacher for her Central Valley district. That enables her to talk to many of the district’s teachers, and they are not happy. “Quite honestly, a lot of them are wondering if teaching is the profession for them,” she said.

“It’s utterly political,” said Carlos Cabana, a math teacher at San Lorenzo High School, near San Francisco. “Politicians want a simple mechanism. . . . Politicians don’t know the complexity of education.”

Sally Stickler’s eighth-graders study only one novel a year now, instead of several.

“We used to read ‘My Brother Sam is Dead,’ and ‘Shane’ and ‘A Day No Pigs Would Die,’ ” said the teacher at Buena Park Junior High School. “I would take a piece of literature and work on it for quite a while. Now we read short stories rather than full novels.”

Gone too are the long, in-depth discussions of what a piece of literature means and how it relates to teenagers’ own lives. Now, students answer multiple-choice questions designed to test their reading comprehension as it will be measured on the Stanford 9.

Because of the test, Pete Schedlosky, former social studies teacher at Nordhoff High School in Ventura County, stopped teaching the causes of World War I. Instead, he made sure they knew the dates the war began and ended.

“So what if you know a date?” said Schedlosky, who is now a middle school counselor. “Don’t we want to prevent war? How important is the date? It’s really the concept of why the war started that to me is the most important thing.”

This problem is compounded, teachers say, because the Stanford-9 test is not fully aligned with California’s curriculum standards.

Architects of the plan acknowledge that the program still has kinks, but they promise it’s going to get better.

Just last week, legislative leaders announced that they plan to reevaluate the state’s testing system because they fear it doesn’t measure what students are actually learning. This spring, an additional language arts test that students have been taking for two years will start counting toward the API. The extra test matches California’s language arts standards.

“California doesn’t do things slowly and with a lot of planning,” said Hayward, the education specialist who helped draft the API. “We moved quite rapidly into implementation, before all the pieces were in place.”

Lawmakers have talked of developing a different test, one that is more closely aligned to California’s curriculum. And the API is going to be expanded, so test scores will cease to be a school’s be-all and end-all. Attendance and graduation rates, writing samples and perhaps even proof of good citizenship will also be counted.

Hayward said he sympathizes with teachers who say it’s unfair to judge what their students learn and how they teach based on a single test. But the basic idea of holding teachers and principals responsible for students’ achievement is sound, he said.

“The public has a right to know what students know and are able to do,” Hayward said. “We’re getting a negative response from teachers, but it’s tempered by the fact that there’s a general feeling that the schools have made important strides, and are better now than they were.”

Some teachers agreed.

“I think the state is raising the bar for the children in our schools, and I think this is a good thing,” said Judy Emerson, who teaches fifth and sixth grades at Beatty Elementary in Buena Park. “Social studies and science and health are important subjects, [but] it’s more important that a student know how to read.”

Forced to Teach to the Test: Yes or No?

State officials also maintain that they have never wanted educators to “teach to the test.” In fact, last week they even returned math textbooks to publishers because they thought some questions too closely mirrored problems on the Stanford 9.

Teachers scoff at the notion that they’re not supposed to teach to the test.

“When the state rewards and punishes schools based on test scores, you’ve created . . . an environment that is going to push people to raise scores at the expense of real learning, no matter what the cost.” said Josh Pechthalt, a teacher at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.

The pressure has driven a handful of teachers to cheat.

Seven schools in California have admitted to the state that cheating occurred on their campuses, said Doug Stone, spokesperson for the California Department of Education. Thirty more are under investigation after a computer detected large numbers of irregularities on answer sheets. At Commonwealth Elementary School in Fullerton, a teacher was disciplined last fall for allegedly changing answers on her students’ exams.

But one of the state’s most honored teachers said she refuses to change what she does because of a standardized test.

“I teach my kids to think,” said Cynthia Stern, who teaches second grade at Peterson Elementary School in Huntington Beach. Stern recently became one of only 786 teachers in California to achieve National Board Certification, which requires teachers to write essays, pass exams and have their classrooms evaluated.

To get her kids ready for the test, Stern reads them “Hooray for Diffendoofer Day,” by Dr. Seuss. The story relates the predicament of children who must do well on a test or else be sent to live in a dreary place called Flobbertown, where all the children dress the same, act the same and think the same. But the terrified students do well on the tests because they’ve been learning all along.

Seuss had the right idea about standardized tests, Stern said.

“It’s nuts,” she said of the current stress on test preparation mania. “I think sometimes . . . we as teachers should say: ‘I’m here with these kids every day, and I’m the expert and this is not the way it needs to be done.’ ”