Testing dissidents: School leaders go public with their concerns over the harm of highstakes tests - education

School Administrator, Dec, 2001 by Paul Riede

In Whitefish Bay, Wis., where many of the parent protests originated, Superintendent James Rickabaugh and his board placed the state tests on the bottom of its list of criteria. The tests will come into play only if a student has not passed the required courses, posted a minimum grade-point average or elicited favorable teacher recommendations.

Demographic Distinctions

Whitefish Bay, like Tamalpais, Scarsdale and many of the other schools and districts marked by protests, is relatively wealthy and high performing. Indeed, it is the districts that excel on such exams that have produced the loudest protests against them.

There are several reasons for that. Many educators say protests from low-performing districts would be summarily dismissed as attempts by bad schools to avoid accountability. In addition, some urban educators say they welcome the focusing effect of the exams, which clearly direct teachers and staff to concentrate on the basic skills many urban children have failed to master.

"it's helping us do a better job of buying textbooks and resource materials where previously it was just almost purchasing things because you liked it or it felt right," says Walter Burt, superintendent in Pontiac, Mich. "It also enables us to do a better job of enriching the skills of our teachers when we see that there are areas where our students are nor doing well."

Where Burt parts company with the pro-test politicians is in the way the scores are reported by the state and published in newspapers. The constant, unsurprising news that poor, urban students score worse than their wealthier suburban counterparts is a continual drain on staff and student morale and parent confidence, he says.

"We have many parents who say, 'Well, God, I've got to get my kids out of this school district. I've got to move across the street,'" Burt says.

Some urban educators have campaigned actively against the tests. Ann Cook, principal of the Urban Academy high school in Manhattan, is co-leader of a 28-school coalition of alternative schools across New York that sued the state over its must-pass Regents exams in August.

The schools, created as options for children who were not thriving in traditional settings, had been excused from Regents exams until a ruling earlier this year removed the exemption. In its suit, the New York Performance Standards Coalition accused the state of being arbitrary in that ruling.

Cook says the mandate would drastically alter the curricula at the schools--many of which have impressive graduation and college placement rates--and turn them into the same test-preparation institutions their students fled in the first place.

"It's bureaucratic mandates gone mad," she says.

The state argues that if the schools are so effective, students should have no problem passing the Regents exams.

Meier's Lament

In Boston, nationally known educator Deborah Meier has made no secret of her disdain for the testing required by her state. Eighty-five percent of the parents at her K-8 Mission Hill School apparently agreed with her, withholding their children from the state exams administered last spring.