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A
co-production of The Merrow Report and Frontline.
Shot on location in California, Massachusetts, Virginia, Iowa,
Arizona and Washington, DC.
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INTRODUCTION
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"Testing
Our Schools" explores the closely intertwined issues of Standards
and Accountability. Standards are necessary, of course, and
so is accountability, but are schools being backed into a corner?
If they continue to live by test results, will they die that
way? 'High stakes tests,' 'multiple test measures,' multiple
opportunities to take tests– How these issues are resolved
will shape the future of American public education.
produced by John Tulenko |
George Bush |
Bill Clinton |
Tommy Thompson |
Louis Gerstner, Jr. |
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BACKGROUND
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The
movement known as 'Standards and Accountability' goes back to
1983 and the national report known as "A Nation at Risk," which
warned that our schools were 'drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity.'
From that came the first-ever National Education Summit, convened
by President Bush in 1989, at which the president and the nation's
Governors carved out five National Education Goals.
These
goals led to an effort by states to set standards - to define
exactly what every student should know and be able to do in
every subject area, in every grade. As the standards movement
progressed, it acquired new leadership when America's business
community joined the governors in 1996 for a second Education
Summit. Led by IBM's Louis V. Gerstner Jr., and Governors
James B. Hunt (North Carolina) and Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin),
this new coalition has since convened two additional National
Education Summits, one in 1999 and, most recently, in October,
2001.
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ACCOUNTABILITY
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The
stated purpose of these Summits, according to its leaders, was
to make schools more business-like; to hold schools and the
adults in them accountable for student achievement. The first
step, they agreed, was to establish clear standards that would
spell out for schools and students what was to be learned. Next,
to develop a plan to teach that materal (schools call it a 'curriculum').
The third step called for testing to see whether and how much
students had learned...with consequences for success and failure.
Accountability is a term with political power, and a growing
number of states have adopted 'high-stakes' policies. For example,
students in some states must pass specific standardized tests
proving they've
learned the required material before they are promoted to the
next grade or allowed to graduate. The passing or failing of
such tests supercedes all other school work. Educators and politicians
who favor such a high-stakes testing argue the stakes are acceptable
because students have multiple opportunities to take such tests.
However, there is evidence that students who fail once or twice
become discouraged and leave school, a high price to pay for
a system that is trying to 'leave no child behind.'
President George W. Bush has also embraced this type of accountability,
and his proposal, now being hammered out in Congress, calls
for annual testing of all students in grades 3-8 in reading
and math. |
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STANDARDS
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 As
we show in the program, developing standards turns out to be
hard, politically perilous work. Policymakers in Virginia argued
for weeks over just what names students should be familiar with
in history. If Robert E. Lee is important, what about Frederick
Douglass? Does Stonewall Jackson make the list and, if he does,
should Jefferson Davis? Abraham Lincoln of course, but what
about Ulysses S. Grant? Special interest groups wanted the history
standards to include such things as the Armenian genocide ('because
it was the first one of the 20th century and made Hitler possible')
or the African kingdom of Mali ('so that African-American students
wouldn't think that their history begins with the arrival of
the first slave ship in 1619'). 
In the end, Virginia and most other states seem to have simply
added more and more to the content standards, rather than make
the difficult choices required to pare them down to a managable
number. The result is an ever-thicker curriculum, perhaps too
much for teachers to teach or students to learn. States like
Virginia have developed 'pacing charts,' which basically tell
teachers what they should be teaching, and when.
 But
there's more to it than just identifying 'content standards,'
the 'stuff' that students should know. 'Performance standards,'
which deal with the quality of students' work also must be
established. Someone has to decide what constitutes 'A' work
and what constitutes failure; it's a tricky and fairly subjective
process. Think of setting the bar in the high jump. Unfortunately,
when failure rates for performance have proven to be embarrassingly
high, the bar often has been lowered.
A third
kind of standard - 'opportunity to learn standards' - has been
virtually ignored. In a fair world, all students who have to
take chemistry, for example, would be in schools equipped with
chemistry labs and would be taught by teachers who've studied
chemistry. That's not the world that many students live in,
but some politicians have chosen to ignore this reality. |
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TESTING
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Most states
seemed to have moved quickly to what should be the last step,
testing students. California, for example, worked hard to create
genuine academic standards, a process that took about five years.
But the political pressure to test was so great that California
began testing immediately, using a national test that it bought
'off the shelf' from a testing company. As we show in the program,
the new curriculum and the national test are barely related,
and so California students were and are being tested on material
they have not studied. California also is rewarding schools
for high performance ($350 million is being distributed!) and
penalizing schools with low test scores.
 As
the program reveals, man-made tests are fraught with error.
A Massachusetts teenager describes a math question on a high-stakes
test with no right answer and explains how he spent many minutes
of test-time puzzling over it, probably hurting his score
on the high-stakes exam.
But even without human error, every test has built-in error.
As the program explains, a seemingly precise score of, say,
216, could truly be anything from 210 to 222, because of this
built-in error range. Thus, in one year 10,000 Massachusetts
students were, in all probability, labeled as failures even
though their true score would have enabled them to be promoted
or to graduate.
In business
the 'bottom line' involves looking at more than profits and
losses. Things like repeat customer rate, employee turnover,
theft, and so on are part of determining a business's overall
health. But schools seem to have adopted a narrow version
of the business model, making test scores THE instrument for
determining success. As we show in the program, this focus
on testing is reshaping American education. For better or
worse remains to be seen.
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Madeline
Valera, a 10th grade student at Boston Arts Academy, failed
the standardized test by 4 points.
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Richard
Kervorkian, painter and retired professor, is lobbying the
Virginia Board of Education to include study of Armenian genocide
of 1915 in new history standards.
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Jim
Popham, test writer and professor emeritus at UCLA, is leading
the charge to stop using the SAT 9 to rate schools and teachers.
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Audrey
Qualls is a test author and professor of educational measurement
at hte University of Iowa.
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Original
airdate: March, 2002
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Click
here for more information on Testing Our Schools:
•
A look at the surprising politics of President Bush's landmark
education bill;
• Information on standards and testing in
all 50 states;
• Interviews with education and testing experts;
a guide for parents; background readings, and more.
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