High-stakes questions

NEA Today, Mar 2003 by Jehlen, Alain

Do high-stakes tests boost student achievement?

Can good schools be labeled 'low-performing"?

Which of the following is true?

(a)If the President of the United States says a school is great, it won't be put on a list of failing schools.

(b) If the U.S. Department of Education says a school is exemplary, it won't be put on a list of failing schools.

(c) If a school is succeeding in imparting both factual information and critical thinking skills to a diverse student body, it won't be put on a list of failing schools.

(d) A nationwide scientific experiment conducted over two decades has shown that high-stakes tests do not improve student achievement.

You won't be graded on this, but it's a very high-stakes question, because the new federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) mandates a testing regime that impacts every school.

"Every teacher knows tests have a role to play," says NEA Student Achievement Director Stephanie Fanjul. "Teachers use tests all the time, including standardized tests. We want to be sure our students are learning and growing. But there are lots of ways that we collect that information, not just tests. Almost never does a bubble sheet reflect back the breadth of what a child understands. When tests are punitive, all the attention is focused on the scores. That doesn't help us educate our children."

So now let's try to answer our question. Let's see.. as experienced test takers, we know we can improve our chances by eliminating clearly wrong answers. This is an open-Web test, so let's do some research.

Checking out (a), we learn that President Bush, touring the country last May to promote the new federal education law, stopped at Vandenberg Elementary School in Southfield, Michigan, and said, "This is a successful school... This school doesn't quit on kids, and that's why it's heralded for its excellence." A few weeks later, Vandenberg found itself on the Michigan low-performing schools list.

For (b), we discover that USA Today found 19 U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon exemplary schools on low-performing lists.

Let's try (c). We investigate Hart Middle School in Rochester Hills, Michigan, a vibrant learning environmentand a Blue Ribbon winner. It, too, did not escape the lowperformer list (see "Blue Ribbon or Below Par?" page 9).

That leaves (d), which seems the least likely answerexcept that it's true.

Scientists at Arizona State University announced last December results of the most comprehensive study ever conducted of high-stakes testing. High-stakes testing, they concluded, does not improve student achievement.

The Arizona researchers took advantage of the fact that a giant experiment on high-stakes tests had been inadvertently conducted for the last 20 years: 28 states adopted high-stakes tests, while the others did not.

So the scientists posed a simple question: How did student achievement change when states put on the highstakes pressure? Did students in high-stakes states improve more or less than students in the states that left student assessment mostly to local educators?

For an answer, the researchers looked at results on several national tests, including the reading and math tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which are given to random samples of students under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education and are widely accepted as the nation's best measure of achievement. The Arizona scientists also looked at SAT, ACT, and Advanced Placement scores. "The data presented in this study suggest that after the implementation of high-stakes tests, nothing much happens," researchers Audrey Amrein and David Berliner reported. "No consistent effects across states were noted. Scores seemed to go up or down in a random pattern."

There was actually a small tendency for states that adopted high-stakes testing to improve less on national tests than states that avoided the high-stakes pressure. But in most high-stakes testing states, the public impression has been that the tests work. That's because scores on the high-stakes tests themselves generally did improve, so state officials were able to claim success.

But the higher scores were apparently due to the enormous amounts of time and effort that schools poured into teaching the content and exact wording patterns that students would see on those particular tests. The improvement did not carry over into better performance on other tests of the same general content-they did not reflect real gains in learning.

MORE DROP-OUTS

In a second study, the Arizona researchers studied what happened to drop-out rates and graduation rates when states adopted high-stakes graduation tests.

The results were disturbing. Graduation rates fell. Drop-out rates rose.

Further investigation revealed that the reason wasn't just that students got discouraged or fled the pressure. The researchers found that some administrators encouraged low-achieving students to leave school, probably to improve their schools' scores.