Could adults today pass high-stakes math?

School Administrator, June, 2004 by Dennis L. Recker

A disconcerting pattern is emerging in the way our elected officials have chosen to hold public schools accountable.

Legislators have acted by imposing new statewide proficiency tests that are intended to "raise the bar" and tend to accompany such actions with chiding statements about "no excuses." They expect more and offer us less flexibility.

Ohio is in the midst of all this, having spent time, energy and considerable money to craft the Ohio Graduation Test. As in most states, the gatekeeper of all student testing is the mathematics examination. Ohio is creating a 10th grade math test to mirror what students will supposedly need to be able to function in society, especially in their future workplaces. Wisely, our state leadership field-tested the proposed exams to determine their effectiveness.

When our school district's field test results were provided last spring, I was distraught about the performance of our sophomore class. Where had my students and teachers erred in their learning and instruction? The results were horrendous.

I studied each student's performance to compare the field-test results to our students' historical showing on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the ACT mathematics test. The fact that our students have performed well on the Iowa and ACTs only raised more questions about the state's mathematics prototype.

Liberty-Benton serves 1,350 students in a mostly rural community in northwestern Ohio, with an annual college-bound population ranging from 65 to 80 percent. This year's senior class has an average score of 24 on ACT mathematics, and the top two-thirds of the graduates rank within the top third nationally of college-bound seniors in math. These measures didn't reflect the results on the Ohio Graduation Test prototype.

A Public Testing

Was Ohio trying to make a political statement about demanding high standards? Would the results end up increasing student failure rates, feeding the belief of some that public schools indeed were failing? Had state officials created a test that truly reflected student learning or had they created a math exam with such unreasonably high expectations that even working adults could not pass ?

If this math test was trying to assess what every student completing 10th grade should know on a day-to-day basis in their post-school lives, perhaps the best group to test would be the parents in our community who ought to be using the same math in their daily lives. That's what political leaders at the national and state levels have been telling us as they attempt to legislate improvement through more testing.

I asked parents of our current freshman class to sit for the same exam that had been administered to our students a few months earlier. Seventy-seven parents participated in the test-taking. Sixty percent of the parents held four-year college degrees or higher; 30 percent had high school diplomas or two-year associate degrees. These parents' children will be the first required to pass the test for graduation.

We placed the adults in a test situation to see if we were failing to provide appropriate mathematics instruction for our students. Surely this highly educated parent group would excel on a 10th grade math exam that measures competency on day-to-day math skills. That's not what we found after scoring the tests.

The mean percentage for our adults was 61.4 percent correct response rate. Those parents holding bachelor's degrees and higher produced a 71.9 average score and the remaining parents averaged a 38.2 percent score. One might conclude that the latter parents are either poor employees due to their lack of math skills or the state prototype was based on flawed assumptions about math skills currently used in the workplace.

The proposed cut-off score needed for graduation was 58 percent, meaning that 20 of the 77 adults, or 37 percent, would not be considered proficient and could not graduate, were they students today.

We asked the participating parents to tell us about their test-taking experiences in a short open-ended survey. Of the 24 written responses, two were favorable. Their insights about the test's relevancy were revealing. One adult stated, "I teach apprentices and this is on par for what we expect of our tool and die, electricians and skilled trades people. This would be expected of about 100 of over 2,000 hourly employees." Another stated: "This is fine for students with higher grade levels, but for those with learning disabilities or who struggle, this test would be impossible."

A Dose of Sanity

As educational leaders, we are chastised by political leaders to "get on the train." It's more difficult, however, to jump off when the train races out of control. When we are faced with a "manufactured educational crisis" and the ensuing political "cures," a dose of sanity goes a long way toward helping good schools evolve into great schools.

To involve the community as we did is worthwhile because it shows the harmful impact of high-stakes testing on the children we serve.