Test Drive

By Jodie Morse With Reporting by Dan Cray/Oxnard

For the past seven years, Sam Camacho has taught language arts at Robert J. Frank Intermediate School in Oxnard, Calif., an oceanside community an hour north of Los Angeles. He has coached the boys' basketball team for nearly as long. Lately his two roles seem oddly interchangeable.

Camacho began one recent eighth-grade class by brandishing a page of the morning's Los Angeles Times, which listed the latest standardized-test scores of all the schools in the state. "This is a competition," he told his students. "What you see here is like a box score in the sports section." The school had a sorry record for the third year in a row, ranking in the bottom 20% in the state. But Camacho now has a new playbook. He spent the previous afternoon at a tutorial paid for by the school as part of a $10,500 package designed by Kaplan, the test-prep company that, for the past half-century or so, has taught students how to beat the SAT. From now on, his students will spend 50 minutes a week in his class and another 50 in math studying Kaplan's Test-Taking Strategies manual. The approach appeals to the coach in Camacho. "This class is my team, and this is the equipment they need to win this game," he explains. "What better strategy is there?"

By now, state high-stakes exams have become a fact of life in the American classroom. Less noticed is the growing presence--and power--of firms like Kaplan that teach students and their teachers how to master them. The companies, which have spent decades deflating the mystique of the sat, take a similar tack with the grade-school exams. They maintain that test taking, like telling time or double-knotting a shoelace, is a "life skill" that every child can learn and no youngster should go without. Says Jeff McCullough, Kaplan's director of training and development: "Kids who have done well...are suddenly slapped with a challenge that is so foreign to them that they underperform just because of the strangeness of the task."

Schools have needed little convincing. The market for K-12 test-prep services for state exams, which was almost insignificant three years ago, is now a booming $50 million arena dominated by familiar names such as Kaplan, The Princeton Review and tutoring powerhouse Sylvan Learning Centers, which last year launched a $900 test-prep course for students as young as those in third grade. These testing giants have been joined by hundreds of new, small-time firms that often have little to recommend them beyond their own breathless promises of higher scores. The demand will only grow with the law signed by President Bush on Jan. 8 that requires annual testing in reading and math in Grades 3 through 8 by 2005; a provision in the law also pledges up to $1,000 a child in chronically low-scoring schools, for tutoring and test training.

The reach of coaching firms is already long. In the three years since The Princeton Review created its grade-school division, it has signed contracts with schools in 25 states. The company now sells more than 500 guidebooks to state exams and sprinkles test-taking tips ("Many problems can be solved without much calculating") throughout 36 different textbooks published by McGraw-Hill. In the summer of 2000 it launched Homeroom.com an online bank of more than 120,000 practice questions, which helps teachers pinpoint their students' strengths and weak spots. Like its competitor Kaplan, The Princeton Review offers workshops to help teachers tailor their daily lessons to state exams. The firm's latest offering: a $1,950 primer for parents on test-taking skills that, among other things, instructs them to serve an extra-large breakfast on test day because "it's better to take an exam bloated than on an empty stomach." A school's annual tab for teacher and student coaching can easily top $20,000.

In the harsh calculus of public-school budgets, that means electives like PE or chorus could be the first to go. In inner-city schools, the cuts can be even less kind. For Deborah Holmes, the principal at Jefferson Junior High School, just a few blocks southwest of the U.S. Capitol, the choice was between buying more computers and doing something to raise her students' scores. In the end, Holmes opted for a $21,000 contract with The Princeton Review, reasoning that her students would become more computer literate by spending much of their time taking online practice exams. "We'll buy the computers another year," she sighs.

Other sacrifices may not be so easily recouped. Critics, including some classroom teachers, contend that many test-prep activities--such as skimming instead of reading passages or speedily filling in bubble sheets--do nothing to really expand brainpower or knowledge. For example, a Kaplan guide to the writing section of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills counsels students not to dwell on spelling and punctuation: "If you write a deeply moving essay with atrocious grammar, you might still get a...passing score." Says Walt Haney, a testing expert at Boston College: "My main worry is that students will learn how to take tests but not how to think." Maria Aguilar, an eighth-grader at Robert J. Frank, shares the concern: "It's kind of boring; they go over the same thing so many times."

The complaints boiled over when Kaplan's McCullough visited Robert J. Frank Intermediate School in mid-January for a teacher-training session. The audience of 50 teachers, many already intimately familiar with the Kaplan regimen, stayed silent throughout his 45-minute spiel. "This book is horrible," eighth-grade language-arts teacher Charles Manley told him afterward. "When you're doing the language section, you're taught to first eliminate two of the possibilities, leaving two left. That's leverage, not learning." His colleague Jamie French tells of jettisoning Greek and Roman mythology to make room for three weeks of test prep. The teachers draw little sympathy from principal Ron D'Incau, who has fielded angry calls from parents demanding to know why test scores remain so low. "Some teachers want to teach things that are nice to teach but aren't really standards," says D'Incau. "You might teach a tremendous unit on dinosaurs, but nothing in the standards calls for knowledge of dinosaurs, so you have to take it out."

It might be easier to give up the stegosaurs if the school were not still flailing. After one year of Kaplan, its scores have increased 45 points--three times the state-mandated 15-point gain--but it remains dead last in its county. The problem is that there is no solid evidence so far that this kind of preparation makes kids dependable test takers, let alone good learners. One minuscule study of five schools in Houston that used The Princeton Review's Homeroom.com found that fourth-graders who used the online assessments improved their scores twice as much as nonusers--but that study was conducted by the company itself.

Many schools are desperate to try anything. Late last spring, Durfee High School in Fall River, Mass., signed a $28,000 deal with TestU, an online test-prep newcomer, to help its students prepare for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam. Though test scores improved only slightly in their short time on the system, Durfee renewed the deal for the entirety of this year. "It's not an exact science," says the school's assistant principal Jackie Proulx. "But, by golly, every intervention we can use we will."

--With reporting by Dan Cray/Oxnard