Illinois Loop
Your guide to education in Illinois
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Tests and Assessment

Getting Test Results

What Do They Mean?

    Your children's school touts (or explains away) its ISAT results, and you are sent your children's own ISAT scores. But what exactly is the ISAT -- the Illinois Standards Achievement Test -- and what is it supposedly measuring?

    Read these excellent reports to find out:

  • "What Do State Tests Measure? A cautionary tale from Illinois" by Dawn Earl.
    Excerpts: "...recent evidence from Illinois indicates student performance on state-designed tests bears no relationship to changes in state educational standards. ... Average ISAT test scores by school are not reported to Illinois parents or the public. The state report cards thus do not allow parents to determine how well their child's school is performing relative to other schools in the area or across the state."

  • ISAT Tests: Worth the time? Worth the Money? by Dawn Earl, Education Policy Analyst, IFI. Excerpt: "Is all this effort and expense paying a dividend? According to the Illinois State Board of Education's own research the answer is a resounding NO! ... this report tells us that no data can be found to indicate that the ISAT does indeed measure student achievement relative to the Illinois Learning Standards."

  • Ultimately, the goal of the state assessment is to determine whether children are meeting the learning standards established by the state. That is, has a school met the standards? But that means that the usability of the state tests is dependent on whether or not the standards themselves are substantive and specific. If you set the bar low enough, it is easier for schools to congratulate themselves on attaining that low standard. So, how challenging are the Illinois Learning Standards? Click and find out!

Dumbing-Down the State Tests

    "A law where the consequences mean that Arkansas has zero failing schools and Michigan has 1,500 is bound to have unintended consequences -- every state strives to be Arkansas."
    -- Lisa Snell, Education Weak

    "If you're in Oklahoma right now, you're told that 95% or 96% of your schools are doing fine ... And if you're in Massachusetts, you're told that 40% to 45% of your schools are doing fine. But if you look at the actual achievement data, it suggests that kids in Massachusetts are doing far better than kids in Oklahoma."
    -- Wall Street Journal, editorial, March 6, 2007

    "We've seen a race to the bottom. States are lying to children. They are lying to parents. They're ignoring failure, and that's unacceptable."
    -- Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, quoted by David Brooks, New York Times, March 12, 2009

    The federal No Child Left Behind Act demands that states test the children in public schools, and specifies penalties and remedies for schools that are observed to be failing. Sounds great ... except that there is a huge loophole. The easiest move a state education bureaucracy can make to have more schools pass is to dumb down the test. Make the test easier, more kids will pass -- simple!

    Example: In New York, the state education bureaucracy recently observed that too many students couldn't achieve the stated passing score of 55% on their "Regents" math test. Their solution? As of August 2003, they lowered the required passing grade to 39%.

    Right here in Illinois, we've seen tweaks and rejiggerings to make the state test easier while sending scores higher, without any real improvement taking place:

    "State may ease test norms: Board targets scores for 8th-grade math"
    Chicago Tribune, February 23, 2006

    (excerpt)

    As Illinois ramps up state testing to record levels early next month, with nearly 1 million grade school students set to take tests, education officials are looking at changing state rules to help more children pass.

    If approved, more schools would be able to meet strict state and federal standards that penalize schools if too many children flunk the tests. But critics say the changes would amount to lowering standards. ...

    In addition, state officials are considering changing the way Illinois evaluates test results, including using a more liberal statistical formula that would help schools meet passing requirements on the tests even if student scores fall short.

    "Illinois is one of the worst offenders ... Illinois tests have some of the lowest 'cut scores' in the nation"
    A year later, the Tribune editorialized:

    Dumbing down the ISAT" Editorial, Chicago Tribune, October 4, 2007. "Are the kids doing all right? A [new] study ... suggests we have no idea. [It] bolsters the contention that many states bob and weave their way around strict school-testing standards -- and Illinois is one of the worst offenders. A quick primer: A student is determined to be proficient in a subject when he reaches or exceeds the 'cut score' on a standardized test. Illinois tests have some of the lowest 'cut scores' in the nation, particularly in math, the study finds."

    Paul E. Peterson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, observes, "[A]ccountability systems tend to soften over time. They may be legislated like lions, but they get implemented like lambs."

    And how does that happen? In The Politics and Practice of Accountability Martin R. West and Paul Peterson explain, "As popular as tough accountability is when first announced, it encounters political opposition as time goes by. Tough accountability has vague, general support from broad constituencies, but, as its coercive teeth begin to bite, the individuals and groups most directly affected complain bitterly. To ease political opposition, standards are lowered, exceptions granted, and penalties postponed."

    On October 23, 2002, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige warned against dumbing-down state tests to make bureaucracies look good. Here are some of his comments, expressed in a letter to all state ed bureaucracy officials:

    "Unfortunately, some states have lowered the bar of expectations to hide the low performance of their schools. And a few others are discussing how they can ratchet down their standards in order to remove schools from their list of low performers. ...

    " ... it is nothing less than shameful that some defenders of the status quo are trying to hide the performance of underachieving schools in order to shield parents from reality ...

    "Those who play semantic games or try to tinker with numbers to lock out parents and the public stand in the way of progress and reform. They are the enemies of equal justice and equal opportunity. They are apologists for failure. ... And they will not succeed."

    "Once parents discover that children in their local schools are not learning as well as they could, they will demand results - no matter how much one state tries to buck accountability. ...

    "As a former superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, I understand the promise and the peril of improving schools. It takes courage to confront the forces of bureaucracy, regulation, and special interests."

  • Has the bar has been lowered in Illinois? Click here to read more on the Illinois Learning Standards.

  • Second City Ruse: How States Like Illinois Rig School Tests to Hype Phony Achievement Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2009.
         "The new Chicago report explains that most of the improvement in elementary test scores came after the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was altered in 2006 to comply with NCLB. 'State and local school officials knew that the new test and procedures made it easier for students throughout the state -- and throughout Chicago -- to obtain higher marks,' says the report.
         "Chicago students fared much worse on national exams that weren't designed by state officials. On the 2007 state test, for example, 71% of Chicago's 8th graders met or exceeded state standards in math, up from 32% in 2005. But results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, a federal standardized test sponsored by the Department of Education, show that only 13% of the city's 8th graders were proficient in math in 2007. While that was better than 11% in 2005, it wasn't close to the 39 percentage-point increase reflected on the Illinois state exam."

  • The 2005 NAEP results:

    • Gains on State Reading Tests Evaporate on 2005 NAEP (Introduction), Education Gadfly, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, October 20, 2005. "Many have suspected that states are beginning to game the No Child Left Behind accountability system to show academic progress where none actually exists. The newly released 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress results tend to confirm those suspicions. While nineteen states reported gains from 2003 to 2005 in the percentage of eighth-graders rated 'proficient' (or the equivalent) on state reading tests, only three showed any progress at even the 'basic' level on the NAEP test. 'The long-feared 'race to the bottom' appears to have begun,' said Fordham president Chester E. Finn, Jr."

    • Gains on State Reading Tests Evaporate on 2005 NAEP (Report), Education Gadfly, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, October 20, 2005. Subheadings:
      • "Has a 'Race to the Bottom' Begun?"
      • "Gains on State Reading Tests Evaporate on NAEP"
      • "Decline in 8th Grade Scores Points to 'Middle School Slump'"

  • The 2006 Illinois ISAT results:

    • Making Grade Just Got Easier: More Illinois schools met U.S. standards because of changes
      by Stephanie Banchero, Chicago Tribune, March 13, 2007:

        "A record number of Illinois schools escaped federal No Child Left Behind sanctions this school year, largely because of changes in how schools are judged and alterations that made state achievement exams easier for students to pass.

        "Nearly 82 percent of the state's public schools met the federal goals on the 2006 state math and reading tests, compared with 74 percent the year before, according to a Tribune analysis of state data.

        "But 450 of the nearly 3,100 elementary and high schools that met the federal goals did so because state education officials changed the way students' test scores were counted, not because students necessarily did better on the tests, according to the state data.

        "There is clearly a race to the bottom going on"
        "'There is clearly a race to the bottom going on,' said Kevin Carey, a policy director at Education Sector, a think tank that studied state testing changes. 'When states change rules under No Child Left Behind, it's always changes that will make it easier for schools. One state will come up with an 'innovative' way to give schools the statistical benefit of the doubt and then every state will follow suit.'"

    • Chicago Sun-Times, March 6, 2007:

        "The tests reflected a laundry list of changes. Some question whether scores soared, in part, because of those changes. [Uh, gee, do ya THINK?]

      • Ten extra minutes per reading and math section, for a total of 30 extra minutes per subject

      • Kid-friendly test booklet, with new color illustrations and more graphics

      • New answer sheet, making it harder to put answers in the wrong place

      • Pass score in eighth-grade math dropped from 67th to 38th percentile to conform with other tests

      • Reading and math exams expanded from third, fifth and eighth to third through eighth

      • New testing contractor and new scoring system

      • Weight of open-ended "extended response" questions, among the hardest questions on the ISAT, dropped from 15 to 10 percent

      • In Chicago only: A second standardized test was dropped, making it easier for teachers to focus on ISAT-tested skills. For the first time, ISAT scores determined whether students had to attend summer school and could apply to college prep high schools.

      • In Chicago only: New reading tests given twice before ISAT to pinpoint student weaknesses. The tests made by same company that wrote the ISAT. Some schools also gave diagnostic math tests to students.

  • The 2005 Illinois ISAT results:

    • Reprieve For More Schools: Relaxed Rules Mean Fewer U.S. Sanctions by Diane Rado, Stephanie Banchero and Darnell Little, Chicago Tribune, September 15, 2005. Excerpts: "Fewer Illinois public schools will face tough federal sanctions this year for academic performance, in part because the state relaxed rules on judging school progress. ... This year, educators expected the number of failing schools to rise in Illinois because the federal reforms required more students to pass--47.5 percent, up from 40 percent in prior years.
         "But Illinois, like three dozen other states, loosened requirements on how schools are measured, making it easier to meet the new passing rates. Among the changes, the state used a new statistical approach that allowed schools to meet the standards even if some of their test results fell short. The state also relaxed rules on how some test scores for special-education, minority and low-income students would be counted. The changes are sure to cause confusion for parents and educators trying to assess the strength of their schools, because comparisons with prior years are virtually impossible.
         "Supt. Donald Hendricks, in DuPage's Addison School District 4, said he hopes the state doesn't make further changes, because 'then we'll never have a sense of growth or honest achievement.'"

  • Narrowing The Grade-School Standards Gap, CBS Evening News, May 30, 2007. "Good grades always make teachers happy. And in Georgia, there were plenty of smiles after statewide testing of students ... 87% of the state's fourth-graders were rated proficient in reading in 2005. But when Georgia's performance is measured nationally, the numbers tell a different story: Only 26% of the state's fourth-graders were rated proficient on a national reading test ... The problem, say experts, is one word: proficiency. Each state can come up with its own definition. ... That has some states crying foul, accusing other states of lowering the bar to make their schools look more successful. Just across the border from Georgia is South Carolina. The two states score the same on that national test, but have very different results on their state tests. Just 36% of South Carolina fourth-graders were rated proficient in reading -- far below Georgia's 87%."

  • Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB by Kevin Carey, Research and Policy Manager, Education Sector, May 2006. Also see complete PDF report, which includes the methodology and appendix. From the introduction:
         "No Child Left Behind (NCLB) gives states wide discretion to define what students must learn, how that knowledge should be tested, and what test scores constitute 'proficiency' -- the key elements of any educational accountability system. States also set standards for high school graduation rates, teacher qualifications, school safety and many other aspects of school performance. As a result, states are largely free to define the terms of their own educational success.
         "Unfortunately, many states have taken advantage of this autonomy to make their educational performance look much better than it really is. In March 2006, they submitted the latest in a series of annual reports to the U.S. Department of Education detailing their progress under NCLB. The reports covered topics ranging from student proficiency and school violence to school district performance and teacher credentials. For every measure, the pattern was the same: a significant number of states used their standard-setting flexibility to inflate the progress that their schools are making and thus minimize the number of schools facing scrutiny under the law."

  • Education Law Encourages Fuzzy Math by Marie Gryphon, February 28, 2005. Excerpts: "State and federal politicians ... are committed to a higher-stakes bluff: they must convince us that the No Child Left Behind Act can work. The Act wasn't designed to work. An accidental byproduct of bipartisan compromise, it reflects no single idea of accountability. Lauded as a great political achievement, it is unlikely to improve student achievement. And like an emperor's nudity, no state or federal functionary can afford to notice the fact. States must generate the appearance of complying with the law, including a display of 'annual yearly progress' necessary to stave off the Act's more discombobulating remedies. They are doing so by fudging their figures.
         Some states play this game better than others. According to the RAND Corporation, Texas boasted an 88 percent pass rate on its eighth grade reading test last year while South Carolina turned in a miserable 21 percent pass rate. Texas children read far better than South Carolinians, one might conclude. One would be wrong, though. On the standard National Assessment of Educational Progress, scores from these two states are nearly identical: South Carolina has a 24 percent "proficiency" rate compared with only 26 percent among Texans.
         Last year the state of Michigan reduced the number of 'failing' schools under its care from 1,500 to 216. But this remarkable achievement was merely a statistical sleight of hand. Michigan lowered the minimum passing score on the state's assessment from 75 percent to a mere 42 percent, the Heartland Institute reports."

  • Report: Dishonest Education Reporting by States Is 'Widespread' by Katie Farber, Human Events, June 2, 2005. "Some of the education statistics sent by states to the federal government in compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act simply can't be trusted, according to a new Cato Institute study of the law. 'Sadly, dishonest reporting about graduation rates turns out to be widespread,' writes Larry Uzzell in a Cato Institute policy brief titled, 'NCLB: The Dangers of Centralized Education Policy.' Uzzell, a former staff member of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. House and Senate committees on education, cites the example of California, which in late 2003 announced a graduation rate of 86.9%. However, California's own specialists admitted the true figure was closer to 70%. 'Unless those data are honest and accurate and reliable, even when the findings are threatening to the same people who are in charge of finding and compiling it, then NCLB is not going to work,' Uzzell said at a Tuesday debate on recent opposition to the act."

  • Defining Failure Down, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, November 18, 2004. Excerpt: "According to the National Education Association, of the 41 states that have reported their NCLB test results from spring 2004, 32 showed improvement in the number of schools meeting their adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals. ... But before anyone makes grand claims, take a careful look at what those numbers mask. Specifically, while 32 states have reduced the number of schools that 'need improvement,' according to the Center on Education Policy, at least 35 states have amended the rules that determine which schools pass and which schools fail. As the Wall Street Journal reports ... the Education Department ... allowed Delaware, among other states, to label a school district as failing 'only if children at all three school levels--elementary, middle, and high school--miss their learning goals.' (Previously, a district was deemed 'in need of improvement' if children in one grade in any level failed to meet AYP--a rule that last year resulted in 17 of 19 Delaware districts being labeled 'in need of improvement.') Nancy Wilson, head of the Delaware school improvement office, insists that 'It's not about ducking accountability. It's about managing morale. These labels are morale busters.' What, one wonders, is their current morale based on? Failure?"

  • The Fight for High Standards by Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, Hoover Digest, Summer 2004. "An increasing number of states are requiring students to pass exit exams in order to graduate from high school. Such tests simply demonstrate what students have actually learned. So why do they make some people so nervous? ... a strange thing is happening: As we get closer to having the graduation tests 'count,' many leaders have blinked, with the result that standards are compromised and test results invalidated. But why is it happening -- why are some blinking? Is it fear of litigation? It is confusion about legal requirements? Is it the excruciating pressure on that one-diploma option? Word choice is telling. It used to be that a student 'earned' a diploma. Now many speak of a student being 'denied' a diploma. The first is about standards; the second, about rights and lawsuits."

  • Who Needs School Boards? by Chester Finn, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, October 23, 2003. "Whatever one's view of No Child Left Behind, it's a valiant effort to bring needed change to American education. Where is the National School Boards Association on this? Singing the establishment anthem, which piously declares its support for NCLB's intentions and then proceeds to pick apart almost every significant aspect of the law as unworkable. What message does that send to America's 15,000 local school boards? It's akin to Dad saying, 'Your mother told you to eat your spinach but you really don't have to unless it's sprinkled with sugar and eaten in front of TV. With ice cream to follow.'"

  • Bastiaan J. Braams, a math prof at New York University, has put together a web page Content Reviews of Standardized Assessments which looks at national tests, as well as state tests in Texas, California, Florida, New York and Massachusetts.

  • New School Of Thought: 'Superior' Is Adequate by Bud Kennedy, Dallas-Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 25, 2003. Excerpt: "Texas is grading schools again. This time -- surprise! -- nearly everybody gets an "A." ... Almost every area school district won top awards for "superior achievement" ... How wonderful. In Texas, 84 percent of all schools are 'superior.' ... Most of the less-than-'Superior' school districts, 130, still ranked as 'Above Standard" -- a 'B.' In other words, Texas tested every district, and set the curve so low that 96 percent of the grades were 'A's' or 'B's.' If our schools are all so superior -- why test? Silly me. It's so superintendents can call their districts 'superior.'"

  • The Knowledge Deficit by Diane Ravitch. Ravitch says that standardized tests are becoming easier and easier, and require less and less background knowledge.

  • The Tests We Need by E.D. Hirsch Jr. "Curriculum-based tests hold more promise than skills-based tests to promote significant gains in achievement and equity."

  • Spinning Education by Thomas Sowell, October 29, 2003. Sowell errs in the opening sentence, when he ascribes dumbing down to a political bias. (Education reform is not a one-sided political issue: for more, see our page on politics, left and right.) But after that, he nails the problem on the head, referring to "a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle of October 25th: 'California School Rankings Improve.' According to education officials quoted in the story, an 'unprecedented rise' in test scores has been achieved by 'shifting away from a nationally normed test and toward exams that measure what children are being taught in the classroom.' In other words, when school children in California were taking the same tests as children in other states, their results were lousy. But, now that we have our own test, results are much better. If you or I or anyone else could make up his own test, wouldn't we all turn out to be geniuses? The idea of gearing the test toward what is being taught in California schools is turning things upside down. The whole reason for giving tests is to find out whether students and schools are up to standards. Obviously, if California schools teach drivel and there is drivel on the tests, everybody looks good."

  • Children Left Behind Despite Bush Education Act by Phyllis Schlafly, October 27, 2003. Excerpts: "Because the penalties for not complying with act requirements are severe, states and school districts have devised ingenious methods to avoid sanctions. The Texas State Board of Education reduced the number of correct answers students must provide to the test's 36 questions from 24 to 20 out of 36. Michigan officials lowered from 75 to 46 the percentage of students who must pass statewide high school English tests in order to certify a school as making adequate progress. Colorado restructured its grading system, lumping 'partially proficient' with 'proficient' students. ...
    "One sanction imposed on failing schools is to give their students the option of transferring to another school. Los Angeles and Chicago officials are meeting this challenge by approving very few transfers, citing overcrowding concerns. New York City schools approved [only] 8,000 transfer requests, but one-third of the students have been moved from one 'failing' school to another."

  • Keeping an Eye on State Standards by Frederick M. Hess, Paul E. Peterson, Education Next, Summer 2006. "While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires all students to be 'proficient' in math and reading by 2014, the precedent-setting 2002 federal law also allows each state to determine its own level of proficiency. It's an odd discordance at best. It has led to the bizarre situation in which some states achieve handsome proficiency results by grading their students against low standards, while other states suffer poor proficiency ratings only because they have high standards."

  • Lake Woebegone, Twenty Years Later (PDF) by John Jacob Cannell, MD., March 9, 2006. "Almost twenty years ago, I wrote - and then privately published - the two 'Lake Woebegone' reports, named after Garrison Keillor's mythical Minnesota town where 'all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.' The first 'Lake Woebegone' report documented that all fifty states were testing above the national average in elementary achievement and concluded the testing infrastructure in America's public schools was corrupt. The second report delineated the systematic and pervasive ways that American educators cheat on standardized achievement tests. Both reports received widespread national publicity, were extensively discussed in academic journals, and helped spur the testing reform movement. ...
         "This paper discusses how I learned about 'Lake Woebegone' testing, thereason why I left the testing reform movement, and my observations on where testing is today. Is No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing much different from what was occurring during the 'Lake Woebegone' years?"

Who Is Opposed to Testing -- and Why?

  • Putting "FairTest" to the Test by Dave Ziffer, December 15, 2004. Who is this "FairTest" group that sets itself up as an authority on the evils of school testing? Dave challenges the core premises of this group, and argues instead for honest, objective evaluations. Dave Ziffer is one of the founders of the Illinois Loop, and (for a while) the operator of the I Can Read afterschool centers.

  • FairTest: Dumbing Down America by Ken Blackwell, Townhall, February 22, 2009.
         "The unfortunate trend is that too many schools are redefining merit as it has traditionally been recognized. The main engine behind this effort to change the nature of academic merit is a group called Fair Test, a Boston-based organization ... The efforts and track record of this organization demonstrate that simply administering a standardized test constitutes a misuse, while the primary flaw of such tests is that they exist at all. ...
         "In fact, the SAT and the ACT ... have long since addressed legitimate claims of bias in testing. Both are scrupulously developed, reviewed and updated by dedicated educators to ensure they reflect a student's academic merit. They also are administered in a consistent manner ...
         "The efforts of Fair Test and others who want to eliminate standardized testing stand to put all of American higher education at risk. ...
         "Standards of academic excellence are critical to the future of students and our economy. If we forsake such standards based on the ill-conceived ideology of Fair Test and like-minded individuals, we risk not only our children's future but that of our nation."

  • Why Testing Experts Hate Testing by Richard Phelps, Fordham Foundation, January 1999. Phelps provides replies for the claims made by the ed school theoreticians who oppose meaningful assessments of educational progress.

  • Test-Basher-Speak by Richard Phelps, January 26, 2001: Dissects the vocabulary and obfuscation techniques used by test-bashers.

  • Also see this related book: "Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing" by Richard P. Phelps with a forward by Herbert J. Walberg

  • Putting the Fox in Charge of the Hen House; Or, Why School Reform Often Fails to Improve Education by J. Martin Rochester, Curators Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and author of Class Warfare: Besieged Schools, Betrayed Kids, Bewildered Parents, and the Attack on Excellence. Excerpt:
    "Schools of education and other parts of The Blob are mounting a strong counter-attack against the growing national pressure for testing and accountability, offering all kinds of rationalizations for why testing is bad. Given the questionable effectiveness of many trendy reforms adopted as part of 'continuous improvement,' it is not surprising that educators are resistant to the search for empirical evidence that might invalidate their theories and new "best practices." To the extent that educators are promoting testing today, it is in the form of "performance assessment" and portfolios,' which are inherently subjective and unreliable as evaluation instruments and, therefore, are unsuitable for purposes of high-stakes accountability of the type school systems dread."

  • The General Patton of the Testing Wars by Nicholas Stix, March 15, 2004. This is a meaty review of Richard Phelps' book, "Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing." Excerpt: "A week doesn't go by, without a mainstream media story on the 'horrors' of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating. The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that journalists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth invented by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives. For years, the American public has been force-fed a diet of test-bashing by the establishment media, the teachers' unions, professors of teacher education and well-financed anti-testing organizations, in which test-bashers have twisted existing data, ignored contrary data, and fabricated data outright. So reports Richard Phelps in his brilliant new book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing."

  • In this lively review of a Time magazine article, education activist Elizabeth Carson reveals the anti-testing bias that dominates much of the news coverage on standardized tests.

  • Testing: Myths & Realities, WrightsLaw, August 21, 2003. This article starts with a short preamble "Why Tests Are Necessary" and then tackles these "9 Myths About Testing":
    • Myth: Testing suppresses teaching and learning.
    • Myth: Testing narrows the curriculum by rewarding test-taking skills.
    • Myth: Testing promotes "teaching to the test."
    • Myth: Testing does not measure what a student should know.
    • Myth: Annual testing places too much emphasis on a single exam.
    • Myth: Testing discriminates against different styles of test takers.
    • Myth: Testing provides little helpful information and accomplishes nothing.
    • Myth: Testing hurts the poor and people of color.
    • Myth: Testing will increase dropout rates and create physical and emotional illness in children.

  • "Education After the Culture Wars" (PDF doc) by Diane Ravitch, Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Summer 2002

  • The Tests We Need by Herbert J. Walberg. Excerpts: "Despite many reforms and substantially increased spending, our schools are doing no better than they were in 1983. ... Few professionals or other workers want to be held accountable; but, in education, our nation's welfare and students' development are at stake."

  • In October 2003, a cover story in Time magazine promised a look "Inside the New SAT." Much of the article depended as sources upon the usual ranks of the test-bashers. Elizabeth Carson, of the very active and effective reform organization New York City HOLD replies with this review.

  • Soccer Moms vs. Standardized Tests by Charles J. Sykes, December 6, 1999. Excerpts:
    "After decades of endless gold stars, happy faces and inflated grades, American parents apparently were not ready for a reality check about how much our schools are really teaching our children. ... It is not surprising that more rigorous state standards have come under fire from the usual opposition coalition of civil rights groups, progressive educators and teacher unions. What is striking though, is the opposition from soccer moms. In Wisconsin ... most of the opposition to [a proposed exam] came not from troubled urban schools, but from affluent suburbs. ... For much of this century, the educational establishment has behaved as if it were addicted to bad ideas, indulging its own wishful and romantic thinking even in the face of mounting evidence of failure. ... The schools had been allowed to obscure the fact that many children were not mastering basic subjects. The constant positive reinforcement of unrealistic grading and easy tests was meant not only for the children, whose self-esteem remained strong in the face of shaky math and reading abilities, but for their parents, as well. For many of these parents, the new tests were a very rude shock. Accustomed to thinking of educational difficulties as somebody else's problem, they and their school districts suddenly faced the possibility of failure." For more on the threats and challenges in suburban schools, see our page, Illinois Loop: Suburbs.

  • The Assessment Debate by Jeffrey M. Jones, M.D..,Ph.D. This is a quick intro to the essential issues in the types of tests, and their merits. It also responds to anti-testing groups that want to dumb-down, fuzzy-up, or eliminate tests entirely.

  • Test-Bashers Oppress Students, and Leave the Truth Behind by Nicholas Stix, October 28, 2003. Some of this article's rhetoric is a bit over-the-top, but it also provides some cogent arguments against claims of the test-bashers.

  • Alfie Kohn is a lecture tour speaker who rails against testing and objective accountability. Prof. Ralph Raimi attended one of Mr. Kohn's talks, and wrote this account of what was said.

"Teaching to the Test"

  • GOOD Teachers Teach to the Test: That's because it's eminently sound pedagogy by Walt Gardner, Christian Science Monitor, April 17, 2008. "For the entire 28 years that I taught high school English, I taught to the test. ... I know that fessing up to this perceived transgression will reflexively draw clamor from everyone with children in school. ... But stay with me here: This type of reaction is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of both curriculum and instruction."

  • What's So Bad About Teaching to the Test? by Lisa Rosenthal, GreatSchools.com, January 2008. "If teaching content standards is considered 'teaching to the test,' it may not be such a bad thing. ... Good test preparation focuses on making sure that students are meeting state standards ..."

  • Teaching to the Test: Increasingly, Schools Are Finding It Just Makes Sense to Align Curriculum and Assessment by Kevin Bushweller, American School Board Journal, September 1997, National School Boards Association. "Teaching to the test -- the very words have always been heresy to educators. ... But today a new perspective (and a new education buzz phrase) is emerging. It's called curriculum alignment, and it means teaching knowledge and skills that are assessed by tests designed largely around academic standards set by the state. In other words, teaching to the test."

  • State Tests Don't Make the Grade by Linda Starr, Education World, March 26, 2002. "A few years ago, one of the TV news magazines aired a segment on what was then a fledging movement to assess student performance using standardized testing. Part of the show, as I recall, involved a panel of teachers describing how standardized tests were forcing them to abandon 'real teaching' in favor of 'teaching to the test.' I was appalled at the idea ... In the intervening years, however, I've gradually been converted to the belief that standardized testing is, in fact, a necessary good, a vital means of determining whether students are learning what they are supposed to be learning and of determining what they still need to learn. Recent surveys indicate that most other teachers also have come to accept -- if not to embrace -- the idea that standardized tests are a legitimate way to assess student performance."

  • Let's Teach to the Test by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, February 20, 2006. "Teaching to the test, you may have heard, is bad, very bad ... [yet] in 23 years of visiting classrooms I have yet to see any teacher preparing kids for exams in ways that were not careful, sensible and likely to produce more learning."

  • Teaching to the Test by Thomas Sowell, Washington Times, August 23, 2002. "There is much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth because so much classroom time is spent 'teaching to the test' as our 'educators' put it. Unfortunately, most of the people who call themselves educators have not been doing much educating over the past few decades ... While our students spend about as much time in school as students in Europe or Asia, a higher percentage of other students' time is spent learning academic subjects, while our students' time is spent on all sorts of nonacademic projects and activities. Those who want to keep on indulging in popular educational fads that are failing to produce academic competence fight bitterly against having to 'teach to the test.' ... If there has actually been such 'genuinely great teaching,' then why has there been no speck of evidence of it during all these years of low test scores and employer complaints about semiliterate young people applying for jobs? Why do American students learn so much less math between the fourth and the eighth grade than do students in other countries? Could it be because so much more time has been wasted in American schools during those four years? Evidence is the one thing that our so-called educators want no part of. They want to be able to simply declare there is genuinely great teaching, 'creative' learning, or 'critical thinking,' without having to prove anything to anybody."

  • The Fallacy of "Teaching to the Test" By Leanne Hoagland-Smith. "From a performance improvement perspective, teaching to the test is 100% absolutely correct."

Iowa Test of Basic Skills

    Many Illinois schools and districts conduct the Iowa ITBS test in addition to the ISAT test required by the state. Many educators consider the Iowa to be a better test for assessing and diagnosing educational attainment. It is also thought to be a more substantive and less fuzzy test, concentrating on real skills and achievement.

  • School districts have the option of checking this box on the order form from Riverside Publishing, publisher of the ITBS:

    Math Computation is one of 3 areas tested in the ITBS' math battery. Leaving this crucial element out may be a way for some schools to hide their deficits in teaching algorithmic competence.

The NAEP on Illinois

    The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as "the Nation's Report Card," is the most respected national assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas.

  • Website of the NAEP

  • To get reports for individual states, including Illinois, click here

  • Illinois and the Nation, SchoolMatters, a Service of Standard & Poor's. Use this site to see how Illinois compares with the rest of the country, on NAEP and state tests in reading and math.

Multiple Choice Questions

    Theorists who are opposed to an emphasis on developing a factual basis for later understanding regularly raise objections to the use of multiple choice questions in standardized tests.

  • A detailed defense of the use of multiple choice questions is presented by Prof. E. D. Hirsch, in his book The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them. Prof. Hirsch lists the major charges made, and responds to each.

  • "The 'deep-thinkers' did better on multiple choice questions, just what we would hope for."
    Do Standardized Multiple-Choice Tests Penalize Deep-Thinking or Creative Students? (PDF) by Donald E. Powers and James C. Kaufman. This paper reports on a study of the relationship of Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) General Test scores to selected personality traits, including conscientiousness, rationality, ingenuity, quickness, creativity, and depth. Analyses revealed statistically significant, positive correlations of GRE verbal, quantitative, and analytical scores with both creativity and "quickness." (Quickness was defined here by, for instance, the ability to handle a lot of information and the ability to understand things.) In other words, the "deep-thinkers" did better on multiple choice questions, just what we would hope for.

Who Scores Open-End Questions?
(a.k.a. "Authentic Assessment" or "Performance Assessment")

    It's no secret that many ivory tower ed theorists despise the notion of knowledge as a key goal of learning. Instead, they argue, testing should evaluate concepts and "critical thinking", and that therefore tests should require thoughtful essay responses. There may be something to that in a classroom situation, but is this actually accomplished by the big national manufacturers who are now promoting fuzzy, open-ended tests?

  • What does it cost to ask a even a single open-ended question? $1.4 to $2.4 million!
    Illinois ISBE officials estimate that asking a single open-ended question in the state ISAT math test triples or quintuples the cost of administering the test. From the Chicago Tribune, January 8, 2004: "State officials estimate that it would cost an extra $2 million to $3 million to include one open question for every grade on these two tests. By contrast, the state's social science test, which is all multiple-choice and is scored automatically by computers, would cost about $600,000 to administer and score."

  • Here is a crucially vital question about open-ended test questions: Who actually scores these tests? Read on...

  • "Illinois ... encourage[s] the learning of vacuous thinking, thinking without substance ...
    Kids are passing the tests by writing drivel."
    Standardized Writing Assessments May Be Harmful To Children's Learning, University of Chicago Chronicle, July 11, 2002, Volume 21, No. 18. Excerpt: "George Hillocks Jr., Professor in English Language & Literature and Director of the Master of Arts Program in Teaching [found that] in ... Illinois ... the tests guide the curriculum and 'encourage the learning of vacuous thinking, thinking without substance.' ... 'As a result of the test conditions, writing teachers usually rely on the formulaic five-paragraph structure. In Illinois, students have 40 minutes to complete the task. ... Students then churn out essays with a 'first, next, last' structure, but they are not taught how to discern real evidence or support for their points. ... Evaluators reward students for following the structure, but not for their choice of evidence. The result ... 'kids are passing the tests by writing drivel.'
         "Hillocks also researched the process of scoring the Illinois test. A company in North Carolina, which supervised the process, trained its judges to grade each writing test on a 32-point scale within 60 seconds. Under this type of time-pressure, judges simply looked for the formula. 'Any teacher who has ever taught writing knows that 60 seconds is not enough time to grade a paper.'"

  • Who's Scoring Those High-Stakes Tests? Poorly Trained Temps by Cameron Fortner, Christian Science Monitor "Growing up in California's public schools ... I approached each test with all the solemnity and effort a child can muster. ... My summer as a test-scorer disabused me of that notion. ... Instead of the professionals I'd envisioned painstakingly grading exams, I found a room full of temporary employees who had little respect for -- and minimal investment in -- their jobs."

  • Temp Workers Score WASL Tests ... In Minutes: The Sun, Bremerton, Washington, August 28, 2000. Excerpt: "The state's new standardized tests -- used to determine how money is allocated to schools, which courses are taken and, eventually, who graduates from high school -- are graded in minutes by $10-an-hour temps."

  • Temps Spend Just Minutes To Score State Education Test, Seattle Times, August 27, 2000. Excerpts: "In a matter of minutes, a $10-an-hour temp assigns a score to your child's test, a grade that helps determine how money is spent in Washington schools, which courses students take and, before long, who is denied a high-school diploma. Such weighty decisions rely on the judgment of seasonal workers with 16 hours of training who sift through dozens of exams each day. Working at assembly-line pace, these college-educated moonlighters spend as little as 20 seconds grading each math question ... And scorers plow through as many as 180 writing essays a day, at a rate of 2 1/2 minutes each. ... Several other scorers confessed to skimming tests. ... A recent grad said she looked for certain key numbers or phrases in math problems so she wouldn't have to read a whole paper. She described herself as an easier grader, giving students the benefit of the doubt."

  • The above article also includes these quotes from some of the $10/hour part-time "graders" of open-ended essay questions for a national standardized test:
    • "It's low-maintenance, low-cerebral work"
    • "I kind of bop in and out according to their workload"
    • "The scoring guide isn't always clear when it's between a 2 and a 3"
    • "They started hounding us about the pace. [Supervisors asked us to] pick up the rate [and told us,] 'Don't pay as much attention to accuracy.'"
    • "After doing this work, I know for sure that I don't want my own children to take these kinds of tests"


  • From the same article, here are comments by educators after learning how open-ended standardized tests are actually graded:
    • "I had the impression it was a little more thorough and scientific than that. The [tiny] amount of time they spend [scoring] surprises me a lot - I couldn't do it in that length of time." (a teacher)
    • "The part that bothers me is there's no double-check .. [assigning a grade based on one person's scoring] clearly would be subjective." (a principal)
    • "This is a very fallible process, and mistakes are going to be made. ... And yet people take those numbers as if they're written in stone." (a college professor)
    • "Graders bring their own preferences about writing to the job. ... Some are drawn to grammar and spelling, while some are swayed by ideas, and others give weight to vocabulary and expression." (a professor who has researched open-ended test grading)


  • "NCS to hire up to 500 to score K-12 tests; Office in Tucson to pay $10 an hour", by RuthAnn Hogue, The Arizona Daily Star, November 10, 1999. Excerpt: "National Computer Systems is looking for up to 500 Tucsonans who can make the grade -- literally. .. It's opening a Tucson office to score the tests which are administered by states around the country. 'We will be hiring as many employees as we can find to actually come in,' said Jim O'Connor, a company spokesman ... Scorers ... will be paid about $10 an hour ... [They] will not physically handle the tests they score. Instead, they will do image-based scoring, meaning they will view images of tests that have been scanned into a computer."

  • Right Answer, Wrong Score: Test Flaws Take Toll by Diana B. Henriques and Jacques Steinberg, New York Times, May 20, 2001. Excerpts:
    • "Jake Plumley was pulled out of the classroom ... and told to report to his guidance counselor. ... The news was grim. Jake, a senior, had failed a standardized test required for graduation. ... In fact, Jake should have been elated. He actually had passed the test. But the company that scored it had made an error, giving Jake and 47,000 other Minnesota students lower scores than they deserved."
    • "Despite the recent mistakes, the industry says, its error rate is infinitesimal on the millions of multiple-choice tests scored by machine annually. But that is only part of the picture. Today's tests rely more heavily on essay-style questions, which are more difficult to score. ... Testing companies turn the scoring of these writing samples over to thousands of temporary workers earning as little as $9 an hour."
    • "Several scorers, speaking publicly for the first time about problems they saw, complained in interviews that they were pressed to score student essays without adequate training and that they saw tests scored in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner. 'Lots of people don't even read the whole test - the time pressure and scoring pressure are just too great,' said Artur Golczewski, a doctoral candidate, who said he has scored tests for NCS for two years, most recently in April."
    • "The pressures reported by NCS executives are affecting the temporary workers who score the essay questions in vogue today, said Mariah Steele, a former NCS scorer and a graduate student in Iowa City. But one evening in late July ... Ms. Steele said, she was asked by her supervisor to stop grading math and switch to a reading test from another state, without any training. 'He just handed me a scoring rubric and said, 'Start scoring,' Ms. Steele said. Perhaps a dozen of her co-workers were given similar instructions"
    • "Renée Brochu of Iowa City recalled when a supervisor explained that a certain response should be scored as a 2 on a two-point scale. 'And someone would gasp and say, 'Oh, no, I've scored hundreds of those as a 1,' Ms. Brochu said. 'There was never the suggestion that we go back and change the ones already scored.' Another former scorer, Mr. Golczewski, accused supervisors of trying to manipulate results to match expectations. 'One day you see an essay that is a 3, and the next day those are to be 2's because they say we need more 2's,' he said. He recalled that the pressure to produce worsened as deadlines neared. 'We are actually told,' he said, 'to stop getting too involved or thinking too long about the score - to just score it on our first impressions.' One reading teacher said she was assigned to score eighth-grade math tests. 'I said I hadn't been in eighth-grade math class since I was in eighth grade,' she said. Another teacher, she said, arrived late at the scoring session and was put right to work without any training."


  • We Hung The Most Dimwitted Essays On The Wall by Amy Weivoda, June 6, 2002. "The biggest case against [open-ended questions on] standardized testing might be the people who score the tests -- people like me, for instance. ... I ended up scoring public school students' standardized tests. It paid [$6 an hour,] a dollar more per hour [than working at a Dairy Queen], although I'd have to bring my own lunch. ... The interview was a little like jury duty. I appeared at the required time. I twitched in a room with 20 or 30 people until my name was called. An intake person photocopied my diploma and assigned me to the Georgia Basic Skills Test. I was asked to report to work the following Monday. That was it. I did not have to interview, network or submit a résumé. I did not need a background in K-12 education. I did not need to care about or understand children, although it was obvious I'd been one, pretty recently."

  • Grading This Article? First, Take Time to Learn the Rules by Tamar Lewin, New York Times, June 11, 2003. "At my grading session, about 100 teachers from across the country are being paid $22 an hour to grade the 33,000 essays produced at the May 3 SAT II writing test. Each essay is read by at least two graders, so over the five days, each one will be plowing through some 660 essays. Our instructions don't help me much."

    Also see our page, Illinois Loop: Writing

Portfolio Assessment

    Fuzzy curricula and vague project-oriented schoolwork create a dilemma for school administrators: With such amorphous materials, how can anyone document if children are actually accomplishing anything? The education industry's response to this need is the portfolio: Put many examples of a child's productions into a folder, so as to impress with bulk and variety, if not substance.

    Charles Sykes, in his powerful and thorough book "Dumbing Down Our Kids" (click for more info) raises many disturbing questions about portfolios:
    The idea of the portfolio is to gather together collections of student work over a semester or a school year -- student essays, reports, math assignments, post-projects -- to provide a more meaningful measurement of their progress and skills. Portfolios are popular in programs that claim to be outcome based or "performance based," because theoretically they demonstrate what children can do. As attractive as the idea might sound in theory, there is evidence that it does not work nearly as well in reality. In some classes a portfolio might consist of a handful of paragraphs, while in another it might consist of detailed essays that require extensive research. Such inconsistencies continue to plague so-called "authentic assessments." A detailed study of Vermont's use of "portfolio assessment," for example, found that teachers scored the portfolios inconsistently. An evaluation of the pioneering effort for the state's education department found the scoring of portfolios "unreliable because in too many instances, two individual teachers graded the same collection of work differently." The study found that the teachers' scores on student writing portfolios agreed with one another less than half the time. Even on portfolios of math work, the Vermont study found that teachers agreed on their scores less than 60 percent of the time. Such inconsistency would seem to suggest that judging the portfolios is so subjecrive as to be meaningless for purposes of comparison. One teacher's score of 90 might be anbother's score of 80, and another's 96. As a system of reliable measurement and accountability, portfolios are essentially useless in practice.
    After raising such serious doubts about the supposed merit of portfolios, Sykes goes on to point out some of the hidden costs:
    Although enthusiastically backed by educationists, the alternative assessments are also remarkably burdensome and time-consuming for teachers. Schools in Great Britain have experimented with "alternative" and "authentic" assessments that involve portfolios and other required "performances." Researchers there found that virtually every teacher surveyed "reported that major disruptions had occurred to normal classroom practice, and half of those surveyed felt that the [alternative assessments] were totally unmanageable." By one estimate it took 82 to 90 hours "to plan for the assessments, mark them, and record the marks." Another estimate put the time alloted to the alternative assessments at two to five weeks out of the British schools' year. Such a huge investment of time translates into huge costs for the educational system. If similar assessments were employed in American schools, some experts have estimated the costs could run into the billions of dollars.
    In one of the most important and thoughtful books on school reform, "The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them" (click for more info) by E. D. Hirsch, Prof. Hirsch defines "portfolio assessment" this way:
    In portfolio assessment, students preserve in a portfolio all or some of their productions during the course of the semester or year. At the end of the periof, students are graded for the totality of their production. It is a device that has long been used for the teaching of writing and painting.
    Beyond that, Prof. Hirsch sees problems:
    But there its utility ceases. It has proved to be virtually useless for large-scale, high-stakes testing.
    Dr. Elaine McEwan says (in her book "Angry Parents, Failing Schools") (click for more info) that this practice justifiably has alarmed many parents:
    "...The current practice in some schools of refusing to send work home with students because it needs to stay in the school portfolio has many parents alarmed because they want to review their child's progress."
    Dr. McEwan also notes a study conducted in 1995 by a panel of nationally known experts looking into the use of portfolios in one statewide system. She reports, "They concluded that the assessments based on portfolios were 'inappropriate' and 'too flawed' for use in their system of accountability."

    In her excellent book on teacher education, "The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing-Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem" Dr. Maureen Stout has this to say (pages 145-6) about portfolio assessment:

    Standards and evaluation are complex but very necessary aspects of schooling, without which there is no way to gauge student progress and achievement. But by introducing gradeless report cards, or report cards with numbers instead of letters ..., or dispensing with them altogether, we have no way to determine whether Johnny has learned what he was supposed to.

    Educators have invented portfolios as a way around this problem, but although they can be useful, they do not, by themselves, provide a complete picture of progress or achievement. Portfolios are a collection of a student's best work in a term or a year and thus are a good measure of progress over time. They provide no information however, on how one student compares to her peers or whether or not she has reached a desired standard, so they have limited value.

    To make matters worse, rather than use old-fashioned words like "excellent", "good", "fair" or "poor" (or, heaven forbid, A, B, C, or D) portfolios are typically judged using words like "distinctive", "appropriate" and various other euphemisms that make it virtuallly impossible to understand whether Johnny can write or not. Because the words are so vague, each of us will likely interpret them differently. Consequently, it is virtually impossible to obtain either a consensus or a clear understanding on just what Johnny's capabilities and achievements are.

    ... None of this should come as a surprise. Portfolios were part of an enterprising and well-orchestrated attempt by educators and self-esteem advocates to avoid anything like accurate, objective assessment (things like tests, actual grading, comparing students to a clear standard) and they have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

    Tom Burkard, an educator in England, comments:
    "I've always had the suspicion that the main purpose of student portfolios is to provide proof that subjects have been 'covered'. Unfortunately, they don't always reflect what they have actually learnt. In England, they are usually a reflection of what parents have done. There's nothing like a good, old-fashioned test for finding out what students have learnt. Beats the hell out of project work any day."

    More on Portfolio Assessment

  • Portfolios: A Backward Step in School Accountability by Robert Holland, Lexington Institute, September 2007. "Portfolios are collections of student work, such as essays, artwork, and research papers. Progressive educators long have advocated that portfolios be substituted for paper-and-pencil tests because they are more 'natural' and 'authentic.' In the 1990s, Vermont and Kentucky implemented portfolio assessment as an integral part of education reform plans. Separate studies by nationally respected researchers showed that as a school accountability tool, portfolio assessment was a huge flop in both states, yielding results that were wildly unreliable and very expensive to obtain. Among the problems found:
    • A failure to yield reliable comparative data.
    • Large differences in the way teachers implemented portfolios.
    • Major differences in the degree of difficulty of assignments, rendering comparisons among students or groups of students highly misleading."

  • Comments on Portfolios and Accountability by Richard Innes, August 27, 2007. "... In Kentucky the writing portfolio program actually hampers the teaching of writing because any piece a child creates can be selected later as a portfolio item. As a result, teachers are constrained on the types of correction comments they can make on student papers. The constraints severely impact the effective teaching of punctuation and grammar. Spelling, of course, has not been a key requirement in Kentucky ever since our fad-laden reform was enacted in 1990. ..."

  • Portfolio Assessment by Jay Mathews, Education Next, Summer 2004. Excerpts: "Most critics of portfolio assessment say they like the emphasis on demonstrated writing and oral skill, but have seen too many instances in which a refusal to give traditional tests of factual recall leads to charmingly written essays with little concrete information to support their arguments."

  • Portfolio Assessment in the Therapeutic State by Dr. Martin Kozloff, November 2004. Here's the start of this pull-no-punches essay: "You can hardly take a step in Edland without tripping over a portfolio. Little kids in fourth grade ... are busily selecting, cutting, pasting, magic markering, stapling, and binding 'artifacts' and 'evidences' of their 'authorship' of 'literacy materials' for 'authentic assessment' of portfolios. And when they bring these foul creations home -- covered with glitter and half-dried Elmer's Glue dripping off the sides -- their parents Oo and Ah and assume their kids have learned something. It takes a cynical and heart-hearted parent to look at his kid's portfolio and say, 'How's this different from toting home all your junk in a sack?' Well, the portfolio biz is no longer limited to kids. Having made the little ones illiterate (with whole language) and unable to make change (with fuzziest math), the ed establishment in some districts now requires graduating high schoolers to present their portfolios to a board of portfolioticians for evaluation."

  • For a biting satire of portfolio assessment, see Scoring Rubrics for Portfolio Assessment by Dr. Martin Kozloff.

Grade Inflation

  • In High Schools, a 'B' Is New 'C': Higher Grades Not Matched By Higher Test Scores, by Eleanor Chute, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 3, 2007. "At high schools across the country, more and more students are graduating with grade-point averages of A, including some whose averages are well above the traditional 4.0 for an A. Grades ... are getting so high that a solid B is becoming the new C, which years ago was considered average. Consider: ... Seniors at Pine-Richland High School who have a weighted grade point average below 3.3 -- a B -- are in the bottom half of the class."

  • High schools inflate grades, and parents are fooled, USA Today, August 30, 2001, page 12A. Excerpt: "Among a blizzard of charts released Monday to explain an uptick in scores on the nation's favorite college-entrance exam, the SAT, one stood out: Since 1991, the percentage of [SAT] test takers with averages ranging from A-minus to A-plus soared from 28% to 41%. Taken at face value, that seems like good news. ... But scratch a little deeper ... The verbal and math SAT scores for those A-average students are declining -- a signal of grade inflation. That suggests students are receiving good grades for material they didn't learn."

  • Your Kid's A+ Doesn't Mean Much: Students' GPAs are skyrocketing, but their knowledge is plummeting by Michael Skube, Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2007. "High school students' grade-point averages keep going up, up, up -- and what students actually know stays where it's always been. If anything, students seem to know even less, GPAs notwithstanding. ... high-school GPAs are all but meaningless. For too many students, the luster is lost once they arrive at college and are expected to know certain rudimentary things -- an acquaintance, for example, with the geography of the world, the contours of U.S. history, the parts of speech. There is, in other words, little correlation between the GPA and what a graduating high school student knows."

  • The Gentleman's "A", Education Next, Spring 2004.
    This description of this article is from the National Council on Teacher Quality:
    A new study out of Florida backs up teachers who are tough graders. ... Are elementary students more likely to make real gains when assigned to a teacher who makes it harder to get an A than to squeeze blood out of a turnip? The study concludes that, overall, tough grading policies benefit all students academically and high ability students more so than low ability students. The impact, however, differed dramatically depending on the ability of the student and the average ability of the class as a whole. High ability students did best with teachers with high grading standards when the overall class performance was low. Low ability students, on the other hand, reacted better to tougher grading standards when the overall class performance was high.

  • Item in Economic Trends by Gene Koretz, Business Week On-Line, Monday, August 27, 2001: "... [a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research] ... indicates that shifting to a class with high grading standards significantly improves learning. And shifting from a tough teacher to an easy grader retards learning by a similar amount. The results hold up regardless of students' relative achievement levels and racial or economic backgrounds."

  • Inflating grades simply deflates education by William Bainbridge, as printed in Columbus Dispatch [Dispatch.com], Saturday, July 21, 2001.

  • Tough teachers improve students, comment by Judith Kleinfeld, professor of psychology at the University of Alaska, Anchorage Daily News, August 31, 2001

  • High School Grade Inflation From 1991 to 2003 (PDF) by David J. Woodruff and Robert L. Ziomek, ACT, Inc.

    MORE: Also see the sections of this web site regarding:

The SAT

  • Inside High Ed: A good source for recent articles about SAT issues, methods and controversies.

  • The latest changes to the SAT involve a number of elements that raise concerns about highly subjective assessments and constructivist approaches. One area that is sure to generate controversy is the proposed new "essay" requirements of the "Writing Section" of the new SAT. The College Boad itself, on its webpage on the "Writing Section", says,
    Students will be asked to write a short essay that requires them to take a position on an issue and use examples to support their position.
    The concern here is over what the College Board means by "an issue." In a further description, the College Board gives as an example a very benign "issue":
    Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt ...

    ...each failure leads us closer to deeper knowledge, to greater creativity in understanding old data, to new lines of inquiry.
    Assignment: What is your view on the idea that it takes failure to achieve success? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
    The concern is over what could happen if the "issue" chosen involved a more controversial or "politically correct" topic. The College Board intends to send photocopies of all such essay to all colleges getting the test results, raising serious questions about how a student is to answer if different colleges may be looking for certain "correct" viewpoints. Stay tuned!

  • SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors by Michael Winerip, New York Times, May 4, 2005. "Dr. [Les] Perelman is one of the directors of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did doctoral work on testing and develops writing assessments for entering M.I.T. freshmen. He fears that the new 25-minute SAT essay test that started in March - and will be given for the second time on Saturday -- is actually teaching high school students terrible writing habits. 'It appeared to me that regardless of what a student wrote, the longer the essay, the higher the score,' Dr. Perelman said. ... 'I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one,' he said. 'If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time.' The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.
    He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays. An essay on the Civil War, given a perfect six, describes the nation being changed forever by the 'firing of two shots at Fort Sumter in late 1862.' (Actually, it was in early 1861, and, according to 'Battle Cry of Freedom' by James M. McPherson, it was '33 hours of bombardment by 4,000 shot and shells.')
    Dr. Perelman contacted the College Board and was surprised to learn that on the new SAT essay, students are not penalized for incorrect facts. The official guide for scorers explains: 'Writers may make errors in facts or information that do not affect the quality of their essays. For example, a writer may state 'The American Revolution began in 1842' or 'Anna Karenina,' a play by the French author Joseph Conrad, was a very upbeat literary work.' (Actually, that's 1775; a novel by the Russian Leo Tolstoy; and poor Anna hurls herself under a train.) No matter. 'You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts.'"

  • No SAT required for admission: Dumbing Down America's Colleges by Alan Caruba, July 7, 2008. "[Now] we have the specter of university and college presidents eliminating one of the most respected tools for measuring a prospective student's ability to qualify for admission. The venerable SAT, the gold standard for measuring readiness for college for nearly 80 years, is slowly being eviscerated by colleges and universities. ... Disparaging the SATs for helping set high academic standards ignores the fact that more than two million students take the SAT every year and that more than 88% percent of America's colleges require it for admission. Those that don't require the SAT for admission often use it for course placement and scholarship consideration. The overwhelming majority of colleges use the SAT because it has acquired a well-deserved reputation for its ability to aid the evaluation process. ... The best way to prepare for college and the SAT is to work hard in high school and take a well rounded curriculum. Cheating qualified students who have taken the time and effort to prepare for this by devaluing and eliminating the SAT is just wrong."

  • Predictions of Freshman Grade-Point Average From the Revised and Recentered SAT I: Reasoning Test (PDF doc) by Brent Bridgeman, Laura McCamley-Jenkins, nd Nancy Ervin, College Entrance Examination Board, New York, 2000. This technical report examines how well the SAT predicts the freshman grades of students entering college. The answer, in short, is the SAT does an excellent job on predicting college success. One disturbing finding is that African-American and "Hispanic/Latino" men actually performed less well in their freshman college grades than the SAT predicted.

  • A look at historical SAT scores shows an ominous trend: "Between 1963 and 1994, there was a nationwide drop in verbal and math scores on the SAT exam. On the math test, the score declined from a postwar high of 502 in 1963 to a low of 466 in 1980 ... On the verbal test, the score declined from 478 in 1963 to 424 in 1980 ... critics attributed the drop to weaker curricula" (from Martin Rochester, Class Warfare, page 57).

  • But the College Board found a quick fix in 1995: "Recentering" the SAT made the dropping scores look better: For example, your old SAT verbal score of 590 is equivalent to a score today of 660. The College Board thoughtfully provides tables to compare "old" SAT scores with the new dumbed-down, oh, excuse me, I meant "recentered" SAT scores. Use this table to convert old and new scores for individuals, and this table to convert scores for groups.

  • "Also starting in 1995, SAT test-takers were given 30 more minutes to answer fewer questions. They were permitted to use calculators on the math section. By 2002, the notoriously difficult analogies section of the verbal test had been eliminated. This is in addition to special accommodations for 'disabilities' sufferers." (Martin Rochester, Class Warfare, page 58)

  • SAT Scores Up, Compared to What? by Diane Ravitch, September 4, 2003. "The famous SAT score decline began in 1964; scores hit bottom about 1980 and have slowly begun to come up since then, at least in math. Tracking the SAT score trends became much harder after 1994, the year the College Board decided to 'recenter' the scores. For reasons that I have trouble remembering, the College Board decided to declare that the 1994 average scores in both verbal and math were 500. This was an immense boost for verbal scores, which had languished around 430 for a whole generation. So, voila, 'average' scores were re-pegged at whatever they were in 1994."

  • The Effects of SAT Scale Recentering on Percentiles (PDF), College Board, Research Summary RS-05, May 1999. Look here for hard data on the effects of recentering. The table at the end is particularly interesting, because it shows how many points (as compared to the pre-1995 tests) are being added to various types of scores.

  • The Recentering of SAT Scales and Its Effects on Score Distributions and Score Interpretations (PDF), College Board, Research Report 2002-11. This detailed analysis documents the long-term drop in SAT scores throughout the latter half of the 20th century (leading to the recognized "need" for recentering). Of particular interest is section II, "Brief History of SAT Score Scales," which discusses the 20th century SAT score declines in detail.

  • And then there's this, from the parody newspaper, The Onion, for March 8, 2001:
    "Guidance Counselor Prefaces SAT Results By Talking About Test's Flaws: Mahwah, NJ -- In a preamble that boded poorly for the academic future of Mahwah High School senior Kevin Stember, guidance counselor Elvin Cross prefaced Stember's SAT scores by downplaying the test's reliability and worth Monday. 'You know, the SAT is a flawed, inexact measure of one's abilities,' a grim-faced Cross told Stember. 'It measures what you know rather than what you're capable of doing.' Cross added that the SAT fails to judge many essential real-life skills, like punching in on time and maintaining a clean uniform."

    "The SAT ... is biased. It's biased against people who aren't well-educated."
  • SAT tutor David S. Kahn, writing in the Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2006:
    "People complain that the SAT is biased and that the bias explains why students don't do well. That's true -- it is biased. It's biased against people who aren't well-educated. The test isn't causing people to have bad education, it's merely reflecting the reality. And if you don't like your reflection that doesn't mean that you should smash the mirror."

The ACT

  • Finding the Pony in the ACT: Just about every state can find some good news somewhere in the ACT results, if they look hard enough! Click here for the Illinois Loop's analysis of the 2006 ACT results across the nation and in Illinois.

  • Changes in ACT scores may reflect who is taking the test:
    • Jump in ACT Scores by Scott Jaschik, Inside High Ed, August 16, 2006. "One of the changes noted by ACT officials is a substantial increase in the number of people taking the ACT outside of the Midwest. Almost all colleges accept both the ACT and the SAT, although in areas like New England, colleges are far more likely to receive SAT scores, even when the ACT is an option. In recent years, more students applying from New England or applying to New England colleges have started taking the ACT (frequently still taking the SAT) to go for the best possible score to submit. ... For whatever reason, more students are taking the ACT in parts of the country where that was once unheard of. In New England, 19,721 students to the ACT this year, up 13 percent from last year's total, which was also 13 percent higher than the previous year. Other states where the numbers of ACT test-takers were up significantly this year included Florida (+14%), New Jersey (+33%), and Oregon (+12%)."

  • ACT, Inc.

  • Here are descriptions of the subject-area components of the ACT, taken directly from the ACT website:

    • The English Test:
      The English Test focuses on the student's understanding of the conventions of standard written English (punctuation, usage, and sentence structure) and of rhetorical skills (writing strategy, organization, and style). Spelling, vocabulary, and rote recall of rules of grammar are not tested. Students are asked to make a variety of decisions about revising or editing short essays, which are written especially for the test in order to reflect the interests and experiences of students.

    • The Reading Test:
      The Reading Test measures the student's reading comprehension as a product of referring and reasoning skills. The test questions require students to derive meaning from texts by (1) referring to what is explicitly stated and (2) reasoning to determine implicit meanings, draw conclusions, and make comparisons and generalizations. The tests consist of copyrighted passages drawn from appropriate published sources and cover the areas of prose fiction, the humanities, the social sciences, and (in the ACT Assessment only) the natural sciences.

    • The Mathematics Test:
      Emphasizing quantitative reasoning and the ability to solve practical quantitative problems, the Mathematics Test focuses on reasoning rather than memorization of formulas and computational skills. The ACT also says, "You may use a calculator on the Mathematics Test."

    • The Science Test:
      The Science Test measures interpretation, analysis, and evaluation skills required in the science content areas of biology, chemistry, physics, and Earth/space science.

      A different area of the ACT website advises, "The questions require you to: recognize and understand the basic features of, and concepts related to, the provided information examine critically the relationship between the information provided and the conclusions drawn or hypotheses developed generalize from given information and draw conclusions, gain new information, or make predictions."

      Note that both of these ACT sources suggest that knowledge of science content is NOT evaluated in this test!

  • In 1989, the ACT changed its tabulation procedure. In comparing pre-1989 with post-1989 scores, it is necessary and crucial to take this into account. We are advised that appropriate adjustments can be made using conversion recommendations from the ACT. The ACT website says, "The former ACT Assessment was revised in the late 1980s, and the Enhanced ACT Assessment was first administered in October 1989. This new version is currently in use, but the word 'enhanced' is no longer included in its title."

ACT's "PLAN" Test

    The ACT administers a test called "PLAN" which is taken by high school sophomores. (The official PLAN website is here.) The intended goals are to prepare for and to predict a student's most likely performance on the ACT test down the road, and to provide information on strengths and weaknesses so as to plan coursework during the remainder of high school. As such, it is sort of an ACT version of the PSAT, which is a precursor to the SAT test.

    In addition, the PLAN test also attempts to gauge a student's interest and suitability for various careers, displaying results in what it calls a "world of work" chart.

    Whether PLAN achieves any of these goals is another matter. We have been unable to determine the means used in PLAN to predict likely future ACT scores, and it's a little unsettling that this topic isn't given more substance in official ACT documents such as the PLAN_Program_Handbook. Similarly, it's hard not to be skeptical about a career assessment that claims to distill its advice down to a simplistic two-dimensional chart of job titles.

    If you can help, we would welcome your insight into the technical aspects and validation of the PLAN test, and the degree of its value to high school students.

More About Testing

  • Kimberly Swygert, a Ph.D. and psychometrician, runs an interesting "blog" of commentary on testing and assessment, and other education issues, named Number 2 Pencil

  • Supreme Court Upholds School Practice Of Having One Student Grade Another's Work, February 19, 2002. "The Supreme Court upheld [in a 9-0 decision] the common schoolroom practice of having one student grade another's work, ruling today that such paper-swapping does not violate federal privacy law. ... Teachers nationwide commonly tell students to swap homework, quizzes or other schoolwork and then correct one another's work as the teacher goes over it aloud. Sometimes the teacher then has students call out the results, and the teacher records them. 'Correcting a classmate's work can be as much a part of the assignment as taking the test itself,' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for himself and seven colleagues. ... 'It is a way to teach material again in a new context, and it helps show students how to assist and respect fellow pupils,' wrote Kennedy, a former law professor who still teaches several classes a year."

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