A Report Puts Testing in Schools to the Test

The sides in the sometimes hysterical debate over testing in our nation’s public schools are well-established.

Many educators, and some parents, protest that judging schools by their test scores undermines learning as well as teaching, substituting memorization and drilling. Supporters, including President Bush and some key Democrats, contend that tests are an accountability tool that forces schools to analyze their practices to improve on their shortcomings.

But as John Merrow’s uneven “Frontline” documentary that airs on PBS tonight makes plain, the issue is too complex for those pro or con formulations. The hourlong report, “Testing Our Schools,” is keyed to the recent passage of the federal education reform legislation advocated by the Bush administration. The centerpiece of that law is testing of students in reading and math in the third through eighth grades and the attachment of consequences for sustained poor performance.

Merrow, as usual, does his homework in raising pertinent questions about the strategy. Are tests accurate enough? Are some types of tests better than others? Do they cover the right topics? Do tests measure the effectiveness of teaching or the relative affluence of the students who take them? What’s the connection between students’ motivation and their scores?

The answers he offers are, necessarily, still tentative. But even as he raises the issues, Merrow provides fodder for the backers of testing. He shows us two schools in Virginia where the efforts of educators devoted to teaching students the state standards are paying off in dramatic fashion. And in interviews with teachers in Richmond, where few students pass state exams, he showcases what President Bush calls the “bigotry of low expectations.”

A high school teacher says it’s “ridiculous” to think that poor children could learn the same material as their better-off peers. And a kindergarten teacher says she resents “the pressure and the stress” that’s put on educators to raise test scores “when everybody knows children do not learn the same way or at the same rate.”

UCLA education professor emeritus James Popham concludes that testing, if done properly, “can be a powerful force ... for getting kids to learn what they ought to learn.” That, he says, will ensure public education’s survival. Done badly, however, an overemphasis on testing is a recipe for “absolute failure.”

“Testing Our Schools” airs at 9 tonight on “Frontline” on KCET-TV.