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The possibility that even more students could be
held back a grade appeared to be on the minds of some North Carolina
lawmakers when, in April, a month before this year’s testing
began, some legislators were calling for an easing of standards.
As it turned out, when this year’s fifth-grade scores
came in, as many as 98 percent of students passed the fifth-grade
EOG in math in some schools. Officials then admitted they had probably
set the bar too low after an eleventh-hour revision to the math exam,
which did not permit sufficient field-testing. According to the Raleigh
News & Observer, on last year’s fifth-grade math test, students
had to answer 35 to 63 percent of the questions correctly to pass,
depending on the version of the test administered. This year, the
passing measure ranged from 28 to 34 percent of correct answers. Says
Susan Wynn, principal of Durham’s Lakewood Elementary, “I’m
not sure how much of a student’s actual knowledge we were measuring
if answering only 28 percent of the questions correctly was passing.
We know that students can actually get 25 percent of the questions
correct by random chance.”
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“At
a time when some top colleges are questioning how much weight
to give standardized-test scores in admissions decisions, standardized
testing for K-12 students is increasing
in nationwide influence.” |
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Last year, approximately 20 percent
of all fifth-graders failed the reading test while some 17 percent
failed the math test. “We were anticipating that 15 percent of
the students would not be able to meet the standard in math,”
said Lou Fabrizio, the state official who oversees North Carolina’s
testing.
Steve Schewel ’73, Ph.D. ’82, visiting assistant
professor in the Hart Leadership Program, part of Duke’s Terry
Sanford Institute of Public Policy, chairs the board of a progressive
think tank called The Common Sense Foundation, based in Raleigh. Common
Sense has been highly critical of the state’s testing system;
it has distributed some 10,000 parent handbooks on the consequences
of high-stakes testing. With funding from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation,
it also convened a commission to collect parent and teacher reaction
through a series of hearings across the state. Schewel himself has
a fifth-grader at Durham’s E. K. Powe Elementary.
“When state officials say, ‘Our target was a
15 percent failure rate, and too many fifth-graders passed,’
it suggests to me that the state can too easily manipulate the tests
for some political purpose,” Schewel says. “Are we aiming
for a certain failure rate so that we can recreate the low-pay workforce
we have now, identifying the kids who will eventually work at McDonald’s,
and tracking them from the third grade on? Is this test just a tool
to replicate our social stratification?”
While Schewel is speaking halfway tongue-in-cheek, he
is certain that North Carolina’s agenda for testing is primarily
business-driven. He points to the fact that the chair of North Carolina’s
State Board of Public Instruction, Phil Kirk, also happens to be the
president of North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry. The
state’s largest business group, it calls itself “the state’s
chamber of commerce.”
“Kids that fail these tests are having their self-confidence
destroyed,” says Schewel. “You only have to walk through
a school on test day or the few days leading up to it to witness the
anxiety associated with EOG.” The Common Sense Foundation has
heard from parents about children crying uncontrollably, throwing
up on the tests, and physically abusing themselves with number-two
pencils.
“The level of stress is way too high for a third-
or fifth-grader,” Schewel says, “way beyond what children
of that age should experience.” He concedes that test results
have confirmed how parental income is correlated to student achievement.
“Testing has now put a number on that,” he says, “and
everyone is talking about the achievement gap. We can’t ignore
those students anymore. But I’d still rather see more teaching
and less testing.”
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If I could make the tests go away,
I would,” says assistant principal Fred Williams. “The whole
process denigrates the professionalism of teachers, the majority of
whom here at Jordan have an advanced degree; some have Ph.D.s. We
have reasonably rigorous licensing procedures. To have a two-hour
paper-and-pencil test count more than a teacher’s year-long observation
of a student doesn’t seem reasonable.” Nevertheless, Williams
says that teachers have teamed up to think more creatively about how
to present the curriculum, create mock test questions, develop review
formats, and assess student progress in advance of the EOC tests.
“Still,” he says, “I know in my field of U.S. history,
the coverage of content is much more superficial now. The tests require
breadth over depth. There’s no opportunity to take some extended
time to explore the New Deal or the civil-rights movement or the beginnings
of the women’s movement in the nineteenth century.”
On the other hand, says Ike Thomas ’69, M.A.T. ’70,
Ph.D. ’83, principal of Northern High School in Durham, “The
EOC keeps that U.S. history teacher from spending nine weeks on the
Civil War just because that’s the teacher’s favorite period
in history. What we’re trying to do with EOC is create consistency
and focus and keep teachers from operating as independent contractors.
Still, we need to keep asking, ‘Is it a fair test?’”
Thomas says he has sometimes witnessed wildly different
scores from year to year, suggesting that “some years the test
is different, not the kids, so comparisons of groups from one year
to the next may not always be useful. But the part we find most burdensome
are the field tests.” He says, “Every year we are testing
for future tests. Our students tested two of four parts of the new
exit exam this year.”
Wilkes County superintendent Joe Johnson says he has railed
at times against what he sometimes thinks of as “psychometric
madness” or an overemphasis on testing. “We have to remember
these are children, not numbers, we’re talking about.” Likewise,
at the Common Sense Foundation’s hearing on fair testing in Durham
in mid-May, parents, teachers, and organizers from at least five counties
gave testimony about how much classroom time is given over to practice
tests, field tests, and then the actual tests themselves. “As
jobs in our society become more automated, so does our school system,”
said David Freeman Ph.D. ’01. “Are we treating our kids
like machines because that’s the workforce we want?”
Larry Holt, a parent of two children in the Durham public
schools, testified on behalf of his daughter, who had reported to
him that some of her teachers were not spending a lot of time with
students who were struggling with the material. “Teachers hurried
to get ready for the tests,” said Holt. “But, as my daughter
pointed out, different teachers teach at different rates, and students
learn at different rates. I believe testing is taking away from the
positive motivating experience that education ought to be. She says
she doesn’t mind tests to measure performance, but how much is
too much?”
“Students become the unwitting victims of an over-focus
on accountability,” says TIP’s Steven Pfeiffer. “They
can lose their enthusiasm and passion for learning. Instruction can
quickly over-emphasize memorization of facts to the relative neglect
of important and enjoyable higher-level skills, such as the critical
examination, synthesis, and evaluation of ideas, group problem-solving,
transforming ill-defined problems, imagination, and creative discovery.”
Based on his study of twenty-three teachers in Durham
County, Duke researcher Brett Jones says teachers are definitely doing
things differently in the classroom. “They are focusing on skill
and drill and the lower objectives because multiple-choice tests generally
do not involve higher-order thinking. We also found that teachers
are spending less time in science and social studies in the primary
grades since these areas are not tested.”
When I was a Duke student and later, when I started teaching,
I thought the importance of my profession was based on the abstract
principle that learning is valuable, regardless of its usefulness,”
says superintendent Joe Johnson. “Now we’ve moved to the
point of view that learning is good for making money. That’s
how we have changed socially. That economic focus, which may be good,
has nevertheless caused us to lose the notion that learning by itself
is worthwhile.”
Principal Ike Thomas has decided to retire from public
education this year. “One of the things that continues to concern
me,” he says, “is the perception that public education used
to be wonderful, and now it isn’t. If we go back fifty years,
a lot of kids didn’t get to school at all. We didn’t worry
because of manufacturing and farm jobs that were available to them.
But today, we’ve made a commitment to educate all of our children.
When you set the bar that high, the shortcomings are more evident.
Our schools are doing more for more people than we ever have, and
we’re not getting credit for it.”
Superintendent Johnson agrees. “One of the most disappointing
things in my career has been the decline in the status, the trust,
and respect that people have for public educators,” he says.
“Sure, some have misbehaved, but in our nation, there has been
a general erosion of confidence in government, and public education
has been one of the key focuses.”
If testing ultimately fails as a remedy to upgrade our
schools or becomes too costly to maintain, do we then face the disintegration
of public education in favor of a voucher system and the privatization
of schools?
Howard Machtinger, director of the Teaching Fellows Program
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, speaking at the
Durham hearing on fair testing, said, “Right now, I think the
present administration doesn’t really believe in a public sector,
only the free market. Meanwhile, we are facing a major crisis in recruiting
and retaining teachers. All the talk about testing has obscured this
unfolding crisis.”
“What I would like to see at the state and federal
level,” says Pfeiffer, “is a group of authorities brought
together—experts in curriculum, child development, and measurement—to
come up with the best way to promote equity and excellence in public
schools. We need more dialogue in the public arena about what should
be the goals of public education. I think the violence we are seeing
in our schools speaks to the shared responsibility we have in helping
kids deal with painful conflicts and emotions in this culture. Accountability
is secondary to what we hope public education will provide our future
citizens, which includes getting along with others, respecting the
environment, strategic thinking, and problem solving instead of this
emphasis on traditional nineteenth-century academic skill areas. We
simply have not had that debate yet.”
“Ultimately,” says Brett Jones, “I’d
say what we have in North Carolina is a good working draft of a testing
system. But for the kids in the system right now, it’s not a
draft, it’s a final exam. What we’re doing is a little like
building the airplane while you fly it. We are focusing on education
more in this country, and on student learning, but good teachers were
doing that before high-stakes testing began.”
Eubanks ’76 is a frequent contributor to
the magazine
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