The Test of Their Lives

By Jodie Morse

For Lajoi Moore, the past year has been all about The Test. She started preparing last summer with a six-week Kaplan test-prep course, in which she took mock exams and brushed up on test-taking strategies. Since then, she has dedicated part of each afternoon--and nearly all her Christmas vacation--to writing practice essays and memorizing 150 vocabulary words on flash cards. In the final days before the test, she stepped up her studying regimen, cramming sometimes until after midnight. And when the big day arrived last week, Lajoi took a lucky rabbit's foot to the test along with her No. 2 pencils. "If I don't do well, it would just be frightening to me," she says. "I won't be able to get into college."

It's a little early for that kind of worry. Lajoi is only 10, and the test she was fretting about is the FCAT, or Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, given to the state's fourth-, fifth-, eighth- and 10th-graders last week. While poor FCAT scores won't keep her out of college just yet, they could hold Lajoi back from fifth grade.

Florida grade-schoolers aren't the only ones sweating new standardized tests these days. With President Clinton's proposal for national reading and math tests shelved by Congress, states are rushing to roll out comprehensive tests of their own. In the past two years, some 20 states have unveiled custom-made exams intended to hold students (and their schools) to higher educational standards. What's more, unlike the old-style multiple-choice exams, in which lucky guesses often padded scores, tests in more and more states now include subjective "performance questions" that ask students to craft essays and show their work on math problems. What's at stake in these new breeds of tests can be everything from a school's accreditation to teachers' bonuses to a student's high school diploma.

The high stakes, educators hope, will translate into high scores. That has apparently been the case in Texas, which has long used its Texas Assessment of Academic Skills to tag schools that are low performers. Five years ago, just over half the state's students passed all the components of the TAAS; last year more than three-quarters did. During his campaign for re-election, Governor George W. Bush vowed to up the ante by holding back students who fail the TAAS. Says Bush: "In Texas we have found that when you raise the bar, people rise to the challenge."

In many states, the tests have sparked worry about the number of students who aren't measuring up. Virginia's board of education disclosed last month that nearly 98% of the state's schools failed to meet suggested accreditation minimums on the new Standards of Learning test, though many educators claim the test was unfair because it was not geared specifically to school curriculums. In Massachusetts, which introduced its exam last spring, more than 80% of fourth-graders got a failing score or a "needs improvement" in English; half of all 10th-graders failed the math portion of the test. Governor Paul Cellucci calls the performance "unacceptable." Maybe so, but it's not surprising, says Harvard lecturer S. Paul Reville. "We were having difficulty reaching lower standards, and now we've raised the bar by a factor of 25% to 30%."

Has the bar been raised too high? Some teachers and parents complain that the tests are too exhaustive--and exhausting--for young students. The Massachusetts test clocked in at 16 hours, spread over several weeks. Tina Yalen, an eighth-grade civics teacher, gave her opinion of the Virginia test: "Some of it looked like Trivial Pursuit to me." More worrisome is how a 10-year-old will react if his or her result is branded with a scarlet F. Says Harvard's Reville: "An overload of negative feedback runs the risk that students are going to shut down and not make an effort in the future."

This could be especially true of disadvantaged students, who routinely score much lower on these tests. "If you give me the income tax returns of all the students being tested," says Kitty Kelly Epstein, who teaches education at California's Holy Names College, "I could predict how they would score and save millions of dollars." Well-off New York City parents hire tutors to give their kids a leg up, while poorer students depend on the goodwill of teachers generous enough to tutor them after school.

Many teachers rave about the high-stakes exams, contending that they have galvanized students. But other teachers find themselves forsaking important lessons simply to "teach for the test." Even in North Carolina, whose soaring scores earned accolades in Clinton's State of the Union address, some teachers tailor upwards of 80% of their lessons to the test, according to a University of North Carolina survey. "Teachers must go way beyond textbook instruction," says Felicita Santiago, principal of a Brooklyn public elementary school, where teachers came in an hour before school to help kids get ready for the exam. "Preparing for the test is a whole shift in methods of instruction."

Another problem is the piecemeal way in which these tests are developed, with no attempt to coordinate them nationally. Last month Achieve Inc., a bipartisan resource center on standards, was host to a conference in Washington, where representatives from 20 states pledged to work toward a shared national standard by offering uniform exam questions. In the meantime, students like Lajoi probably have less to worry about than the people in charge of teaching them. The Maryland board of education has just targeted three elementary schools in Prince George's County for state takeover because of poor test results. And the county's school board voted not to renew the contract of its superintendent.

--With reporting by Melissa August and Ann Blackman/Washington, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Georgia Harbison/New York and Laird Harrison/Oakland

With reporting by Melissa August and Ann Blackman/Washington, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Georgia Harbison/New York and Laird Harrison/Oakland