President Obama, You are Mistaken!

Recently President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan stated that teachers should be evaluated on the basis of their student's test scores. Both agreed with the Bush administration that schools should be evaluated on the basis of test scores. They are both wrong!

Standardized testing has spun out of control. Large numbers of children are not prepared to take these tests due to their poverty-stricken back grounds and limited English language skills.

"Poor children are much more likely [than middle-class children] to suffer developmental delay or damage," says Ruby Payne in her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty.

Policy Analysis for California Education agrees. In 1999 it reported, "Poor children are two or three years behind their more affluent peers on several measures long before their first year of school."

In 2000, poverty was defined by Julian Palmer at Columbia University as a family of four earning $17,524 a year. According to 1998 figures from Columbia, the United states leads the industrialized world in child poverty.

Twenty-five percent of children under 18 and 33% of Latino children live in poverty and Edsourse reports that 42 percent of California's 6.4 million K-12 students are Latino.

"Well off white kids continue to outperform their disadvantaged or minority peers, often by sizable margin," says a January 2002 article in U.S. News and World Report.

California's Star program test scores reveal this sad reality and little else. Scores reflect almost perfectly the socioeconomic status of the children who are tested. And despite this knowledge, teachers are being pushed to the limit to raise test scores. It has become the political and administrative mantra in California: Teachers, raise those test scores!

In California in 2001, we tested 4.5 million kids in grades 2 through 11.


When the API scores were analyzed, I was shocked to find that in the bottom 10 percent of API schools, 86 percent of the students were poor while in the top 10 percent of schools, only 7 percent came from impoverished backgrounds. In the bottom 10 percent of schools, 46 percent of the students were English language learners whereas in the top 10 percent, only 2.6 percent had to overcome language difficulties.

Now let's take a look at the reality of testing and what it is doing to our schools.

The SAT-9 test, the major component of the STAR test, is a norm-referenced test. That means no matter how the 4.5 million kids score, there will be a top 50 percent and a bottom 50 percent. Half the kids and half the teachers lose no matter what!

A series of news articles by Sarah Tully Tapia, Keith Sharon and Ronald Campbell in the Orange County Register, citing research that API scores have a 20-point margin of error. Despite this, schools have been put on the list of under performing schools on the basis of one point.

The reporters also wrote, "students who traditionally score lower, African Americans and special education students, are excluded [from the API results in their school] at a higher rate than white and Asian students."

James Fleming, superintendent of Capistrano Unified School District, excluded 1,259 students of the district's 3,201 from his district's API scores.

One year a school in San Bernardino County raised its test scores by 102 points. The next year its scores dropped by 105 points. This is not uncommon.

As the Public Policy Institute of California revealed in 2000, "Much of the variation in {STAR} test scores among urban, suburban, and rural schools that appear in raw data can be accounted for by variation in students' socioeconomic status and school resources."

A strong case can be made that these STAR Test results are totally invalid, yet they are driving public education in California. Despite the fact that 50 percent of the students will always score in the bottom 50 percent, teachers are threatened with repercussions if they don't raise the test scores when it is virtually impossible to do so. In this testing system, the rule is if someone goes up, someone else must go down. We already know who will be at the bottom.

We must reform this testing nightmare. We must have tests that are aligned with textbooks and curriculum. We must have a criterion-referenced test. Then if 100 percent of the kids scored in the top10 percent, that is what would be reported. We must do away with a system that requires 50 percent of kids to score in the bottom 50 percent of the test scores.


Please Mr. President, study standardized testing before you endorse it!