Articles of Interest. Click on an
article to read it.
Mississippi Association for Assessment Reform MAAR It appears as though we are working both ends against the middle. One one end, we spend thousands of dollars to improve the graduation rates; and on the other, we spend millions pushing students out of school through testing. The children, of course, are in the middle. As graduation rates go down, school ratings go up New study shows the negative implications of No Child Left Behind
Wisconsin teacher protests No Child law By RYAN J. FOLEY, Associated Press Writer Thu Nov 1, 5:30 AM ET
MADISON, Wis. - A middle school teacher is protesting the federal No
Child Left Behind law by refusing to administer a standardized test to
his eighth-grade students. Click here for full Article
Congress will be addressing the revisions to the ESEA over the next six weeks. Please contact your congressman.
The following article appears in the San Francisco Chronicle. The comparison between the standardized tests used in our country and the formative assessments used in other countries is poignant. It shows the transparency of the US testing process. Linda Darling Hammond points out that the tests, in many cases, are not used to hold students back but to improve the curriculum. Many of the tests are teacher created. The tests are not limited to multiple choice questions, but use real world (authentic) problems to evaluate critical thinking skills in a variety of ways. This article points to the heart of the No Child's behind left movement - that the members of ruling class are not trying to create solid, creative, thinking students in the public schools; they simply want cheap laborers who can memorize facts for the simple jobs in fast food, janitorial, and manufacturing industries.
High-quality standards, a curriculum based on critical thinking can enlighten our students
STEVEN WOLK is an associate professor in the Teacher Education Department at
Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago (e-mail: S-Wolk@neiu.edu).
He writes a thought provoking piece about what school is really for. We have been preaching that school is supposed to prepare students for life. We know that success in school and life is not based on cognitive skills but on one's ability to negotiate emotions and the emotions of others. Teachers can teach these skills through the arts, through reading, through math and science if administration will allow them to do it. Unfortunately, we are bogged down by OVERLY focusing on reading skills and bubbling exercises. This spring, many Jackson Public School children took not one MCT but two MCT tests. The second one was a
check on the first one, I guess.
We know that there are insidious reasons that public school children are subject to these standardized tests. Accountability can be achieved in other ways. At least one arm of Congress has agreed to stop testing four year olds with standardized tests. Even in Mississippi, we have begun to use the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERS) to develop accountability at the preschool level. One test cannot achieve the results that multiple measures can achieve in the area of accountability.
Wouldn't it be nice if every school superintendent gave this warning, and parents had to sign off on the possible psychological effects of testing?
Ring, ring.
Please stand by for an important phone message about your child ...
Hello. This is _______________School District Superintendent, ______________.
I am calling to alert all our parents about another potentially disruptive element to your child's education. This one, we fear, may be even worse than the video game, Bully, which I warned you about earlier this week.
We have reason to believe your child will be exposed to bullying during the upcoming round of the Mississippi Curriculum Test.
Reasonable educators have concluded that the MCT could be detrimental to the education, emotional, social development and well-being of your child while in Mississippi’s public schools.
And unlike some violent video game, there's no way to turn off the MCT.
I'm afraid, parents, that the MCT has become the academic bully that stalks your child's school hallways every day, causing cowering teachers to trim lesson plans, frightening principals into browbeating teachers and making students believe that they are the foot soldiers in some kind of inter-school combat.
We strongly suggest that you be aware of the game, MCT, and its negative effects, especially now that school salaries are tied to success at beating the game.
Testing strategies trump learning
The MCT game depicts a virtual-reality world in which learning takes a beating from the gang teaching of testing strategies. Academic pursuits that fall outside the boundaries of the test are pummeled, and teaching curriculums in tested subjects are perverted to support the test.
The "winners" of the game are deluded into thinking that beating the test is the only way to achieve a school's self-esteem, and this encourages schools to come up with their own desperate measures that may be sending the wrong kind of messages.
For example, a few Mississippi schools decided to reward students for receiving top scores on the MCT. When some people complained, the schools' response was that if it was OK to reward teachers and administrators for good test scores, why wouldn't it be OK to reward students?
The imperative to win the game distorts the true purpose of education.
And as in all growth-stunting games, the real cost is in all the wasted hours spent playing the game, time when your child could have and should have been doing something more worthwhile with his or her time.
A “level 5” school at any cost
As you may know, we here in the _______________ schools have taken a strong position in curbing bullying among our students. But our efforts have been restricted to the one-on-one, student-against-student bullying on our school campuses.
Unfortunately, we haven't addressed the much more pernicious kind of systemic bullying posed by the MCT game, which seems to spiral more and more out of control every year.
So I am taking the extra step this year to warn you about the next round of testing. The pressure to win the MCT game will be more intense this year, and there's no telling how that pressure will manifest itself and what price will have to be paid for a school's sign to say "We're a 'Level 5' school!"
So please, parents, be vigilant.
We live in a world where your child is exposed to a host of unsavory elements in our society, be they in the music world, on the movie screen or in Jackson.
We recognize and support your efforts in being a positive role model in your child's life. And we invite you to consult with your school's administration and staff to become more involved in learning about how to keep your child, our schools, and communities safe from unhealthy and negative influences.
I hope you are aware of the disgustingly fraudulent activities effected by the leaders of the program. Specifically, they force districts to use programs created by administrators of Reading First. One particularly heinous program is the DIBELS which forces young children to read nonsense words to predict their future reading problems. The children often struggle to make the words make sense and get distraught when they can't. What makes it even worse is that teachers use a timer creating even more stress in the children. Dr. Fish
GREG MATHIS; Education department must avoid fraud
by Greg Mathis
October 20, 2006
The President's Reading First program, instead of being celebrated for its role in helping America's children read to the best of their ability is being criticized for its fraudulent management. Not only has an audit of the program revealed that Reading First directors mishandled the way money was distributed to states to implement the program, but it also shows states were required to meet conditions that aren't necessary under the law. And, if a state didn't back a certain method of instruction, its funding was reduced. In a time where accountability in public education means everything, it is unthinkable that a government program charged with managing a key part of a major education initiative would engage in fraudulent, unethical behavior.
The largest and most comprehensive initiative of its kind, Reading First is designed to make sure all public school children in America read at grade level, in English, by the end of the third grade. Money is given to states so they can provide scientifically proven programs that improve reading instruction at selected Reading First schools. States must apply to the Department of Education for the money, and then the Department distributes funds based on the number of children living below the poverty line in that state. Statistics show that only 31% of all fourth graders read at or above what's considered a proficient level. Among poor students, only 15% are considered proficient readers. Further research shows that if a student falls behind in reading in the early grades, they are rarely able to make up the ground they've loss and, over time, school work becomes increasingly difficult. When a
kid loses interest in school, unproductive and destructive behaviors begin to grab their attention.
Early success in reading can prevent this. As such, if run successfully, Reading First can make a difference in public schools in America and, ultimately, impact the future of our country: our schools will produce students equally prepared for college or the workforce and crime rates are sure to fall. But, with all of the fraudulent activity that has been uncovered, how can the American people be sure the Reading First program is actually working? If the executives in charge of running the program are unethical in their business dealings, how can we put our children's, and our country's, future in their hands?
The fraudulent behavior uncovered during the audit is varied: schools were forced to buy materials the program's administrators preferred; some of those manufacturers had financial ties to the program's advisors. Conflicts of interest were ignored and certain aspects of the law were 'downplayed' when administrators weren't particularly fond of them. No matter how big or small the infraction, it's appalling to think that the education of America's children rested in the hands of people whose sole focus seemed
to be on lining the pockets of their elite friends.
Reading First must be thoroughly reviewed; this Education Department audit was only a first step. If necessary, people must be fired and policies must be changed. Our children's futures are too precious to trust them to broken organizations.
Judge Greg Mathis is national vice president of Rainbow PUSH and a national board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference .Top of Page
Just in case you're not familiar with the Reading First Scandal, here is some background:
Harkin wants to know more about Spellings' early oversight.
By David J. Hoff
Two prominent Democrats are demanding to know more about the problems identified in the implementation of the federal Reading First program, including whether criminal violations may have occurred and what Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings may have known about the problems while she was a White House aide.
In the wake of a report last month that found U.S. Department of Education officials had acted improperly in administering Reading First, Rep. George Miller of California and Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa have asked the Bush administration to provide additional information about how the $1 billion-a-year program has been carried out.
Rep. Miller also has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to launch a criminal inquiry based on findings in the report, issued by the Education Department’s inspector general.
“He thinks that there could be [criminal violations], so he wants them to investigate,” Tom Kiley, a spokesman for Rep. Miller said last week. As of late last week, Rep. Miller, the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, had not received a response from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Mr. Kiley said.
Separately, Sen. Harkin has asked Secretary Spellings to fully explain whether she had any involvement in or knowledge of the actions outlined in the Sept. 22 report, which covered a period when Rod Paige was secretary of education.
The report said it appeared that department officials had improperly organized an advisory panel to favor a specific teaching method and may have exceeded their legal authority by requiring states to adopt specific curricula to qualify for Reading First grants.
“It is hard to imagine that Secretary Spellings didn’t know anything about the abuses described in the inspector general’s report,” Sen. Harkin said in a Sept. 29 Senate floor speech. He said he suspected that Ms. Spellings had been closely tracking what was happening with the Reading First program in her role as White House domestic-policy adviser during President Bush’s first term.
The inspector general’s report covers actions from 2001 to 2003—the first two years of Mr. Bush’s presidency.
“Instead of making others take the fall for what happened, she needs to stand up and say whether she had any knowledge of or involvement in these activities when she worked in the White House,” Sen. Harkin said of Ms. Spellings.
‘Individual Mistakes’
In a Sept. 19 letter to the inspector general responding to the findings, which was released along with the report last month, Ms. Spellings said the inspector general had found problems that “reflect individual mistakes” by Education Department officials, and that all of those actions happened before she became secretary in January 2005.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Spellings declined comment on Sen. Harkin’s questions about her role in Reading First, but referred to the secretary’s letter to the inspector general.
For several years, education officials in various states have complained that federal Education Department officials forced them to adopt specific reading programs to receive approval to get grants from Reading First. The 4½-year-old initiative, part of the No Child Left Behind Act, seeks to raise the reading achievement of disadvantaged students in the early grades.
In his report, department Inspector General John P. Higgins Jr. documented actions by department officials that favored the direct instruction method of teaching reading and their efforts to force states to abandon curricula that didn’t use that method. ("Scathing Report Casts Cloud Over ‘Reading First’," Oct. 4, 2006.) [below]
Mr. Higgins plans to release five more reports about the Reading First program before the end of the year, which will evaluate how the department selected a technical-assistance provider for the program and explain several states’ attempts to get their plans approved by the department. In January, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, plans to release its own report on the program.
Some officials who worked closely with the Reading First program said the Education Department’s in-house lawyers reviewed all of the grant-application guidelines to ensure they complied with the law. The inspector general’s report said that the guidance didn’t accurately reflect the law’s requirements.
“We had lawyers scrub that actual proposal, the guidance,” Susan B. Neuman, who was the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education from March 2001 through January 2003, said in an interview. “Nothing could have gotten through the final process if in fact it was not within the law.”
Robert W. Sweet, who helped write the Reading First legislation as a senior staff member for the House education committee, said the Education Department’s guidance for the program was reviewed and approved by aides for House and Senate members from both parties.
Some former officials, meanwhile, have suggested that Secretary Spellings is downplaying her involvement with the Reading First program while she worked at the White House.
Ms. Spellings “micromanaged the implementation of Reading First from her West Wing office,” Michael J. Petrilli, who worked as an aide to then-Secretary Paige during the president’s first term, wrote on Sept. 28 on the National Review’s Web site. Mr. Petrilli is now a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington think tank.
“She was the leading cheerleader for an aggressive approach,” he also wrote about Ms. Spellings in the article.
Eugene W. Hickok, who held the No. 2 and No. 3 posts at the Education Department under Mr. Paige, said in an interview that Ms. Spellings “was very much engaged in No Child Left Behind.”
I would be surprised if Margaret didn’t have a pretty good sense of what was going on in Reading First,” said Mr. Hickok, who is a senior policy director at Dutko Worldwide, a Washington-based public-affairs firm.
Funding Plans Pending
To date, the Reading First program has awarded $5 billion to 1,700 districts and 5,600 schools. President Bush proposed Reading First as a key ingredient in the effort to have all children reach proficiency in reading and mathematics—the main goal of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Even with Inspector General Higgins’ highly critical report on how Reading First has been implemented, leading members of Congress appear to be more interested in fixing any problems with the program than in scrapping it and starting over, according to statements by lawmakers and interviews with congressional aides.
Because members are waiting for the rest of the inspector general’s findings and the GAO report, Congress is unlikely to alter the program this year. With the House and the Senate in recess, no legislative business will be conducted until after the November elections. In the short session scheduled to start the week after the elections, Congress is expected to be busy handling an agenda that includes passing remaining appropriations bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
In the version of the Senate spending bill that includes the Education Department’s budget, which is awaiting action in that chamber, Reading First would receive $1 billion, or $29 million less than in fiscal 2006 and in the plan approved by the House Appropriations Committee this past summer. Overall, Reading First and the other NCLB programs would receive $14.4 billion in the Senate Appropriation Committee’s fiscal 2007 bill, about the same as last year. The House committee’s bill would provide $14.6 billion for those programs.
Underdoing Oversight?
In addition to his call for a federal criminal inquiry, Rep. Miller, the California Democrat, asked his Republican colleagues—who are in the majority—to conduct oversight hearings on the Reading First program.
“He feels like the Republicans have fallen down on oversight in general,” said Mr. Kiley, the spokesman for Mr. Miller. “What you’re finding is the inspector general is stepping into the void left by Congress.”
The House education committee plans to hold a variety of hearings next year in preparation for the No Child Left Behind reauthorization. One of those will focus on Reading First and will deal with the inspector general’s findings, said Lindsey Mask, a spokeswoman for Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., the committee’s chairman.
And if the Democrats win control of the House or the Senate—or both—in the midterm elections, they will aggressively investigate all sorts of decisions made by the Bush administration, one longtime observer of Congress predicts.
“There is no doubt that Republicans have shirked their responsibility for overseeing the implementation of laws and conduct of agencies on a range of domestic and foreign policies, including education,” said Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “A Democratic majority in 2007 would almost certainly be more active and aggressive in its oversight.”
Associate Editor Kathleen Kennedy Manzo contributed to this report.
Vol. 26, Issue 07, Pages 1,27
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Published: October 4, 2006
Scathing Report Casts Cloud Over ‘Reading First’
Federal officials encouraged use of specific programs, inspector general finds.
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo
The findings of a scathing report on the federal Reading First program continued to reverberate last week following its Sept. 22 release, fueling debates in Congress, on the Internet, and among professionals in the field about their gravity and potential impact.
Critics of the program’s implementation said the conclusions drawn in the report by the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general validate complaints that federal officials may have steered the grant-application process to ensure that particular reading programs and instructional approaches were widely used by participating schools, and that others were essentially shut out.
Some supporters of the program characterized the findings as overblown and charged that they constituted a personal attack on department personnel, rather than a verdict on the $1 billion-a-year program itself, which was rolled out 4½ years ago as part of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Many educators and observers said the blistering review of the implementation and management of Reading First, though justified, could damage a program that is showing initial signs of effectiveness.
“There really needs to be a good, hard look at the program ... and a renewed focus on solid, research-based instruction,” said Alan J. Farstrup, the executive director of the International Reading Association, in Newark, Del. “Reading First can be a more solid program.”
The long-awaited evaluation, which includes excerpts from internal Education Department e-mail marked confidential and sometimes containing vulgar language, concludes that:
• Department officials may have intended to “stack” the panels of grant reviewers with those who favored a particular teaching methodology, and their method of screening the panelists for conflicts of interest was ineffective;
• Requirements for receiving grants under the program were expanded beyond what the law requires; and
• Federal education officials may also have overstepped provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act that prohibit them from influencing or dictating the curricula, assessments, or instructional approaches used by schools or districts.
Reading First, which has already handed out nearly $5 billion in grants to some 1,700 districts and 5,600 schools, is designed to improve reading instruction in the nation’s most disadvantaged schools through the use of research-based methods.
Potential Conflicts
The inspector general’s findings correspond with charges leveled over the past several years by critics of the program, as well as by many reading experts and state officials.
Education Week has reported since 2002 many of the concerns among researchers and educators that the program favored only a handful of consultants and commercial products, and the potential financial conflicts between them. In an extensive analysis of documents and e-mail correspondence obtained through state and federal open-records requests, as well as interviews with state officials, the newspaper reported last fall a pattern of behavior that suggested federal employees and their representatives had directed or even pressured states to choose specific assessments, consultants, and certain kinds of texts as conditions for getting funding under Reading First. ("States Pressed to Refashion Reading
First Grant Designs," Sept. 7, 2005.)
Cindy Cupp, a former state education official and the publisher of a little-known reading series, filed formal complaints in May 2005 with the Georgia and federal education departments. Shortly afterward, the Success for All Foundation in Baltimore and the Reading Recovery Foundation of North America, based in Columbus, Ohio, lodged similar complaints with the federal department’s inspector general.
Investigators for Inspector General John P. Higgins Jr. found that Reading First’s director, Christopher J. Doherty, nominated review panelists with professional connections to the Reading Mastery program associated with the Direct Instruction teaching method. Mr. Doherty had spent part of his career promoting the use of the program before joining the Education Department in 2001 under the Bush administration. Those panelists reviewed 23 Reading First state applications.
“The Reading First director took direct action to ensure that a particular approach to reading instruction was represented on the expert review panel,” the report says.
The inspector general also found potential conflicts of interest among members of an assessment committee that reviewed tests suitable for use of Reading First in schools. Committee members themselves had produced five of those assessments.
Although Direct Instruction and Success for All are backed by the most scientific evidence of any reading programs, neither method has gotten a boost under Reading First. Reading Recovery, an intensive one-on-one tutoring program for struggling readers, which has also presented evidence of its effectiveness, was named in several of Mr. Doherty’s e-mails in which he suggested that officials should try to discourage its use among grant recipients.
Reading Time
The controversy over Reading First started to unfold from the very outset of the program.
January 2002: The U.S. Department of Education conducts Reading Academies, workshops to provide guidance for state officials on applying $900 million in Reading First grants.
March 2002: The International Reading Association and the Association of American Publishers write to Education Secretary Rod Paige to request clarification on Reading First. The letters raise concerns that state education officials are getting the message that they can improve their chances of receiving their Reading First grants by ordering school districts to use specific products and materials.
June 2002: The first Reading First grants are awarded to Alabama, Colorado, and Florida. Most grant applications are sent back to the remaining states and jurisdictions for revisions.
January 2004: New York City school officials announce that schools seeking Reading First grants will be required to use specific commercial core and intervention programs for teaching reading, not the district’s curriculum in the subject. Several months earlier, the city had been advised by a federal official that its choice of reading text would not meet Reading First requirements for research-based programs.
April 2005: Cindy Cupp, a former state education official in Georgia and the publisher of a commercial reading program, files complaints with state investigators against the state’s implementation of Reading First. Ms. Cupp claims state officials misled districts over whether her textbook series was aligned with Reading First requirements. Two months later, the Baltimore-based Success for All Foundation requests a review by the federal Education Department’s inspector general.
June 2005: G. Reid Lyon, the nation’s "reading czar," steps down as chief of the child-development and -behavior branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to work for Best Associates, whose chairman, Randy Best, founded the Voyager Learning reading program. Mr. Lyon is assigned to help design a teacher education program that emphasizes research-based practice.
September 2005: An Education Week examination of documents and interviews with state officials finds evidence that federal employees and their representatives may have directed or pressured states to choose specific curricula, assessments, and consultants as conditions for receiving Reading First grants.
October 2005: A bipartisan group in Congress asks the Government Accountability Office to conduct a review of Reading First.
July 2006: An interim report on Reading First, based on survey findings, is released suggesting that the program is having a positive effect on reading instruction in most states and districts financed under the program.
September 2006: The first of several reports on Reading First by the Education Department’s inspector general is released.
Also implicated in the report for their roles in setting requirements for the program were Susan B. Neuman, who served as the department’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education from March 2001 until January 2003 and G. Reid Lyon, who directed the branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that supports reading research.
Ms. Neuman returned to her job as a reading researcher at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Mr. Lyon now works for Best Associates in Dallas.
In an interview, Ms. Neuman said she was not included in what she described as closed-door discussions between Mr. Doherty, other staff members, and consultants as they drafted guidance for the program and advised state officials on their grant proposals.
Mr. Lyon said his role was simply to explain and clarify what the research says is effective in reading instruction.
It is Mr. Doherty’s role in directing the grant-application process that is outlined in detail in the report, including e-mail exchanges that express in sharp wording his disdain for what he viewed as insufficiently rigorous instructional materials. Just days before the report was released, Mr. Doherty announced that he would be leaving his position with the department Oct. 1 for work in the private sector. He could not be reached for comment.
The handful of remaining Reading First staff members have been reassigned within the Education Department, according to spokesman Chad Colby.
In past interviews with Education Week, Mr. Doherty has maintained that the department only pressed state and local officials to meet the law’s demand for research-based materials, assessments, and practices, and provided counsel on how they could do that.
“In fact, what we’ve said about Reading First is that there is no approved list of programs or assessment, truthfully,” Mr. Doherty said in an interview last year.
Beyond the Law?
Some education experts said the Education Department had no choice but to push hard for states to change their approach to reading instruction. Many states, they said, wanted to continue using failed approaches or programs with no evidence of effectiveness.
In spring 2002, an Education Week survey found that most state officials were generally satisfied with their existing reading initiatives and planned to use Reading First money to expand, enhance, or supplement them without making wholesale changes.
“In my view, Reading First is starting to get results, not in spite of the aggressive approach of the department, but because of it,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a former official at the Education Department during the current administration. Mr. Petrilli, now the vice president for national programs and policy at the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, said the inspector general’s report does not point to any illegal activity but chronicles how department employees pressed to ensure the law’s intent was followed.
The inspector general, however, suggests that officials went beyond the law, which prohibits federal employees from influencing or directing states’ decisions on curricula, tests, or instructional methods.
Some observers agree.
“The issue is that here are these folks who saw an opportunity to really, fundamentally move the debate on reading instruction,” said Andrew J. Rotherham, a co-founder and the director of the Washington-based think tank Education Sector. “That doesn’t allow them to deviate from what the law allows.”
The inspector general’s office is conducting five other audits related to Reading First. The reports could be completed by the end of the year, according to Mary Mitchelson, who serves as counsel to the inspector general.
In a statement, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said some of the actions described in the report “reflect individual mistakes” by federal employees. She added that she was “moving swiftly to enact all of the inspector general’s recommendations.”
The inspector general has recommended that the department review the structure and management of the Reading First office, establish guidelines to ensure staff members understand the prohibitions in the NCLB law, and set up greater oversight of programs as they are implemented.
Spellings’ Involvement
Mr. Petrilli, Mr. Rotherham, and others question Ms. Spellings’ claims that the program was implemented without her input. Although she became education secretary in early 2005, after many of the practices outlined in the report occurred, she was closely involved in the establishment of the No Child Left Behind program overall, and Reading First, while she served at the White House as President Bush’s chief domestic-policy aide during his first term, Mr. Petrilli said.
“Margaret Spellings was involved in this from day one in her role as domestic-policy adviser, and that’s something she should have been proud of because it’s one of the most successful education programs in the history of the department,” he said.
“Instead of defending it and hailing its success, she’s hanging one of her most loyal lieutenants out to dry,” Mr. Petrilli said, referring to Mr. Doherty.
Ms. Spellings has not yet responded to those allegations.
State and local education officials have generally praised the program for focusing needed resources on professional development and materials in reading. And many are reporting that those efforts are having a positive bearing on student achievement. But those successes have not been linked to the curriculum and assessment decisions made by those states. It is also not known whether a greater choice of instructional program, combined with the additional resources for teacher professional development and support services provided to Reading First schools, would have had a similar outcome.
The program’s results do not appease some officials who say the process may have hindered their ability to serve more children.
“The process we had to go through was so excruciating,” said Lisa Y. Gross, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky education department. Kentucky had to revise its Reading First application at least three times, and officials said they gained approval only after buckling to Mr. Doherty’s demands to change the assessment portion of the plan. Despite the benefits of the program, Ms. Gross said, “still we believe if we had gotten our first proposal accepted, we could have provided many more services for students or at least gotten started a lot sooner.”
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., urged Republican members of the House Education and the Workforce Committee to hold hearings on the inspector general’s findings.
“This was a concerted effort to corrupt the process on behalf of partisan supporters, and taxpayers and schoolchildren are the ones who got harmed by it,” Rep. Miller, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said in a statement. He was among a bipartisan group that initiated a separate investigation of the program by the Government Accountability Office. That report is due out in January
Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., responded to the report in a letter to Ms. Spellings last month. The report “seemed to suggest that the department mismanagement was even worse than expected,” he wrote. But, the senator added, that her promise to implement the inspector general’s recommendations was “a good start.”
Vol. 26, Issue 06, Pages 1,24-25
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SATs Scored in Error by Test Companies Roil Admissions Process
A PDF file (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/marketsmag/education.pdf) contains several sub-stories along with this major thread.
By David Glovin and David Evans
Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Jerry Lee Faine Elementary School in Dothan, Alabama, starts each day with two hours of reading and vocabulary. After that, there's arithmetic. ``If you can read, you can do anything,'' says Principal Deloris Potter, a spry woman of 59 who has run the school since 2002.
Potter, trusting the work of her teachers, was confident of passing grades in April 2005 as students began two weeks of mandatory standardized testing in reading and math. That July, state education officials told Potter her school had failed the Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test. The state warned it might fire teachers if scores didn't improve, she says. A dozen students transferred after the substandard rating. Faculty morale plunged.
``We felt like dogs,'' says Charlotte Adams, a reading specialist at the school.
In February 2006, the state said Jerry Lee Faine Elementary had passed. Harcourt Assessment Inc., a unit of London-based Reed Elsevier Plc and one of the world's largest test companies, had improperly graded the exam.
The snafu is at least the 30th time since 2000 that San Antonio-based Harcourt Assessment, which also wrote the exam, has made errors such as improper scoring, faulty instructions and questions with more than one answer.
Harcourt isn't alone. Other companies are constructing flawed tests, administering them improperly and scoring them incorrectly, according to lawsuits and education department records in 15 states.
SAT Error
In March, Pearson Assessments, a unit of London-based Pearson Plc, the world's biggest educational publisher, had to explain to high schoolers across the U.S. that it had erred in scoring about 5,000 SAT college entrance exams because its scanners couldn't read answer sheets that had expanded from humidity.
The next month, education officials in Minnesota discovered a separate issue with answer sheets that Pearson Assessments had created for a state-mandated exam. At least 500,000 people taking tests from 2000 through 2006 -- from Nevada third graders to aspiring teachers in many states -- were victims of test company mistakes, documents show.
``The errors we've seen from testing companies are probably just the tip of the iceberg,'' says David Berliner, 68, Regents' Professor of Education at Arizona State University in Tempe, who has written more than 200 articles, books and book chapters about education and served as president of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association. ``State education departments often lack the ability to adequately supervise these companies.''
Millions of Tests
The U.S. is in a testing frenzy. Students in the 92,816 American public schools will take at least 45 million standardized reading and math exams this year. That will jump to 56 million in the 2007-08 school year, when states begin testing science as part of the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law, the most comprehensive education overhaul in half a century.
Beyond No Child, tens of millions of additional tests assess college hopefuls, certify future stockbrokers and even evaluate preschoolers. With the stakes for making the grade so high for so many, errors by test companies have dramatic consequences.
Joseph Conigliaro lost his Pennsylvania teaching job after Princeton, New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service, the world's biggest standardized test company, incorrectly scored three of his licensing exams. ETS, which will pay $11.1 million to 4,100 teachers who were falsely failed, called the error an ``anomaly.''
`Growing Catastrophe'
Ryan Beck & Co. asked Linda Cutler to resign from a senior associate job at the securities firm after she and 1,881 other test takers were scored incorrectly last year on the Series 7 licensing exam for securities representatives.
``It's an exponentially growing catastrophe,'' says James Popham, an emeritus professor of education at University of California, Los Angeles, and author of 25 books on education. ``No one knows how bad it is, and it's going to get worse.''
Deputy U.S. Education Secretary Raymond Simon says states must better oversee test companies. ``The whole teaching system is based on the results of those tests,'' Simon, 61, says. ``If the integrity of the testing process is called into question, that brings into question the whole accountability system.''
The national obsession with performance and measurement means a booming business for test-producing and grading companies. In 2005, CTB/McGraw-Hill, Educational Testing Service, Harcourt Assessment, Pearson Assessments and smaller firms generated $2.8 billion in revenue from testing and test preparation, according to Boston-based research firm Eduventures LLC. No Child tests alone produced about $500 million in annual revenue in 2005-06.
`Real Profits'
Along with creating exams, Harcourt Assessment, Pearson Assessments and companies such as White Plains, New York-based Haights Cross Communications Inc. sell mass-produced workbooks, practice tests and computer software that teachers use year-round to prepare students for No Child and other tests.
The burgeoning test preparation industry generated $1.7 billion in annual revenue last year. The $1.1 billion testing market and the $1.7 billion test prep business will grow by a combined 30 percent by the 2009-10 school year, Eduventures predicts.
For test companies, pitching schools to buy preparation materials after receiving a No Child contract is routine, says Robert Schaeffer, public education director at the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based non-profit group.
``It's standard business practice, the equivalent of razor companies' giving away razors so they can make money selling blades,'' he says. ``It's where the real profits are.''
Test Prep
Profit margins in test preparation are as much as seven times higher than they are for No Child tests, partly because there are no requirements for high-quality questions on practice exams. States leave it to schools and school districts to decide whether the test preparation materials they're buying are sound.
Haights Cross, publisher of the Buckle Down test preparation workbooks, reported operating margins of 21 percent in its test preparation division for the first half of 2006.
In comparison, No Child tests, which must be custom designed for almost every state, have pretax profit margins as low as 3 percent, says Kurt Landgraf, chief executive officer of Educational Testing Service. He says his not-for-profit company lost $2.6 million on a $236 million four-year No Child contract in California.
`Cutting Corners'
Richard Rizzo, chief financial officer of Measured Progress Inc., a Dover, New Hampshire-based nonprofit firm that produces No Child tests, says he expects to earn margins triple those of No Child exams by selling practice questions and tests that schools use to gear up for the actual exams. Getting a foot in the door with a No Child contract can also lead to sales of achievement or psychological tests not related to No Child.
``Companies could conceivably low-ball the customized test because they know they could go in and sell the off-the-shelf products with a 40-50 percent margin,'' says Rizzo, 62, referring to tests that aren't specially designed for individual states.
Whether or not they low-ball, companies often scrimp when they bid on No Child contracts, Eduventures analyst Tim Wiley says. Getting a contract involves the same process as selling supplies or cafeteria food to a school: A company submits what it expects to be a winning package. ``As with any bidding situation, it definitely requires a lot of cost cutting,'' Wiley says. ``Or, in some cases, cutting corners.''
In Florida, CTB/McGraw-Hill won part of the state's testing contract for 3,800 schools in 2005. To grade the essay portion, the Monterey, California-based unit of McGraw-Hill Cos. hired $10-an-hour workers from Kelly Services Inc., the second-largest U.S. provider of temporary employees, and other companies.
`Layed Off'
Among the 2,947 graders was a person who won the job while he was employed packing bags of potato chips for PepsiCo Inc.'s Frito-Lay unit, applications compiled by the Florida state senate show. Kelly spokeswoman Renee Walker declined to comment.
Another grader was a cook in an Orlando, Florida, diner. One essay evaluator wrote he was ``layed off'' from a clerical job after working as a janitor. He graduated from Ambassador University, a Worldwide Church of God-run school in Big Sandy, Texas, in 1997. The school shut down that same year. Another said that he majored in ``Phylosophy/Humanity'' at Mount Angel Seminary in St. Benedict, Oregon.
Steven Weiss, vice president for communications at McGraw- Hill, said in an e-mailed statement that the company had performed extremely well in scoring more than 90 million documents with a total of more than 755 million essay and short- answer questions during the past five years.
Florida, Chicago
CTB/McGraw-Hill, Harcourt Assessment and Pearson Assessments don't break down their revenue from No Child tests and preparation materials in regulatory filings. Public records from the Wyoming department of education show the state is paying Harcourt, which has a $21 million, four-year No Child contract, more than $120 per student each year. Of that, about half is for No Child tests, and the rest is for preparation materials and other testing products.
Schools in Okaloosa County, Florida, pay $9.50 per student for a series of preparation tests called Stanford Learning First, which Harcourt Assessment renamed Learnia. By comparison, Harcourt received $4.93 per child from the state of Florida in 2005 to develop questions for its No Child-mandated annual Comprehensive Assessment Test.
Harcourt Assessment's experience shows how winning a No Child bid can be a prelude to more sales. In 2004, Harcourt got a four-year, $44.5 million contract to develop and score Illinois's No Child exams. Chicago schools then began purchasing Harcourt materials, testing director Xavier Botana says.
Tremendous Pressure
The preparation products included Stanford Learning First practice tests that measured student progress as they prepared for No Child exams. In the 2005-06 school year, the district spent $1.8 million on Harcourt's new Stanford Learning First product.
Christine Rowland, a former teacher of English as a second language who now trains colleagues at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, New York, says her pupils didn't learn more because of increased testing. Still, she relied on test preparation materials to help students pass the math test. The cost of failure was too high, she says.
``If I know they are going to test six things six weeks from now, that's what I'm going to teach,'' Rowland, 46, says. ``It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on. The real fear is that it turns students off from learning.''
Test companies, aware that Rowland and other teachers are being judged by how students do on No Child exams, are inundating schools with ads for preparation products such as practice tests, software and banks of sample questions. Often they say their materials are designed specifically to help students pass the state's No Child test.
`Test Anxiety'
``I'm getting mail from companies I've never heard of,'' says Susan Friedwald, head of teacher training at Public School 48 in the Bronx.
At Cracker Trail Elementary School in Sebring, Florida, 11- year-old Alexis Szoka took dozens of practice exams last year leading up to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. She wound up a nervous wreck. ``My daughter has such test anxiety, she can't take a test anymore,'' says Alexis's mother, Carol Szoka.
One exam measured whether Alexis understood vocabulary and another checked her spelling. The school tested how well she read and whether she knew math. Some tests compared her reading and math skills with those of other fourth graders. Alexis was evaluated on phonics, writing and her understanding of text on a computer. Most tests were given two, three or four times a year. Teachers gave chapter tests in reading and math and benchmark tests throughout the year to see whether Alexis was progressing.
`Spray-And-Pray'
Andrew Lethbridge, Cracker Trail's vice principal, says one test gave fourth graders practice in filling in answer sheet bubbles on other tests. The materials came from divisions of Harcourt Assessment, Pearson Assessments and smaller, privately held companies.
``It was never like this,'' says Carol Szoka, who has two grown children who went through the same schools in Sebring, which is 85 miles (137 kilometers) south of Orlando. ``They had an achievement test. They just took it. They weren't prepped.''
Richard Demeri, Cracker Trail's principal, says test preparation materials have helped his students. Seven years ago, the school was given a grade of C by the state. Now, with test scores higher, the school has an A from the state and is no longer on probation.
``There's very little spray-and-pray teaching going on -- where you spray everybody and pray they get it,'' he says. The school uses test results to analyze each student's progress. ``It's much more individualized now,'' he says.
Even if Demeri's students are prepared to take No Child tests, two Florida state senators question whether CTB/McGraw- Hill has qualified people to grade them.
Sports Science
Senators Walter ``Skip'' Campbell and Leslie ``Les'' Miller Jr. sued the state education department and CTB/McGraw-Hill earlier this year to obtain applications of test graders. The department had refused to release the applications, citing confidentiality. CTB/McGraw-Hill settled the suit by providing copies of the scorers' personnel files with personal identifying information removed.
CTB/McGraw-Hill's $82 million, three-year Florida contract requires a scorer to have a bachelor's degree in mathematics, reading, science, education or a related field. On its Web site, the Florida Department of Education assures parents that graders of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test are professional, trained scorers.
Personal Trainer
Information the senate obtained shows one grader had an associate's degree, which is below a bachelor's, from the University of Delhi's School of Correspondence Courses and Continuing Education in Delhi, India.
She worked as a $7.50-an-hour cashier at a duty-free shop at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago before being hired to grade exams, according to the settlement documents. CTB/McGraw- Hill now says this person never scored exams.
A personal trainer with a degree in sports science from the University of Leipzig in Germany also graded essays, as did a convicted shoplifter who graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in physical education, the applications show. A person from Hungary wrote he was a ``pyshical education'' major. A physical education major from Methodist College in Fayetteville, North Carolina, wrote that she had attended ``Methidist College.''
McGraw-Hill's Weiss said its scorers from the University of Delhi met the requirements for a bachelor's degree. ``Individuals must undergo a comprehensive training process before becoming qualified to score,'' Weiss wrote. ``Scorers must maintain performance quality throughout the process.''
Spelling Not a Requirement
CTB/McGraw-Hill spokeswoman Kelley Carpenter says the company subjects scorers to a rigorous three- to five-day training program. Next year, at Florida's request, the company will ensure that scorers have appropriate backgrounds for the subjects they grade, she says.
``They are constantly monitored,'' she says. ``And if they don't match the quality performance standards, they're not retained as scorers.''
Carpenter says spelling errors on an application don't disqualify someone from being hired as a scorer. ``Spelling in and of itself is not a requirement,'' she says.
When Deputy Education Secretary Simon is shown misspellings on applications of Florida scorers, he says he would demand excellence. ``It's absolutely important that the integrity of the scorers is something the companies would be proud of and feel comfortable with,'' he says. ``I can't imagine they would feel comfortable with a non-speller.''
No Oversight
Cornelia Orr, head of the Florida Office of Assessment and Performance, says she reviewed about 25 percent of the grader applications. ``I felt like CTB had minimally met our expectations,'' she says. ``There are ways they can improve.''
One reason for the testing foul-ups and their dire effects is that there's no federal oversight of the testing industry. When the U.S. Congress authorized the No Child law it didn't create an agency to evaluate whether the companies making and selling the exams do an adequate job. Each state oversees its own test contractor.
Roderick Paige, who ran the No Child program as U.S. education secretary from 2001 to 2004, says the law is a good one. He says his concern is that testing may not be done accurately and competently. Paige, 73, says he summoned top executives from 20 testing companies to a conference room at the U.S. Department of Education on Feb. 20, 2003, and demanded better performance.
`Making Mistakes'
In 2005, the Education Department's inspector general announced plans to study whether there's a need for federal review to detect and prevent errors. The study isn't yet under way, spokeswoman Catherine Grant says.
``We've got to get better testing producers,'' says Paige, who's now chairman of Chartwell Education Group LLC, a Washington-based school consulting company. ``They're making mistakes.''
Harcourt Assessment is making the most errors, according to records in 15 state education departments. In addition to erroneously failing Jerry Lee Faine Elementary, Harcourt wrongly flunked three other Alabama schools because of its grading snafu. It mistakenly passed 10 Alabama schools that should have failed, the state said.
`Shortcuts'
In Connecticut, Harcourt Assessment reported the wrong reading test scores for 355 high school students in 51 districts last year. The state fined the company $80,000. In Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts and Virginia, Harcourt made errors on No Child tests and achievement tests given to measure how students compared with one another. States fined the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
``Employees took shortcuts,'' Harcourt Assessment Senior Vice President Robin Gunn wrote in a May 28, 2004, letter to Hawaii school principals, promising stricter oversight. Gunn has since left the company.
Hawaii hired a not-for-profit firm, Washington-based American Institutes for Research, to develop and score the tests after discovering more errors on Harcourt's 2005 exams. Illinois also replaced Harcourt in the middle of its contract; Connecticut, Massachusetts and Virginia didn't renew their contracts with the company.
Nevada fired Harcourt in 2004, after the company mistakenly failed hundreds of students, gave inflated scores to thousands of others and produced tests with missing pages, misspellings and flawed instructions, according to Nevada Education Department records.
Fined and Fired
``It was errors, one after the other, and not to a single student but to a large number,'' says Karlene Lee, the assistant superintendent in Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas. ``In education, we don't have the luxury to say that 2 percent doesn't matter. Every child has to be accurate.''
Nevada fined Harcourt Assessment $425,000 in 2002, before firing the company.
Harcourt's approximately $290 million in revenue last year was 3 percent of Reed Elsevier's sales, according to company filings. Reed Elsevier reported its profit increased 62 percent in the six months ended on June 30 to 217 million pounds ($403 million) compared with a year earlier. The company's shares rose 7.7 percent this year to 588 pence on Nov. 2.
Harcourt Assessment hired a new CEO, Michael Hansen, who took over in July after serving as executive vice president for corporate development at Guetersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann AG, Europe's largest media company. Hansen, 45, says his company won't slip up again. He blames errors on the enormous demand for made-to-order state tests.
`Sacred Obligation'
``You went from an industry that was largely standardized to an industry that was highly, highly customized,'' Hansen says during an interview in a conference room in his San Antonio office suite, which is adjacent to the test production work floor. ``Our most sacred obligation is that the test results are accurate and that they are timely.''
Last year privately held Measurement Inc., a Durham, North Carolina-based test development and scoring company, wrongly failed 890 students out of the 5,461 it tested on Ohio's high school graduation exams. The company says it scored the exams correctly and then erred when it determined the students' grades based on the number of questions they answered correctly.
``We had a really spotless reputation,'' Senior Vice President Mike Bunch says. ``This was just devastating to us.''
Pearson Assessments grades 40 million exams each year. The company has the high-profile job of scoring the SAT, which more than 3,000 colleges and universities use as a gauge for admitting students.
`Hard to Get Perfection'
Pearson discovered its SAT scoring error in January after two students asked that their results be hand-scored. Score changes affected about 1 percent of the October 2005 test takers, says the New York-based College Board, a nonprofit group that represents 5,000 colleges and oversees the exam. Before most college admission decisions were announced, the College Board re-reported the roughly 4,400 scores that had been underscored.
``When you do 12 million tests a year, a lot of people are involved in that,'' College Board President Gaston Caperton says. ``It's very hard to get perfection.''
Shane Fulton, a lean youth who played soccer and tennis at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, knows the pain of an incorrect score. Fulton had his sights on attending New York University or Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.
`Something Was Wrong'
In June 2005, at the end of his junior year at the Quaker- run high school, he took his first SAT. He earned a score of 1,910 out of 2,400 on the three-part test, which assesses mathematics, reading and writing. Not satisfied with his performance on the math portion, he took the test a second time in October. He was shocked when the grade came back as a 1,330.
``I knew that something was wrong,'' says Fulton, 19, of Yardley, Pennsylvania. He asked to have his exam graded by hand. When the results were returned more than a month later, his score was actually a 1,720, or 390 points higher than initially reported.
By then, Fulton had suffered restless nights, sought sleeping pills from his parents and broken down in tears because of the uncertainty surrounding the scores and his future. Adding to his anxiety, he'd taken the SAT a third time because he didn't yet know his results on the second test. On that one, he earned an 1,850.
``Every year, there's more of an emphasis on how you do,'' says Fulton, who's attending Northeastern University in Boston and is suing Pearson Assessments and the College Board over the error. ``I was thinking I wouldn't get into any of the colleges I applied to.''
$50 Million Investment
Mistakes may soon cost Pearson Assessments and other test companies business. Educational Testing Service wants to bring scoring in-house to reduce the chance of errors. ETS's Landgraf has directed the company to invest $50 million so it can expand its scoring operation within three years. He estimates that will produce $33 million in new annual revenue. Pearson shares gained 12 percent this year as of Nov. 2, to 769.5 pence.
Having ETS grade his exam didn't help Pennsylvania teacher Conigliaro, one of the 4,100 false failures on the Praxis test. Forty-four states require the Praxis to evaluate teaching skill and knowledge in a particular field. ETS developed the Praxis and then, in Conigliaro's case, scored it incorrectly -- multiple times.
`Too Embarrassed'
Conigliaro, 55, an engineer and former machine shop owner, started teaching seven years ago as an intern at Mountain View Junior/Senior High School in Kingsley, Pennsylvania. His employment there was contingent on his passing the Praxis to get final certification. He took the exam in April 2003 and was told he'd failed. He took it again and got a second failing score. He took it a third and a fourth time and again flunked.
``I was missing by one or two points each time,'' he says.
Conigliaro was fired from his teaching job and wound up working as a bartender. ``I didn't want to leave the house for a year and a half because I was too embarrassed,'' he says.
ETS notified Conigliaro in July 2004 that there were scoring errors on his tests and that he had actually passed. In a press release that month the company cited a ``statistical anomaly'' in the scoring of nine exams from January 2003 to April 2004 and apologized to test takers. ETS spokesman Tom Ewing declined to comment further.
According to court papers by teachers who later sued ETS in federal court in New Orleans, the firm didn't start an investigation of its scoring of short essays until an unnamed state challenged the results. In March, the company agreed to pay $11.1 million to the test takers to settle the lawsuit.
`I'm Bitter'
Conigliaro, who sued and was part of the settlement, says he would have succeeded on at least three of the four exams he was told he'd failed. ``Yes, I'm bitter,'' says Conigliaro, who, after passing the Praxis and getting his license, now teaches business and accounting at Blue Ridge High School in New Milford, Pennsylvania. ``I was just about to get tenure, and I had to start all over again.''
Errors can occur in the earliest stages of the test-making process and then snowball. In 2003, the Minnesota Department of Education found flaws in questions proposed by Maple Grove, Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corp., a privately held firm that provides testing for eight states. Minnesota school officials reviewed some questions, which are known as items. About 6 percent had no correct answers or multiple correct answers.
`Undermine Credibility'
``There are other concerns about item quality with another 60-70 percent,'' testing director Reginald Allen wrote in 2003 after the company challenged the state's decision not to renew its contract. The flawed test questions didn't make it onto state exams.
Company lawyer Dwight Rabuse declined to comment except to say that the state later hired a Data Recognition staffer to replace Allen. Minnesota Education Department spokesman Randy Wanke declined to comment. Minnesota now contracts with Pearson Assessments to provide its state tests.
``When you have an education reform agenda that's relying so heavily on standard tests to ensure school quality, it doesn't take so many problems to undermine credibility,'' says Thomas Toch, co-director of Washington-based research firm Education Sector, who wrote a 2006 report on test errors.
Executives at testing companies say they strive for perfection in the face of state demands for new tests each year, in at least two different subjects and for seven different grades.
Potential for Errors
Stuart Kahl, president and founder of Measured Progress, says the industry uses dozens of quality checks as companies draft, edit, print and deliver exams; retrieve, scan and read papers; and calculate, compare and convert raw scores into test grades. The process may take two years from start to finish.
``There's no question there are tremendous demands placed on the industry,'' Kahl says. ``Obviously, when you redo things every year, you have tremendous potential for errors.''
Former Harcourt Assessment President Jeff Galt says state education departments are sometimes to blame for errors that they require their testing contractors to assume responsibility for. He points to Connecticut, which is using Measurement Inc., its third testing contractor since 2003. The state got rid of Harcourt and then parted ways with CTB/McGraw-Hill.
``You have to wonder, Is the problem with the testing company or with the department?'' says Galt, 50, who now teaches business at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. Connecticut Education Department spokesman Henry Garcia declined to comment.
On Probation
Harcourt Assessment's inability to follow instructions from Alabama is what cost Jerry Lee Faine Elementary its good name.
After the school was notified of its failure to make the required adequate yearly progress, the state placed it in the category of School Improvement, as probation is called under the No Child program. Newspapers publicized the designation, and parents won permission to transfer children to other schools.
``People will not move into this community,'' says Alfreda Mays-Rogers, whose grandchild is in first grade at the school.
The Alabama Department of Education summoned principal Potter 100 miles north to Montgomery, she says. Officials demanded more teacher training and insisted on additional reading instruction. Potter says she researched curricula used by other schools and dissected years of test data to figure out why her pupils hadn't passed. Nothing stood out.
During Potter's crisis of confidence, Kirby Hubbard, the testing director in Etowah County, about 250 miles to the north, discovered that Harcourt Assessment had miscalculated his schools' No Child results.
`Mad, Mad, Mad'
Harcourt had tallied the scores of students who'd been absent during part of the exam week, failing to follow Alabama's instruction to count the scores of only students who took the entire multipart test, state Education Superintendent Joseph Morton said in a Nov. 8, 2005, letter to Harcourt. That same type of error affected Jerry Lee Faine Elementary.
When the state told Potter her school had actually passed on Feb. 9, 2006, she took to the school intercom and made the announcement. Teachers ran into the hallways, cheering.
``We were happy, happy, happy,'' Potter says. ``But you turn to the other side, we were mad, mad, mad.''
Along with Potter, educators in Florida, Nevada and across the U.S. have to live with test company mistakes every year. Boston College emeritus professor George Madaus and researcher Kathleen Rhoades say there should be independent oversight of crucial exams.
``There's so much error in these products,'' Rhoades says.
`Make Testing Better'
Madaus, co-author of a 2003 study on test errors, envisions an impartial federally financed panel that would monitor state testing programs to ensure they're well crafted and used correctly. Such a board would analyze why there are errors and how they can be minimized. It also may offer a seal of approval on the test preparation products flooding the market, which can generate such a big chunk of a test company's earnings.
``This is not anti-testing,'' Madaus says. ``This is an attempt to make testing better.''
Potter tries not to be bitter. She notes with pride how her school has now passed the state test for two consecutive years. She has a message for test companies. ``They're hurting students more than anything else,'' she says. ``Please don't make that mistake on students. That's a reflection on our school, on my students, on my teachers. That's a reflection on me.''
It's also a reflection on the $2.8 billion test industry, which profits from selling materials to prepare students for high-stakes exams it has a hard time getting right.
To contact the reporters on this story: To contact the reporters for this story: David Evans in Los Angeles davidevans@bloomberg.net David Glovin in New York at dglovin@bloomberg.net
Second in a series of occasional articles on testing.
In ancient Greece, Socrates tested his students through conversations. Answers were not scored as right or wrong. They just led to more
dialogue. Many intellectual elites in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.
cared more about finding the path to higher knowledge than producing a
correct response. To them, accuracy was for shopkeepers.
Today, educators often hold up the Socratic method as the best kind of
teaching.
So how did we go from that ideal to an educational model shaped -- and
perhaps even ruled -- by standardized, normed, charted, graphed,
regressed, calibrated and validated testing? Students in the Washington
area are likely to know more about the MSA (Maryland School
Assessments), the SOL (Virginia's Standards of Learning) and the D.C.
CAS (D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System) than they do about Socrates
and his illustrious student Plato.
Critics say standardized testing has robbed schools of the creative
clash of intellects that make Plato's dialogues still absorbing. "There
is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in
nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all," said educational
psychologist Gerald W. Bracey, research columnist for the Phi Delta
Kappan education journal.
Historians call the rise of testing an inevitable outgrowth of expanding
technology. As goods and services are delivered with greater speed and
in higher quantity and quality, education has been forced to pick up the
pace.
Standardized exams have many sources. In imperial China in the A.D. 7th
century, government job applicants had to write essays about Confucian
philosophy and compose poetry. In Europe, the invention of the printing
press and modern paper manufacturing fueled the growth of written exams.
By 1845 in the United States, public education advocate Horace Mann was
calling for standardized essay testing. Spelling tests, geography tests
and math tests blossomed in schools, although they were rarely standardized.
At the outset of the 20th century, educators began to experiment with
tests that took shortcuts around the old essay methods. French
psychologist Alfred Binet developed an intelligence test about 1905.
Frederick J. Kelly of the University of Kansas designed a
multiple-choice test in 1914. Scanning machines followed. Many Americans
accepted these tests as efficient tools to help build a society based on
merit, not birth or race or wealth.
Still, modern testing had a clumsy start as psychologists experimented
with exams to help employers, schools and others rate applicants. In one
early case, testing expert H.H. Goddard identified as "feeble-minded" 83
percent of Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians and 87
percent of Russians among a small group of immigrants assessed at Ellis
Island.
"Consider a group of frightened men and women who speak no English and
who have just endured an oceanic voyage in steerage," Harvard University
science historian Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the Goddard study. "Most
are poor and have never gone to school; many have never held a pencil or
pen in their hand." Yet Goddard's interviewers expected them to sit down
with a pencil and "reproduce on paper a figure shown to them a moment
ago, but now withdrawn from their sight."
Eventually, testing experts focused on standardizing the measure of
learning, not of innate intelligence.
The College Entrance Examination Board, founded in 1900, played a huge
role. Now called the College Board, it "created the best, most
consistent and most influential standards that American education has
ever known," New York University educational historian Diane Ravitch
wrote in March in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The board's early exams were written and graded by teachers and
professors and had no multiple-choice questions. These essay exams,
Ravitch wrote, led "everyone who went to high school, whether they were
the children of doctors or farmers or factory workers . . . to study
mathematics, science, English literature, composition, history and a
foreign language, usually Latin."
Many educators who value depth and rigor lament what followed. In 1926,
the multiple-choice SAT was introduced as a much faster way of testing
college applicants. On Dec. 7, 1941, several members of the board,
during a previously scheduled lunch, decided that the outbreak of world
war would require faster decisions and less leisurely testing. They
eventually canceled the board's old exam format. The SAT ruled.
Essay questions, however, made a comeback in 1955 when Advanced
Placement exams began.
The launch of Sputnik, the Soviet space satellite, in 1957 fueled a
space race and increased pressure on U.S. schools to show improvement.
But rating schools through tests did not advance much until the
mid-1970s, when the College Board revealed that average SAT scores had
been falling since 1963. Then, in 1983, a national commission declared
in the report "A Nation at Risk" that public school standards were too
low. Over the next two decades, testing took off.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, several governors argued that they had to
test all their students to raise school standards and improve their
economies. Among them were Democrats Bill Clinton of Arkansas and
Richard W. Riley of South Carolina, who would soon become president and
U.S. education secretary, respectively. (Later in the 1990s, Republican
Gov. George W. Bush of Texas also was a big proponent of testing.)
Some educators said a better way to improve schools was to spend more on
teacher training, salaries and smaller classes. They dwelled on
educational inputs; the politicians, on outputs.
The politicians prevailed. In 1988, Congress created the National
Assessment Governing Board. It established new standards for the
National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test that has been given
to a sampling of students since 1970. In 2002, President Bush signed the
No Child Left Behind law. For the first time, it required annual testing
of all public school children in certain grades and required states to
use results to help rate schools.
The National Education Association and other teacher organizations argue
that it is unfair to rate schools through such tests when teachers lack
adequate training and pay. In a 2004 essay for the Hoover Digest,
Ravitch wrote that the advocates of inputs and the champions of outputs
"are in constant tension, with first one and then the other gaining
brief advantage."
"How this conflict is resolved," she wrote, "will determine the future
of American education."
B. L. Buddy Fish, EdD
Assistant Professor, Elementary & Early Childhood Education
Jackson State University
Telephone: 601.979.3410
Website: www.dr-rhythm.com
FishyRhythms Publishing, LLC
Mississippi Association for Assessment Reform (MAAR)
Paul Tough's article follows this one. It is 25 pages long but cites some good research.
NCLB Widens Achievement Gap - Getting the Message Out
What was not on the agenda of reform was often as important as what was debated.
David Tyack & Larry Cuban
The general consensus on No Child Left Behind among educators is that it is a colossal failure in terms of accomplishing its main goal of closing the achievement gap and is in need of serious reform. The mainstream media is beginning to finally pick up on this story and although the discussion is moving in the right direction, there are gaping holes in the public discourse when it comes to the true intent and consequences of this legislation that must be brought to the forefront as Congress begins to consider reauthorization.
Paul Tough's cover story<http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_atrocities.html?id=2441> in the New York Times Magazine entitled "Still Left Behind" touched on the issue of poverty and asks "What It Will Really Take to Close the Education Gap." What is not on the agenda, or in the story, is the sad fact that those who are dictating education reform and policy have no intention of closing the education gap and are actually widening the education gap along with the economic gap, the health care gap and the racial gap.
Since the mainstream media tends to promote the messages being formulated by corporate and political leaders who have self-serving interests in perpetuating the myths that surround NCLB, it is vital that academic research and empirical evidence on the decline in educational equality being caused by this so-called "reform" movement moves from scholarly journals to the public airwaves.
David Hursh at the University of Rochester published an article in the British Educational Research Journal<http://www.jstororg/journals/01411926.html><http://www.jstor.org/journals/01411926.html> in 2005 that documents how NCLB, with its emphasis on high stakes testing, accountability and markets is actually causing a "decline" in educational equality. Through rigorous research and data, he pokes a hole right through the main arguments and assumptions that are at the heart of this legislation and education reform and explains why NCLB is actually doing the opposite of what it was intended to accomplish.
Controlling the debate: how high stakes testing has been promoted in the USA
In the USA, corporate and political leaders have promoted testing, accountability, markets, and choice by arguing that such reforms are necessary to ensure that all students and the nation succeed. Embedded in most proposals are three intertwined discourses: the need to increase educational and economic productivity in an increasingly globalized economy, to decrease educational inequality, and to improve assessment objectivity.
Hursh explains why none of these goals are being accomplished.
David Tyack and Larry Cuban, in Tinkering Toward Utopia, talk about "what is not on the agenda of reform." In the case of NCLB, what is not on the agenda, or in the public discourse, yet, are the very real agendas of neo-conservative think tanks and market based reformers who believe that schooling, like everything else in America, should be privatized and subjected to the market forces of competition and privatization. Until the American public understands and becomes knowledgeable about exactly why their kids are being force fed a curriculum of tests as other educational opportunities and experiences that can really close the achievement gap are being driving out of public schools, the No Child Left Behind Act will continue to do its damage as it eats away at the intellectual and creative forces necessary to sustain a democratic society.
That's why it is essential to disseminate and promote the research by educational scholars who are working tirelessly to expose the transformation of education in the United States that will have huge consequences for generations to come. It's time to move the discourse and the discussion to a new level and get beyond the myths and the lies towards reality and truth.
Improving schools or privatizing education?
One reason the NCLB is allowed to label thousands of schools as failing, restrict what schools may do to improve student learning including which curricula may be implemented, and reduces funding to so-called failing schools may be because the federal government is interested in replacing rather than improving public schools.
Indeed, influential conservative and neo-liberal foundations and think tanks aim to radically transform education through market competition, choice and privatization (Laistsch et al., 2002). Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Fordham Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the Education Leaders Council emphasize the 'principles of individual, economic, and political freedom; [and] private enterprise' (Hoover Institution, 2005, p. 1) and 'education, diversity, competition and choice' (Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2005, p. 1).
The Bush administration strongly supports voucher programs and charter schools. It dedicated $50 million for an experimental voucher program in Washington, DC and granted $77.6 million to groups dedicated to privatization through voucher programs. Some of the organizations receiving funding to promote or put in place voucher programs hope that NCLB will increase parents' and students' frustration with the public schools and increase support for privatization. Howard Fuller, founder of the pro-voucher organization Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), in a 2002 interview with the National Governor's Association, said: 'Hopefully, in years to come the [NCLB] law will be amended to allow families to choose private schools as well as public schools' (cited in Miner, 2004, p. 11).
David Hursh's article, The Growth of High-Stakes Testing in the USA: Accountability, Markets and the Decline in Educational Equality, can be found in the British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 31, No. 5, October 2005, pp. 605-622
Susan Ohanion Notes: I echo Judy Rabin's imperative: Since the mainstream media tends to promote the messages being formulated by corporate and political leaders who have self-serving interests in perpetuating the myths that surround NCLB, it is vital that academic research and empirical evidence on the decline in educational equality being caused by this so-called "reform" movement moves from scholarly journals to the public airwaves.
The television news recently captured my attention with iconoclastic filmmaker Michael Moore blasting the Democrats. Yes, the Democrats.
He was demanding those now in control of the government's budget immediately order a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
While no fan of Moore, it is tantalizing to think of a similar tirade he might direct toward federal interference in control of education through the No Child Left Behind Act.
Now that the election has been decided, politicians are talking of bipartisanship. What we really need is nonpartisanship, not bipartisanship.
We need to find out whether the majority of Democrats really care about the issues facing schools.
Politically informed citizens of either party are displeased with No Child. Conservatives have expressed their displeasure with No Child's federal control. Liberals criticize the law that places accountability measures on teachers whose unions are among their largest benefactors.
It is important to recognize the contradiction inherent in supporting local control through charter schools and vouchers while unloading federal education mandates on the nation's public schools, many of them unfunded. It has been well documented that No Child is not improving education quality. The current administration is using misleading statistics to support No Child.
Also, corruption issues are emerging:
First, seeking to build support for its education reform law, the Bush administration inappropriately paid commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 with federal tax dollars to promote No Child on his nationally syndicated television show.
Then according to the U.S. Department of Education's own inspector general, the $5 billion "Reading First" program showed preference in funding curricula developed by publisher McGraw-Hill. As reported in a previous column, the Bush and McGraw families have been personal friends since the 1930s and the McGraws have been generous donors to the Bush presidential campaigns. Under No Child, the administration populated the committees charged with approving states' curriculums with individuals having "significant professional connections" to another profitable McGraw program, "Direct Instruction."
In October, the Los Angeles Times documented that "Ignite Learning," a company owned by President Bush's brother and his parents, is benefiting from federal dollars targeted for economically disadvantaged students. Many U.S. school districts were convinced to use federal funds to purchase products from Neil Bush's company, such as Ignite's "portable learning centers" that cost $3,800 each. Ignite does not offer reading instruction, and the Ignite math program is not scheduled to be available until next year.
Department of Education officials appointed by a president elected as a "compassionate conservative" are now hinting at a new Washington, D.C., controlled "national standardized test." This, in turn, will require billions of dollars in development and implementation costs.
Before such a test could be developed, additional contracts would be let and national content standards would have to be developed. Efforts would likely rely on firms like McGraw-Hill that are currently reaping the benefits of the flawed No Child legislation.
Public schools were created to provide every child an opportunity to succeed. It is high time federal interference in our schools be "Left Behind." Democrats have the power of the purse strings needed to step up and abolish No Child.
While it is rare for Democrats to reduce federal involvement, the new congressional leadership needs to empower local governments to:
1. Better address problems of children who are homeless, live in poverty and lack health care, by reducing federal taxes in lieu of state initiatives in this area.
2. Realize that testing alone does not increase performance.
3. Eliminate No Child's culture of simplistic criterion referenced tests by simply abolishing them. Before No Child, the country had excellent nationally normed tests in use in all states.
4. Reclaim governance of public education, a function documented in state constitutions, but not anywhere in our national constitution.
5. Receive federal dollars spent on education without restrictions from Washington, D.C.
Simply put, No Child can never reach its stated goal for every child to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
Instead of helping to tinker with No Child, as is being discussed, Democrats now need to lead the effort to abolish the law they have continually criticized.
William Bainbridge of St. Augustine is CEO of SchoolMatch, a national educational auditing, research and data organization.
