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Class Notes
	Spring brings sun, tulips, SAT9 (Published May 3, 2004) By MATT WENNERSTEN

Standardized tests. What’s the answer? Are they good assessments of children's intellectual ability -- or blunt, biased, rote-learned instruments used to bludgeon schools into submission?

On balance, probably a little of both. What’s a teacher to do?

Spring in D.C. brings tulips, sunshine, cicadas and the Stanford 9. The Stanford 9 (SAT9, not to be confused with the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT) is the test chosen by D.C. Public Schools under "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) to assess our children's progress. NCLB requires schools to test all students at least once a year and report whether the school has made adequate yearly progress (AYP) for all sub-groups. By sub-groups, NCLB means socio-economic status, minority status, ESL, special ed, etc. The goal is that by 2012, 100 percent of students should score at a "proficient" level on the Stanford 9.

There is a tremendous amount of teacher anger and frustration at standardized testing. Obviously, a goal where 100 percent will reach some level is crazy. In any group of people, you will inevitably have someone who fails the test, if only out of perversity. Teachers are also upset because if their kids don’t improve each year, students at their school are given the option to be bused to other schools, and after two years, the school can be "transformed" and teachers fired. This prospect can cause some stress.

But isn’t this how it should be? If teachers are doing a poor job, they need to start doing something else. However, adequate yearly progress is relative. For example, almost all schools in Arkansas are meeting their NCLB targets. Many schools in Michigan are classified as "failing," yet public education in Arkansas is much worse than that of Michigan. (On the National Assessment of Educational Performance, 100 percent of Michigan students scored "basic" or higher, while only 79 percent of Arkansas students did.) The reason why Arkansas schools are not failing is because Arkansas is using an easier test for NCLB, yet it’s the Michigan schools that will face the consequences for their poor performance.

Progress also is relative within a school year. Each school tests its current students. The next year, the school is testing a new set of students. The school is being judged based on the improvement of the current year (and current set) versus the performance of last year’s completely different set of kids. This is not fair, as the schools don’t control which kids they accept – they’re public schools, after all. Having an exceptional 9th grade class can actually be bad for a school. If the next year is merely average, the test results will show a decline, not a progression. Is this because the schools’ teachers are doing a bad job?

Another frustration for teachers is that progress for a particular child can be huge, yet the school can still "fail." For example, if a student starts the 9th grade able to correctly answer only nine of the 48 questions on the SAT9 test, and by the end of the year that student can correctly answer 20 of the 48 questions, the student has improved tremendously. However, the threshold for passing is 22 correct questions.

Under NCLB, this student has shown no improvement, as they were failing before and they are still failing. In many ways, I support this, because it really doesn’t matter how much a kid improves if they still can’t function at the level at which they need to function. Still, it's disappointing to be on the receiving end, knowing my kids are starting high school without basic skills like how to multiply fractions. I then have to make a choice: teach them how to multiply fractions, or move on with the algebra curriculum they also need. In part, they need the algebra because the SAT9 will test them on algebra, and not specifically on fractions (although not being able to compute fractions will probably cost them five or six questions outright).

Another teacher frustration with standardized tests is that they are not curriculum. Standardized tests, being standardized, are absolutely predictable. You see almost exactly the same questions every year, and students can be shown how to answer just those questions with some degree of success. Numerous studies and the success of companies like Kaplan have shown that by learning test-taking skills, and not content, you can boost your score tremendously. Unfortunately, knowing the trick on an A,B,C,D multiple-choice question will not help you when you need to decide how many feet of wood you should buy for your new deck. Worse, the tests are rigorously timed; students have less than a minute per question. How often in real life will you have only a minute to solve a complicated math problem? I believe the proper goal of education is to create life-long learners whose lives are not beaten down by endless multiple-choice drills but rather, enhanced by opportunities to read real literature and solve important and relevant mathematical problems. If you want to discourage a child from enjoying learning, eliminate the creativity and richness from the classroom, and focus repetitively on a small set of isolated, skill-based problems. They’ll pass, but are we satisfied with that?

What we teach at my school, and frankly, what we should be teaching, is a well-rounded curriculum where students figure out fundamental problems and complete many different kinds of assessments -- some multiple choice, sure, but mainly expository writing about their thinking process, long-term problem solving projects and open-ended homework assignments. After all, life is "open book" and untimed. The way we progress in the marketplace is usually not through skill on standardized tests.

We should approach standardized tests, instead, as a subset of curriculum. The questions selected are, in fact, thoughtfully chosen to require students to receive instruction in a range of disciplines. Research shows that the best way to prepare students for standardized tests is to teach a full and rich curriculum, not to focus on any one particular skill (although the impressive gains you can get from test drills are seductive.) Students who have truly mastered a topic don’t need test-taking strategies to find the answer that matches a given scenario – they can find it from principles. (Too bad they only have 56 seconds per question to do this derivation.)

There are many good things about NCLB’s focus on standardized testing that we would be foolish to ignore. Prior to NCLB, schools tended to set low expectations for special ed and ESL students, as these students were not tested and their progress (or lack of it) not reported. Also, the appropriate grade level nature of the questions shows us where students should be at a minimum. We should be aiming higher, wider and farther than the test, but it is an important point from which to start. Furthermore, our kids will be taking standardized tests many times in their lives, not just SAT9 but the SAT, the ACT, the GRE, LSATs for law school, MCATs for medical school, the ASVAB for the military, the police exam, even the driver’s license test. Moaning about awful spring rain showers will not make them go away. Being frustrated by standardized tests will not eliminate our children’s need to do well on them, either.

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Wennersten is a third-year mathematics teacher at Bell Multicultural Senior High School and a graduate of the D.C. Teaching Fellows program. Contact him at mwenners@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator