Chicago media ignore findings...

National study debunks high stakes tests as way to improve public schools

By George N. Schmidt

A massive study supervised by one of the nation’s most highly respected educational researchers has challenged virtually every assertion made on behalf of the proposition that high-stakes testing — of the kind used in Chicago since 1995 and now promoted by federal law through the “No Child Left Behind Act” — improves public schools.

Moreover, the two reports of the study charge that the increasing reliance on high-stakes tests as the main vehicle for promoting what business leaders and politicians call “school reform” actually harms schools by turning classrooms into test-prep factories and by forcing schools to increase the number of dropouts from among students likely to bring scores “down.”

“The high-stakes testing policies adopted by many states and the new annual student testing required by the federal government in the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation may be counter productive, according to two studies conducted by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University for the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, a Michigan-based, think tank,” declared a December 28 press release announcing the publication of the two studies by Audrey L. Amrein and David C. Berliner.

“The impact high-stakes tests and high school graduation exams have on academic achievement is, at best, ambiguous,” Audrey Amrein, one of the two authors of the study, states in the press release. “Contrary to popular thought, high-stakes tests do not increase academic achievement. Instead, after states implement high-stakes tests, academic achievement continues to look much like it did before high-stakes tests were implemented. In addition, negative or unintended consequences emerge as students, teachers, and schools attempt to reconcile learning and the attachment of serious consequences to test performance.”

Amrein’s co-author, David Berliner, adds: “The relative failure of high-stakes tests to achieve their intended purpose and their numerous negative consequences must be considered as America prepares to launch a massive testing program in the effort to improve our schools.”

Berliner and Amrein collected data from 28 states where high-stakes testing programs are already in place. Such programs include tests that students must pass in order to advance to the next grade and graduation tests that students must pass in order to receive a high school diploma, regardless of their performance in the classroom.

Summary of reports

In the first report, “The Impact of High-Stakes Tests on Student Academic Performance,” the authors were “interested in whether gains most of those states have noted on their tests would transfer to other, independent exams taken by wider groups of students,” Education Week explains.

“ They found that, after adopting their new testing policies, 19 of the 28 states saw decreases in 4th grade mathematics scores on the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress when compared with the national average,” Education Week reports. “On the 8th grade NAEP math tests, 18 states gained against the national norm.”

“ States were more evenly split on the NAEP 4th grade reading test, with 14 states showing gains compared with national trends. On the SAT and ACT college- entrance tests, twice as many of the states slipped relative to the national average as gained. Likewise, trends in Advanced Placement tests were worse than the national average in 16 of the 28 states,” Education Week summarizes.

“ The data presented in this study suggests that after the implementation of high-stakes tests, nothing much happens,” the report concludes. “Students are learning the content of the state-administered tests and perhaps little else.”

“ For the second study, ‘An Analysis of Some Uninteded and Negative Consequences of High-Stakes Testing,’” Education Week reports, “the researchers focused on 16 of the 18 states that have made passing such tests a requirement for high school graduation. In most of those states, they found that dropout rates increased, graduation rates declined, and the rates at which younger people took General Educational Development exams went up after the policies took effect. Based on those figures, as well as anecdotal evidence from the states, the authors contend that schools might be forcing out students who could drag down aggregate test scores.”

“ In my mind, the take-home message of these reports is that high-stakes accountability is not a sure-fire method of improving student achievement,” Gregory J. Camilli, a professor of educational measurement and statistics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., who reviewed the reports, told Education Week.

The pro-testing faction disagrees with the findings

Education Week reported that “Chester E. Finn, Jr., the president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration, disagreed. He is skeptical of the findings, he said, in part because of Mr. Berliner’s previously vocal opposition to high-stakes testing.”

“ Moreover,” Mr. Finn told Education Week, “that study did a weak job—in part because it’s impossible to do a good job—of controlling for the zillion other policy changes under way in those states during the period they were seeking to gauge the effects of high-stakes testing.”