Forcing Standardized Tests on Diverse Kids

“We visited a business (colleague, opportunity, adjustment, investment) of my mother. She lives in a (regrettable, callous, renovated, formidable) house in a small town near the river. The house fits in well with the sleepy town. It has a small garden and is painted in (subdued, brilliant, excellent, bewildering) shades of green and blue.”

My daughter pondered the words assiduously, painstakingly bubbling in the circles next to the words she thought best completed the sentences.

I studied the questions and answers too, from the “Words in Context” portion of the study booklet for her upcoming standardized exam. And I wondered whether it is English class--or life itself--that gives a child the right answers to questions like these.

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Controversy over the issue is nothing new: What do standardized tests really measure? Can their results fairly account for differences among children’s upbringing and experiences?

It is no longer merely an abstract question. In our national obsession with accountability, we have embraced high-stakes, standardized testing as the quickest, surest measure of whether our schools, and our children, are failing.

We are not yet at the level of countries like Egypt, where the nation’s reliance on standardized exams has turned education into little more than a contest for high test scores, allowing rote learning to squeeze out creativity.

But testing mania in this country is growing. President Bush announced an education platform last week that relies heavily on annual testing of all public school students in grades three through eight. And his new education secretary, former Houston school district superintendent Roderick Paige, has pledged to make testing a centerpiece of school reform.

Indeed, parents--and taxpayers--do need some objective measure of how well our students are doing. In the best cases, tests are drawn up based on what is actually being taught in schools, and administered frequently enough to allow teachers to analyze students’ strengths and weaknesses and tailor instruction accordingly.

But, in reality, districts around the country rely on one-size-fits-all annual exams and praise or pillory their schools based on how students perform. More than half the nation’s states now rate schools on student achievement, and 11 base that evaluation entirely on a single test score.

You can feel the pressure in classrooms in California, where ratings are based on a norm-referenced test, meaning our students are rated against a national sample. Never mind that we are the most diverse state in the nation, with one-quarter of our children living in poverty and one-quarter growing up in homes where English is not the primary language. Can a national test linked to the lives of Middle Americans fairly measure those children’s competence in school?

No, says Monty Neill, director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing in Cambridge, Mass. It’s hard to devise test questions that don’t refer to the world outside the classroom, he says. And because tests are made up by middle- and upper-class people, they are “referenced to the cultural lives of white middle- and upper-class kids,” he said.

So you get questions about business colleagues and renovated homes and sleepy towns with houses painted in subdued hues. Run that by a child whose dad drives a truck or mom cleans offices--folks who have co-workers but never colleagues. Test a child who has lived all her life in a tiny apartment in an urban ghetto, where the nearest homes are ramshackle, not renovated. These kids may hold their own in English class but fail a test that requires them to know about sleepy towns and suburban color schemes.

Ultimately, the reliability of these tests hinges on the notion that kids share a common set of life experiences that undergirds what they learn in class. “The tests measure, in part, things students learn in school and, in part, things kids learn outside of school, from their families or their communities,” Neill explains.

That puts a heavy burden on some schools, which must make up for the disadvantages faced by children who live in homes where no one speaks standard English or there is not enough money for books or families seldom travel beyond the confines of the neighborhood.

And it puts a burden on children who think “The wind blowed the shingles off the roof” or “We is all going to the library” are grammatically correct, because that’s how everyone around them speaks. Or children who might not be able to guess whether “pamphlets” or “spontaneous” are spelled correctly because they’ve never heard, much less seen, those words in print.

Those kids have to do double duty, Neill said. “They have to learn in school all kinds of things that middle-class kids are able to absorb from their environment. So there’s always a catch-up aspect going on.”

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Does this mean we throw out the tests? Not necessarily.

But maybe we ratchet down the pressure, so our schools can stop worrying about teaching-to-the-test and focus on providing the kind of sound, well-rounded education that will lift up all children over time and actually encourage our kids to think.

“If you’re a student in a school where you read a lot, write quite a bit, are put in situations where you get to think about what you do and talk about what you do, you’ll do OK on the tests, and you’ll do better in the long run than a student at a school that focuses on drilling just to jack up test scores,” Neill says.

Maybe parents need to keep test scores in perspective, lest we lash our children’s future to a number that may say more about us and our families than it does about our children’s schools.

And why not give every parent whose child takes an exam a spin with a sample of test questions. Maybe then we’ll understand what the tests underscore: That we are really our children’s most important teachers.

As I leaf through our “Scoring High” study pamphlet, I see dozens of tricky sample questions, full of unfamiliar words, built around circumstances I’m not sure my middle-school daughter understands.

I watch as she tackles a sample question--the one at the top of this column: Business investment, she decides. She’s heard the phrase; it makes sense to her. I make a mental note to talk about my colleagues more. The house was probably formidable, she says, its exterior painted in excellent shades. A business person would probably have lots of money and a big, grand house, she explains. And they’d certainly make a smart choice in paint shades.

Though the answer sheet tells me she’s wrong all three times, I feel I’m watching intelligence in action, as she feels her way from what she knows to an unfamiliar scene the test asks her to create.

She may not score as high as some, but she is not failing at education. The machine that marks her choices as wrong could never guess at the soundness of her reasoning. So I’m satisfied, and gratified when she bounces, smiling, from the exam room the next day. “It was hard,” she says, “but I think I did OK.”

That is good enough for me. But then--like her--I was never much good at test taking, oblivious to the clues, unable to master the tricks that test success requires. Thank goodness our lives, unlike our schools, are judged on more than how we do on any single test, on any given day.