May/June 2000

Testing Mania: Good Intentions Gone Awry

Featuring Nicholas Lemann, Ted Sizer, Linda Nathan, and Angela Valenzuela

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites a number of educators, researchers,community activists, and policymakers, from across the country to talk about such topics as school violence, multiple intelligences, teaching science, and the politics of school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these talks.

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on March 20, 2000. For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Dean Jerry Murphy's Welcome
Introduction by Vito Perrone
Ted Sizer's Talk
Nicholas Lemann's Talk
Angela Valenzuela's Talk
Linda Nathan's Talk
HGSE Forums Home Page
Transcripts of Past HGSE Forums

You can also scroll right through the transcript without clicking on above links.

Dean Jerry Murphy's Welcome

JERRY MURPHY: I'd like to welcome all of you to the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Askwith Education Forum, and a particular welcome to the distinguished members of our panel, which includes some members of our faculty. My name is Jerry Murphy and I'm the dean. It is a great pleasure to have you all here on this first day of spring.

I have received more letters and e-mail and telephone calls on tonight's topic than on any other topic addressed by the Forum. That should not be surprising, given what is truly at stake for children. But what may be surprising to some members of the audience is that I have been taken to the woodshed, which I should tell you is not unfamiliar territory for a dean, not only by those who think that the school is biased against high-stakes testing, but also and with equal passion by those who think the school is biased in favor of high-stakes testing. It is nice to be equally loved.

A common question that's asked is, Where does the school stand on this crucial question? Given these love letters from the field, I thought I would say a few words about the view from the woodshed.

In the case of faculty and students, I encouraged them to take a stand to speak their minds based on their reading of the evidence. They have done so with terrific vigor, and the positions that they have taken have ranged widely across the spectrum on the issue of testing.

I realize that such a cacophony of utterances from the Ed School can be confusing, but I contend that this is exactly as it should be. After all, this is not a church, but a university that values, above all, freedom of expression.

In the case of the Askwith Education Forums, I take a very different stand. The forums are, after all, an instrument of the university. The goal of the forums is not to support a single position, but to bring people together to illuminate and debate the issues. We aim for discussions that are civil and respectful of different points of view, and we believe that through debate, and that means both talking and listening, that we can learn from each other and move forward on some of the most vexing issues facing our nation's schools.

On controversial topics, the forums are designed to achieve balance by providing a venue for multiple voices to be heard over time. And we achieve that balance over time, we believe, through different formats.

Tonight's panel, for example, is by design not balanced. We wanted to give ample time to those who have serious reservations about high-stakes testing. Earlier panels of this forum have also lacked balance, giving ample time to those who strongly favor state standards and high-stakes testing.

Now I realize that balance and how to achieve it, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So I ask those of you who believe that the forums have not amply presented a crucial perspective to come forward, not only with your passionate concerns, but with your concrete suggestions. I assure you that the door to the woodshed is open.

It is now my pleasure to introduce Vito Perrone, who is a member of the senior faculty of the school. For 11 years, Vito was director of our teacher education programs. Vito is also the founder of Teachers as Scholars, a professional development program for local teachers that has now been replicated in 13 sites across the country. More recently, Vito has been devoting more of his time to writing, including a wonderful new book, Lessons for New Teachers. Please welcome Vito Perrone. [Applause.]

Introduction by Vito Perrone

VITO PERRONE: Good evening. It is my pleasure to remain within this woodshed, but the woodshed that probably represents the balance of this panel. I'm pleased to introduce this Askwith Forum on tests and testing, most notably, on the testing that is the basis for students having or not having particular educational experiences and opportunities, whether one is promoted or retained, graduates or does not graduate from high school.

Testing, as you likely know, has moved from a more benign character to high stakes. While high-stakes testing is rapidly taking hold across the country, all of the issues are on display here in Massachusetts with the imposition of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System. For the sake of historical context, I have placed on the board in very low-tech fashion [laughter] a line graph of the volume of standardized testing that we have come to know, beginning with the first standardized test with a multiple-choice technology in 1909.

It goes up slowly from 1909 to about 1965. It then begins to go more steeply upward into the 1970s. By the Year 2000, if I were to be very accurate with this graph, we would be almost to the ceiling, just to give you a sense of the absolute volume.

For those in the audience who graduated before 1960, you likely took no more than two or three standardized tests in your entire school careers, and the results did not matter very much.

A student graduating from high school today will likely have been subjected to 25 or more such tests, and they have come to matter much more. They have come to play a larger role than ever in what teachers decide to teach and what they forego teaching, day in and day out. And they loom large than ever before in children and young peoples' lives. Children as young as nine and ten and all the way through high school talk about the MCAS.

Those who support where we are with testing suggest it will bring equity, even as history suggests large increases in dropout rates among those long underserved, and that the problems are short term and can be addressed by improvements in the quality of the tests and better teaching.

Those in the opposition suggest that any attempt to use a single measure to determine any person's life chances, or to describe any human's actual knowledge and potential, is educationally indefensible, if not immoral. Moreover, they have no faith that the tests can actually be made fairer or better.

To address these myriad issues, we have a distinguished panel of speakers. I will introduce them briefly in the order of their presentations.

Ted Sizer is a former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, he has been one of the premier spokespersons in America for more progressive decentralized schools with genuine performance standards and serious accountability around genuine habits of mind.

Francis W. Parker Charter School, a place where Ted and Nancy Sizer have been intensively engaged for the last four years, is the epitome of some of the Coalition's ideas. His first books elaborate what it means to truly invoke standards, but without tests such as MCAS.

Nicholas Lemann is a journalist and social commentator, who wrote the important book, The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How It Changed America. He recently wrote an illuminating book on testing, The Big Test: The Social History of the American Meritocracy, which is tied closely to Harvard President Conant's vision of the SAT as the great equalizer, a means of creating a more democratic egalitarian elite, a paradox of immense proportions.

Angela Valenzuela is a distinguished faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin and a long-time advocate for democratic schools and communities. Her book, Subtractive Schooling: U.S./Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, has just received a major AERA award. Valenzuela recently completed an extensive review of TAAS, the Texas Assessment System that the Boston Globe and the Massachusetts Department of Education suggest is a model to follow. What they see as building equity, she sees as building inequity and lower-quality schooling.

Linda Nathan is the founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy, and long a co-director of the Fenway School, one of the Coalition's flagship schools. She is a passionate spokesperson in Boston for high-quality schooling for long underserved students and families. Long before anyone linked standards and equity, Linda had set standards for graduation and accountability for her students that make the current discussion pale. And her graduates are succeeding in college and in the world in spite of test scores that would not dazzle everyone in this audience very much. She is one of HGSE's most illustrative graduates--a true teacher/scholar and educational leader.

The promise of a lively series of presentations and discussion is high. Please join me in welcoming this panel of distinguished speakers. [Applause.]

Ted Sizer

TED SIZER: Testing is of course just one expression of a public or private policy--a piece of a larger cloth. Yet, as the title of this forum testifies, we Americans are enmeshed in a mania of testing in our country.

I'd like to introduce the first speaker at this forum with a few remarks on the policy behind the practice. Let me start with a basic intentionally parental question: Who shapes my child's mind and by what right?

As the parent, I do, but the community also has its rights in that shaping. What my child believes and the ways that she perceives the world affect our entire community and much beyond it. The community has, therefore, the right to insist that my child attend school, thereby to form the habits and gain the ideas that will provide her with the principled, informed habits upon which democracy depends.

In so doing, the community must recognize that its requirement that my child attend school under penalty of law is a substantial abridgement of my daughter's freedom: indeed, the most substantial abridgement of her freedom, short of mandatory military service during war. It is also an abridgement, by extension, of my freedom as her parent.

Accordingly, the hand of the state must be light, and its specific demands limited to those fundamental and widely accepted matters upon which a citizen depends: for example, literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding. Beyond that, the schools, families, and teachers may offer much more, but now only with respectful care for my child's reasoned acquiescence.

I, the parent, must have access to this process. If I do not agree with a part of it, I must have the right to look into the eyes of those who have the power to make a change. Such family- and teacher-level authority is necessary, because thoughtful citizens and scholars will always and persuasively disagree on the contours and the standards of knowledge.

There can never be, nor should there ever be, one best school, particularly in a mature and confident democracy. Americans have a long history of debate about culture, about the nature of the disciplines and about the standards necessary for their proper use.

There is not and has never been one best set of standards no one best array of disciplines, no one acceptable form of expression, no uniformly dependable single means of assessment. What endures in this inevitably confused and often high-charged situation is the struggle to ascertain the best of each, according to the intelligence and taste of the given time.

Like most parents, I want a place for my child to stretch her mind far beyond the rudiments, to learn how to engage in this intellectual struggle with respect for what has gone before, and with hope that she can evolve a constructive view of a world that is sensitive to her own time.

In this quest of hers, I recognize that experts may know far more about education than I do, but that does not give them unilateral license to command all that to which my child is exposed. I accept the fact that I have biases, that I can be thoughtless, ill informed, and vindictive, but I find all these frailties are no less present in the experts and in elected officials.

I accept the fact that the schooling of my child will require compromises between my convictions and those of the community. All I expect in making these compromises is a place at a table small enough that my voice can be heard, and that my vote has reasonable weight. Such compromises, which are the stuff of democracy, will be messy. Schools will vary in their academic emphases, in their culture. Such compromise risks a Tower of Babel: however, the risks of insisted conformity, of intellectual hegemony in the name of consistency and orderliness are far greater.

Uniquely, in our time, state governments are headed down a road of orderly standardization both of educational substance and of assessment of each child's mastery of that substance. The reason for this pressure is noble. Too many of our schools are mindless, sloppy places. The government's remedy to this sorry condition is state direction and insistence on accountability solely on its terms.

I agree with the end. Indeed I have been on the public record in this regard for 30 years. But a worthy end does not justify just any means. Our political leaders have overreached, and our assessment technicians have promised far more than their instruments can fairly deliver.

The end is good. Current means are profoundly flawed. As a result, I, the parent, and my daughter suffer a growing assault on our fundamental intellectual freedom. The campaign for higher national academic standards, not only in the uncontroversial rudiments, but also in all aspects of the curriculum, profoundly attacks fundamental standards of a mature democracy.

As a citizen and as a parent, I am fearful of the extent of the intellectual conformity expected of all Americans implicitly in many current proposals and policies.

As a high school educator, I am embittered by the disrespect given to my judgment. As a university scholar, I am deeply ashamed by the academy's extraordinary indifference to this arrogation of power over young citizens' minds by central governments. The rarity of a forum of this sort is the exception that proves the rule.

The end of a rigorous, inspiring, and yeasty schooling must not be sacrificed by means both haughty in their pretensions and indefensible in their means. Democracy and freedom of the mind will be the victims. [Applause.]

Nicholas Lemann

NICHOLAS LEMANN: Thank you. I feel a little funny being here because I've spent years working on a book that's primarily about SATs--where they came from, how they were instituted, and what effect they're having. I know a lot about SATs. I don't know a thing about the new Massachusetts state tests, so I'm in a quandary of knowing about Thing A, which comes under the rubric of testing, and being on a panel and before an audience that wants to talk about Thing B, that I don't have much specific knowledge of. But, I'll speak in general about state standard testing.

Yesterday I was in Chicago speaking at the American Council on Education annual convention, which I would say, went over like a lead balloon. President after president got up and said, "You are hostile to assessment itself." I suspect I'm going to play a little bit the other way in this crowd, which has very different values.

I don't know if any of you saw in the Washington Post that Vice president Gore's SAT scores were revealed. The magazine I work for now, The New Yorker, over my strenuous protest, published George W. Bush's SAT scores. Slate magazine published Bill Bradley's SAT scores, and so the kind of SAT fetish has gotten to the point where it's becoming a kind of quasi requirement of running for president that you reveal your SAT scores. This is the first year that it's happened. [Laughter.]

Being very involved in the internal debates at these publications on this point, a lot of the argument you get is, "Well, you know, the public has a right to know what the SAT scores were of the president of the United States," even though it's a test that this person took at age 16 or 17. [Laughter.]

Now, here's the situation with the MCAS as a type of test, with again the caveat that I'm not speaking about it specifically. Tests are very different from each other, and the aim of these state-standardized tests is quite different from the aim of the SAT. And I believe much more admirable. I guess Ted Sizer also called it admirable, and I hope that we'll sort of get to figure out a better way to get to the admirable goal.

There are two key points about the SAT. The SAT and other ETS tests, ACT and so on--what they really represent is a system of national educational standards for some people, for the few, and not for the many. It's a system that was put in place with two salient points: one, the SAT is descended from an IQ test, and tests like this can be lumped under the category of aptitude tests, as opposed to achievement tests.

The second point, the purpose of the test is not to address the quality of all public education in America, not to address the experience of every single student, but to look out, do a national scan a la the story of Cinderella and the glass slipper, pick out a few kids and bring them to places like Harvard, and kind of leave everything else alone.

I don't know if any of you have ever heard of the eight-year study. There was an organization that probably still exists called the Progressive Education Organization. Let me explain it for those who haven't heard of it. It was a long ambitious study run by a man named Ralph W. Tyler, a very distinguished figure in testing, who recently died at an advanced age. It went on for eight years. It was funded by Carnegie, and was a sort of clarion call for the core values of progressive education, and interestingly, somewhere in the fine print of the eight-year study, is a call for IQ tests. I don't know if they use the words "intelligence tests" or "aptitude tests," but they say, "Look, how are we going to solve the problem of, you know, interfacing between our schools and college, and the way we're going to solve it is with some kind of aptitude or intelligence measure, so that the progressive schools aren't locked into having to have a curriculum dictated to them, which would be the case if we had achievement tests."

So, the fact is, you're going to have tests one way or the other, and the question is really how to structure them. I have seen firsthand some of the bad and also some of the good that state-standardized tests can do. I live in New York state. My children go to New York state public schools. My older son is in high school. He takes the New York State Regents, which I basically like, for reasons I'll get back to in a minute.

When my younger son was in third and fourth grade, he was taking these state-mandated reading tests. There I saw firsthand what goes on.

What they do in elementary schools where a state superintendent institutes a high-stakes test...the first thing that is interesting about it is it's driven by real estate in suburban towns. When people try to buy houses in the town, they have a sheet listing of all the test scores in the town, and the test scores determine the value of the real estate.

The realtors are the biggest businesses in these suburban towns, and for the typical family that lives there their biggest asset is their house. So the kids are sort of foot soldiers in the local real estate wars [Laughter.] because their third-grade reading scores will determine what your house is worth.

Our scores fell one year. My son happened to be in third grade the following year, and the school made it a great cause to raise them. You've all seen this: they have their reading instruction, then they said, "Okay. We're going to stop reading instruction now and have test prep." Then they have an entirely separate thing that's like a mini Stanley Kaplan course. [Laughter.] There's an hour a day of test prep; they'd get pretests; they'd be taught all of those tricks about eliminating two answers on the multiple choice; they would be sent home with drilling exercises that didn't have to do with learning to read, and sure enough our scores went up and our real estate values skyrocketed. [Laughter.] I say that to sort of earn my bona fides as having seen, very much firsthand as a parent, some of the ills of state tests.

But, now let me say why I think there's some good in this cause, and why we should try to find a way to get there better. As a reporter, the thing that I find most shocking and upsetting in American education is not these test prep things, but the spectacle of schools at the bottom of the public school system where the kids just don't learn anything.

And you can argue back and forth about why they don't learn anything, but the fact is that there are lots and lots of schools out there where the kids are finishing school and they don't know how to read. They don't have Ted Sizer's list: literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding. So what do we do about that?

I feel uncomfortable operating without some kind of net, some way of figuring out whether kids in public schools in America are learning the material or not. I just think you have to have some way to measure it. I'm not comfortable saying, "If only we would trust the teachers, we can just be absolutely sure this will happen in every school." We have to find a way.

The other thing that has made me feel more urgency about this is, arguably, the most powerful data point about a change in American social structure over the last generation--the decline in the economic value of a high school degree.

Basically, the big line that's going to open up in America is the line between the people who have college and the people who don't have college. The high school degree used to mean something, used to give you something you could take into the employment market, and now it really doesn't. This is cutting in on not only personal economic fortunes, but attitudes about America, voting patterns, the way you think about yourself, and the way you think about the country. It's very disturbing the way those with only high school or less, particularly males, are being dramatically left behind economically and every other way.

Two people who have done a lot of interesting work on this are Frank Levy at MIT and Dick Murnane at Harvard. They have persuaded me to believe that the declining value of the high school diploma is not just about the credential value of the diploma; it's about the skill set that's represented in the diploma.

In other words, we have a situation where people are finishing high school without the skills the economy needs. I doubt they have civic understanding and yet we're sending them out into the world. The most important function of government and of the society thought of in group terms, which is education, is not being performed for these folks, and it's a big problem.

I hope we will have a sense of urgency about this, urgency that is so great that there's a willingness to overcome the excesses that any kind of testing regime will bring. I don't see a way to really assess how schools are doing in building a basic floor level under education without some kind of testing system.

Let me suggest two or three guiding principles before I stop, and then we'll get into what these testing systems ought to look like later on. Notice that I'm not saying "It's inevitable. Let's just get out of the way of the roaring freight train." Although it is a roaring freight train, I'm also saying there is a good idea here, and people who are worried about the excesses of testing, as I am, should get involved in fighting to get it done right.

The first principle is the cart-and-horse principle. The reason that one of my sons had a very bad experience with standardized testing mandated by the state and one had a relatively good experience is that, in one case, the state reading test, the test comes first. It's purchased or plucked off a shelf. It's not an organic outgrowth of the curriculum, and so, therefore, as soon as it's given consequence, what goes on in the school building is a kind of bending to meet the test. Reasoning should always be forward from the curriculum to the construction of the test, which is much more the case with the Regents exams in New York, and not backward from taking a test, a pre-existing test, giving it high consequence so that inevitably the school system adjusts accordingly, often in maladaptive ways.

Second of all, I like achievement testing better than aptitude testing, both of which are endemic and perhaps epidemic in American society. What I don't like about aptitude testing is that it enables the test prep industry, which I find quite creepy. It's vague--what is being tested for--and it really encourages the teaching of trick pony exercises. It also kind of opens a Pandora's box about whether you are or aren't measuring some innate mental capacity. This gets internalized by kids in very harmful ways and sets off destructive conversations in the society.

I much prefer achievement tests because you can say to your kid, as I say to my high schooler when he's taking the New York State Regents, "You know what? These are tests of whether you learned geography, or whatever the test it is. So go to school, study the course material, learn geography and you'll get a high grade on your Regents." It gives the student incentive to study, it honors learning material in school, and it doesn't set off a lot of harmful, your-whole-worth-is-being-judged stuff. It also gives the schools incentive to teach curriculum material rather than to teach to tests that have been imposed on them from without.

I think-- and here's where I'm going to go a place that I suspect almost everybody here disagrees with--the healthiest thing to do in this process of trying to struggle and find our way to tests that work and tests that are meaningful is to do it nationally. I suppose it's my prejudice as a member of the national press corps to believe in the sort of basic goodness of the national conversation about issues. It's also a prejudice I have as a southern liberal who saw his region change for the better by the imposition of national power. But I think broader this discussion is, the more people that are involved, the better the result will be, the less likely you'll be to have sloppy, pasty, ill-thought-out, badly imposed results. I think if we have a national conversation about standardized testing with the idea of coming up with national achievement tests of some kind, we'll have to have some kind of national curriculum.

I hope it would be a kind of limited national curriculum that does not eat up the entire school day, but on the other hand makes sure that every kid has literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding. Then once we decide what that consists of, we would write and discuss the test nationally to produce those results. Then we would have the same kind of healthy and fine-grained and careful discussion about what the consequences of those tests would be.

I think that's the way to go; I hope that's the way we go. And I think a collateral benefit would be, back to my book, that these tests could replace the SATs, and I think that would be very healthy. I'll stop there. Thank you very much.

Angela Valenzuela

ANGELA VALENZUELA: It's a pleasure coming all the way here to the East Coast and actually having a few friends in the audience. What I have to talk about today, unfortunately, is not so nice. It has to do with the harmful effects of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test in the state of Texas. I want to provide a brief overview of the major issues that I came across as an academic in the public school system in Houston and also as a person who testified in the lawsuit spearheaded by MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense of Education Fund, which is a counterpart to the NAACP against the Texas education agency and the state board of education in Texas. We fought and lost this federal court case last fall.

Specifically, the plaintiff's case argued that the tenth-grade exit test is having a discriminatory effect on children's future educational and employment opportunities. Despite strong evidence of the test's having an adverse impact, clear bias in the development of the TAAS exam, serious issues with construct and instructional validity of the test, and the court's acknowledgement of a very long history of unequal education for minorities in Texas on January 7, 2000, U.S. District Judge Edward C. Prado nevertheless ruled that the harm against minorities did not reach a constitutional level and concluded that TAAS graduation requirements were "educationally necessary."

I venture to say that the judge's ruling itself is part of a very long history of dismissiveness toward poor and minority communities in the realm of education in Texas. My book, Subtractive Schooling, focuses on this history of neglect.

Beyond this history, an analysis of the actual effects of the TAAS on children's educational experience is of current import, given the alleged Texas miracle. The discussion is also important in light of changing demographics. In the US, as in Texas, minority populations are growing very, very fast.

The TAAS test, like the MCAS, has high-stakes consequences for children. Not passing the high school-level test is a bar to graduation, regardless of the student's accomplishments and the courses that they've passed.

To address this issue, the state has something they refer to as conjunctive criteria, which means that students not only have to pass the test, but they must also maintain a 70 grade point average and attend school a certain number of days annually.

A student's test performance, however, is the decisive hurdle, since it can be offset neither by the other two criteria nor by any other showing of student's abilities, which in my mind, diminishes the actual conjunctiveness of these criteria through a privileging of test score data.

So there are students that have high grades but score below the cutoff score, which is 70 on the TAAS, so they do not get a diploma, and these disparities are more apparent and frequent in Latino and African American populations.

In Texas, minorities are still subject to vastly different learning opportunities. For example, they are in schools with larger percentages of uncertified teachers. There are slightly higher class sizes in Texas, and they are more likely to attend schools with reduced educational offerings, in contrast to those offered by richer Anglo districts in Texas.

Minorities are also placed in the lowest tracks through a sorting process that typically begins during the primary years. There are three tracks in the state of Texas. First, there is the regular curriculum. According to Harriet Romar and Tony Fasbole, this track hardly imparts the skills necessary to pass the TAAS test, much less the requisite skills that students would need for going on to college.

Second, we have an academic curriculum that provides some of the basics students need for college, and, finally, we have an honors track, where minorities are least represented, that provides students with advanced-placement opportunities and adequate preparation for college.

The state produced different figures based on different definitions of the dropout rate, which somehow happens to change virtually every year. But the state in the court case argued that about 16 percent of minorities are not given high school diplomas because of their high school exit tests, even after taking it up to eight times.

Analyses done by Walt Haney show the number to be much higher, 34 percent, and this is based on the cumulative dropout rate, compared those who enter in the freshman year and those who graduate four years later.

Moreover, 85 percent of those who do not pass the test are either African American or Latino. Although minority test scores have gone up since the TAAS was first administered, this is hardly heartening for several reasons, since the test administration also correlates to a higher dropout rate and to higher retention rates. Also, there is evidence of widespread teaching to the test. I should also say that, despite the narrowing of this gap between Anglos and minorities, even with these caveats in mind, the scores of the limited-English-proficient youths are constant and very low, indicating that the English-language nature of the test constitutes a constant barrier.

Texas has a serious dropout problem. It already had a serious dropout problem before the TAAS test. It has a serious problem even before students make it to the end of the tenth grade. One study estimates that between 20 and 25 percent of Mexican Americans who do make it to the end of the tenth grade drop out, in great part because of the test.

There is also a large percentage of students who actually make it to the twelfth grade that are still not getting a high school diploma because of the exit test. There is one Texas education agency report that shows that failing the TAAS test is the second-highest reason chosen for students dropping out of school.

With the TAAS test, the dropout rate went up for minorities in one year, that is, comparing the year before the test was instituted to the year after it was instituted, from a 40 percent dropout rate to a 50 percent dropout rate, and the rate has not declined.

Walt Haney estimates that had the TAAS test not produced that 10 percent increase from 40 to 50 in the dropout rate and remained at 40 percent, an additional 100,000 minority students would have graduated from high school over five years. This high dropout rate is one of the reasons that the TAAS scores have gone up. That is, those students who are most likely to fail the test have dropped out. There was even testimony at the trial by Raymund Viascas who provided evidence that some schools are actually retaining students at the ninth-grade level, so that they don't become tenth-grade test-takers who will lower the school average.

Data prior to 1990 show that retention rates for minority students at the ninth-grade level were at about 10 percent before the test was instituted. After the TAAS test began to be administered, those rates went up to 25 percent. So right now, out of about 1,000 children in the ninth grade, 250 of them have been held back.

I'm going to diverge just a little bit to touch on my study, because what I found was that the school I studied, an inner-city school in Houston, Texas, mirrors state-level data.

In 1992, a full quarter of the freshman class repeated the ninth grade for at least a second time. And a significant portion of these students were repeating the ninth grade a third and fourth time. Teachers referred to them as career ninth graders. Between 1,200 and 1,500 students enter this high school in any given year, and only about 400 students graduate in any given year.

The 3,000-plus student body also experiences serious overcrowding in a school that is designed for 2,600 students. Due to the school's high failure and dropout rates, more than half of the school population, at any given time, is comprised of freshmen. So the school essentially depends on the high dropout rate for the students to physically fit in the school.

According to one TEA report, whites have a 72 percent chance of progressing to the twelfth grade without ever being retained. This contrasts markedly with the probabilities of 46 and 44 percent for African Americans and Latinos, respectively. Retention rates are obviously important, because they correlate to a higher dropout rate.

Now, what we have as of this year is a new state policy on social promotion. This will translate predictably into soaring figures. I just want to summarize a paper that Linda McNeill and I wrote that suggests that one of the main problems is that the curriculum is being narrowed with the teaching to the test that is occurring, particularly in our poorer schools. Although we hear that a lot of our suburban schools are also being affected in this way, and we find that it's really taking too much time away from real learning opportunities, field trips, projects, that tend to make school meaningful and interesting.

What I want to just mention because its effects are fastly approaching and potentially devastating is that in the last Texas state legislature session a "no social promotion" bill was passed. Now what this means is that students who do not pass the third-grade reading TAAS will not be able to go to the fourth grade. Students will be allowed to take it two or three times in a month's period, and they will be able to take remediation courses over the summer months. However, if they still cannot pass the third-grade reading TAAS, they will not be allowed to go to the fourth grade.

This will also occur at the fifth- and eighth-grade levels. And the tenth-grade test is going to be used at the eleventh grade. It's going to become four tests; math, language arts, social studies, and science. So this represents an increase in test-taking from three that are required now to ten--ten TAAS high-stakes tests that children will have to pass over the course of their career if they have any hopes of getting out of high school.

So, from a leap to a gush, we expect massive failures at all of these levels. We are going back, unfortunately--regressing to those days when there were 16- and 17- year-olds in middle school. And now the question will be if they even get that far.

The state's accountability system was originally designed to hold school administrators and teachers accountable, but the main people who are being punished here are the children. There are a lot of other options that we need to be exploring.

For us, in Texas, what is particularly distressing for those of us who have been involved in legal and political and community struggles, what is particularly unfortunate and problematic is that we used to have the courts available to us for redress. It's a historic avenue that's been available to us, and our lack of access to the courts now is in no small part related to the federal court's location within the Fifth Circuit, which positively sanctioned, as you know, the Hopwood decision, and ultimately ended affirmative action in admissions and financial aid in higher education in our state.

We therefore have a sense of urgency. For the first time in Texas history, this past year Latino women registered the greatest number of births compared to any other ethnic group in the State of Texas. This is unprecedented. What we see then is a crashing, a clashing of forces.

On the one hand we have these barriers that are very exclusionary, and on the other hand we have this demographic bubble that will burst onto the scene six years later when these children enroll in our public school system.

Given the predictability of widespread disillusionment with the state's evolving system of accountability, alongside these exclusionary practices of higher education, a clash of competing interests fraught with a frustrated sense of entitlement promises to unfold.

Since the tests are here to stay, as Nicholas Lemann suggests, then I think that they would be more just and humane if they determined the destinies of schools and not the children. Thank you very much. [Applause.]

Linda Nathan

LINDA NATHAN: So, get out your books, get out your pencils--we're going to have a test tonight. I want to acknowledge Jerry Murphy for allowing the writer of one of those "letters to the woodshed" to come forth here, because I was one of those individuals who said to him, "When is Harvard going to get it together to hold a panel that would discuss perhaps the others side?"

I'm very aware of the argued benefits of MCAS. I think everyone in this room is. The Boston Globe has done an incredible job of making sure that we are.

Unfortunately, there's been very little discussion about the cost of such a test, and I appreciate particularly Angela's comments about the cost that Texas has undergone. One of our teachers at the Arts Academy is a Texas escapee, and the last thing he wanted to do when he came to Massachusetts was to administer a test that by his own admission is worse than the TAAS. Welcome to MCAS.

I'm a real advocate of quantitative measures that will help in the evaluation of curriculum in teaching. Much of those I learned here while I was a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. That is not, unfortunately, what I think the MCAS will give us.

I have also given standardized tests much of my professional career, and have found them at times to be a useful tool to compare groups of students or schools. Some useful data certainly comes from standardized tests, but I have never found standardized tests to be useful in understanding how Jose or Maria learns to read or do mathematics. That is something that, as a professionally trained educator, I know how to do, and I don't use standardized tests to help me do.

Standardized tests, I truly believe, are best used to compare groups of students or groups of schools or districts, but never to penalize individual students. If it was just for the SATs, I would never be here today.

How have we gotten to where we've gotten? How has it happened that the MCAS is now a way that we can force bad teachers and bad schools to wake up and work towards real improvement. I question the likelihood of punitive measures ever realizing large gains. To me, it's like the notion of, "If you build more prisons, crime will go down." I don't think that we've proven that at all in the criminal justice arena.

And I'm confused by the notion that, if we test more. schools will improve. However, as we discussed in the Globe, the opportunity for teachers to have the opportunity to teach to high standards is powerful and positive: that is what ed reform promised us in 1993.

How did we get the MCAS out of the Ed Reform Act of 1993? I'm confused. So what changed for me? How did this somewhat progressive sounding educational reform act come to mean a 20-hour high-stakes test? When did we all fall asleep, and get MCAS? Teachers and educators were genuinely pleased with the Ed Reform Act. I won't go into details here, but in many districts it meant that principals would have more control over their schools, parents would have more legislative involvement.

The new law actually talked about multiple ways of assessing student learning. It seemed like a sea change for us. I think the word "portfolio," heaven forbid, is even in the new law. For those of us who had been advocating the use of portfolios and exhibition as another way, not the only way, as another way of assessing student knowledge and skills, we were delighted that policymakers had finally caught up with good practice. The state might actually grant legitimacy to a long-held notion that there are different ways of assessing how students perform complex tasks. Using bubble tests or multiple-choice fill-in-the-blank kinds of tests are one way. There might be others.

Certainly at Fenway, where along with our use of standardized testing we have pioneered graduating students through a series of rigorous portfolio presentations to graduation committees, much the way one coaches a doctoral student for a thesis committee. It looked like our way might become more accepted.

I want to mention that Fenway graduates over 90 percent of its students to go on to college. Probably over 90 percent of our students would fail the MCAS. Our students are testimony to the fact that they are able to do well in the world and well in college without MCAS.

So, we were caught off-guard when we got not a system of assessment, but a 20-hour high-stakes test. However, often things become personal before you'll take action professionally. When I realized my own fourth-grade son would not receive the same rich curriculum that his older brother had received because of the time spent on prepping for and then taking the MCAS, my husband and I decided on home schooling for three and a half weeks, not an easy decision. And I know some of you in the audience joined us.

This was the most difficult decision of my professional career. I faced a dilemma. I knew if this test was bad for my child, how could I possibly administer it to other peoples' children? Boston Arts Academy was in its first year. We gave MCAS. Some students chose not to take it. Most parents decided that the best thing to do was to politically organize to try to change the current legislation. The parents are still actively involved in that activity, as is our board.

I want to invite you into our school. I want you to see for a moment what MCAS will do to a school like the Boston Arts Academy. We are a school for the visual and performing arts. Students study a minimum of 12 hours a week in their art major. They also take writing, humanities, math, science, and world languages. Our curriculum is integrated in the sciences. Concepts from biology, physics, and chemistry are taught each year. Math is also integrated, with concepts from Algebra I, Algebra II, geometry, statistics, and probability taught each year in increasing difficulty, not subdivided as we have in a traditional sort of layer-cake approach.

Our math curriculum, the interactive math program, has recently been praised as one of the 15 exemplary curricula in the United States by Secretary of Education Riley. However, in that curriculum are students who will be ready for the MCAS at the end of the eleventh grade. I can guarantee what their scores will look like if they have to take the test in the tenth grade. They won't do well. They haven't covered the material. Should we throw out one of the 15 best math curriculums in the country because of a state-mandated test? I don't think so.

Our humanities curriculum combines history and English and the arts. This year our ninth graders spent the first semester studying World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. They presented a very moving, historically accurate theater piece about that time period. Last Wednesday and Thursday, our students, ninth graders, finished their three-month study of ancient Africa and celebrated their hard work in a wonderful exhibition called "Africa Lives."

I had the opportunity to visit the civilizations of the Cush, the Congo, Shanghai, Mali, Zimbabwe, and Egypt. Our students made historical, cultural, political, and economic studies of not one, but six of these civilizations, and created time lines, wall posters, living spaces, temples, and ceremonial courts from these time periods. They became real individuals or representations of historic figures. They also learned traditional African dances, songs, and music and performed for the entire school, as well as their families. It was an unbelievable experience for our school.

We had a similar experience with our tenth graders, who did an exhibition about ancient China, combining arts and academics in their study of the various dynasties. However, the tenth-grade history MCAS has nothing to do with depth of knowledge. Our students are penalized.

If we were to teach solely for the MCAS at BAA, it would not be a school that I would want my own children to go to. The irony is, I've invited Princeton Review to come in and provide MCAS prep for our school. According to Princton, and they're good at studying tests, the test has very little to do with content. It's about learning the tricks. This is indeed a quandary for our school.

I am not here arguing for zero accountability, far from it. I am an advocate of using data, quantitative data, to make decisions about teaching and how to structure one's school. However, think about the best independent schools you know; they would never allow this kind of test through their front doors. Something so massive, with such high stakes attached, so disconnected from their curriculum, something that takes decision-making from the hands of those who know the students best, the teachers. Suddenly the state is making decisions about who can graduate or not. "You can't pass the MCAS; you can't get a diploma." Even worse, you can't go to a public college.

So if you have money and you don't pass, you can still go to a private college, but our most vulnerable students in the Commonwealth will be stuck. We want accountability, and many of our schools need much more assistance to become true places of learning, but is the MCAS the answer? The MCAS certainly set out to right a wrong by insuring that all students would be tested equally, and thus the premise was provided with the same curriculum. There is some logic to that argument.

If Weston and Boston have the same tests, and thus by inference the same curriculum, they will have the same opportunities to learn. But will a test ensure that students in Weston and my students in Boston gain equal skills? Weston spends well over $14,000 per student. In Boston, we have about $5,800 per student. Is the MCAS equalizing the playing field?

I doubt that art and music and physical education, calculus, physics, and foreign languages and other electives have been slashed as drastically in Weston as in Boston. I doubt that the physical plants in Weston look anything like the schools I've been in in Boston. I doubt the libraries are as understaffed or the shelves as empty in Weston as in Boston. Does testing equalize this playing field?

And, again, I return to an earlier question: must we test all students to achieve equality? If we want to know the disparity between children in Boston and the suburbs, we need only test a few students to demonstrate the inequities. Why penalize the many?

I understand the state's desire to have a role in accountability. I would support that the state should ensure minimal competency in English and mathematics on an MCAS-type test. These two areas are more generally agreed upon as the foundation for much other learning. However, I firmly believe that the current high-stakes mania swirling around our young people in this Commonwealth will hurt us all. I know it will hurt my students at the Boston Arts Academy and my own children. I fear that our good intentions have definitely gone awry, and it is our collective responsibility to reexamine this current state mania and ask: "Is this the only way to create education reform?"

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