The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing by

There is another route that can be taken to get students off the official roles. That is by encouraging them to enter G. E. D. (General Education Degree) programs. K. W. Arenson, reporting in the New York Times⁴⁷ notes that this program is growing and removes weak students from school accountability programs:

….nationally teenagers accounted for 49 percent of those earning G.E.D.'s in 2002, up from 33 percent a decade earlier. The growth has been especially pronounced in New York City. Last year, more than 37,000 school-age students were in G.E.D. programs run by the school system, up from 25,500 two years earlier.

Experts attribute the flood of young people in part to.…the increased difficulty of earning a traditional high school diploma in many states. New York, for example, has made passing five Regents exams a condition of graduation, and no longer offers a lesser diploma for weaker students.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law and state efforts to hold schools more accountable, schools have more incentive to discourage weak students from staying. Students who transfer to G.E.D. programs are usually off school rolls, but in many states are not counted as dropouts.

Mr. Chaplin, of the Urban Institute, said he had “found pretty strong evidence that the G.E.D. option has been encouraging kids to drop out of high schools nationwide. The rules governing the G.E.D. have become more lenient over time,” he said. “Under No Child Left Behind, we're holding schools very strictly accountable for test scores, but barely holding them accountable for students who drop out or go into G.E.D. programs. It is like holding hospitals accountable for the condition of patients who leave, but ignoring the number who die. It's a perverse incentive system.”

Article 27 in this table makes an important point about the curriculum imposed by high-stakes testing for Native Americans. Not only is the curriculum narrowed to focus on the tests, an issue we discuss below, but the curriculum is culturally irrelevant to the students it is supposed to educate. In an era in which our nation is trying to teach teachers to use culturally relevant pedagogy with Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos, teachers feel forced by high-stakes testing pressures into designing curricula that is boring and alien to many of their students. What our policy is doing, then, is driving out these students with a test-oriented curriculum and abandoning the kind of culturally relevant curriculum that might keep them in school. This will have the effect of driving up the already high dropout rates for students from other cultures. The flip side, of course, is the scores in the schools and districts go up when students leave, making it especially difficult to persuade school personnel to address this issue since it is to their benefit to drive these students out.

Articles 29 and 30 illustrate a different kind of problem: The need to test has replaced the need to care, a corruption of the traditional role of teachers. In these horrific cases students are not forced out of school, they are forced to stay in and endure a system that is cruel to them. In both these cases we see the problems that occur when laws are written by policy makers a long distance from the places where the laws must be administered. Under high-stakes testing programs these students are being hurt while teachers and administrators are made complicit in the acts of cruelty. The interpretation of the rules for testing seems particularly harsh and bureaucratic in Florida. The South Florida Sun Sentinel reports on the state’s zero excuse policy for children, who must take the test in spite of frightful emotional trauma or face being held back a grade.⁴⁸ For example, no flexibility in test procedures was allowed for a 14-year-old child who lost her brother to a shooting and was still mourning; or for the 15-year-old who had previously found his father hanged in their home and suffered anxiety attacks from that event. In fear that students and their parents would take advantage of any leniency in the rules, the school system and all the personnel in it become oppressors of some of the children.

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In some schools that are trying to make Adequate Yearly Progress, these students get all the schools’ attention, including special tutoring. The students who are performing less well academically are score suppressors—they get no resources.

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t appears to us that the most important problem emerging from reading these stories is the loss of humanity that high-stakes testing produces. Not just in the treatment of the special education students and those with special psychological problems, but also in the treatment of poor, immigrant, and minority children who are likely to be score suppressors not score increasers. Teachers and administrators are beginning to treat the score suppressors and the score increasers in the same way that children on the playground treat them. When forming teams in baseball, basketball, and track, the score increasers (the best hitters, shooters, and runners) are the ones who are picked first. Those perceived as the score suppressors are picked last, or are not picked at all. They endure a public humiliation. Now the same incentive system is found inside the classroom. Some schools and districts are treating the academically weak among their students as pariahs. They are to be discarded or labeled in some way so as not to take the tests and bring down the average.

This problem was made obvious in a story carried by The Los Angeles Times.⁴⁹ It discusses the “cusp” kids—those almost at the point of passing the high-stakes test, perhaps needing a little extra teaching time to help them to pass. In some schools that are trying to make Adequate Yearly Progress, these students get all the schools’ attention, including special tutoring. The students who are performing less well academically are score suppressors—they get no resources. The schools have effectively written them off. The story makes clear that the increased importance of achievement indictors has taken away some of the humanity of these educators. This can also be seen in some of the stories in Table 3, such as those summarized in Articles 37 and 40.

In a set of stories we found about the gifted we discovered how they too are ignored or treated simply as score increasers, rather than sentient students with their own ambitions. For example, in Arizona the gifted in some schools are written off because their scores, like those of the least able, are so predictable. It is the cusp students who get the schools’ attention. Thus in high schools that must confront high-stakes exit exams, special instruction for the gifted is often ignored.⁵⁰ But in Arizona, perhaps elsewhere, the gifted are not totally ignored. Because they are score increasers they sometimes are ill-treated. Schools and districts in need of higher scores talk their most talented students into taking the high-stakes high school exit exam over and over again, after they pass it!⁵¹ This, of course raises school and district scores, though it wastes a students’ time. It would appear that students are less important than their test scores.

Still another problem concerning the score increasers, the academically talented in a school, was revealed by The Wall Street Journal.⁵² They reported on an Ohio sixth grader who was in a gifted program but his scores on the state’s high-stakes test were never counted in the school he attended, a school for the gifted. Instead, his scores were credited to the neighborhood school he does not attend so the average score of that school could go up. If no “credit” was given to the local schools, the local schools might not identify any students as gifted, fearing that they might lose the student to a school with a gifted program. Apparently such “credit” systems exist in Missouri and Iowa, where their schools also fear losing their high scorers to another school. The scores of the gifted become something to negotiate over, and if credit were not given such students might never be identified as gifted at all! As we saw with the least able students, the score, not the child, has become more important. This is a serious distortion of the roles our nation wants our schools and teachers to enact.

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Houston also had another indictor of success that it was quite proud of—the rate of college attendance by its high school graduates. D. J. Schemo of the New York Times reports:⁵⁴

At Jack Yates High School here, students had to make do without a school library for more than a year. A principal replaced dozens of experienced teachers with substitutes and uncertified teachers, who cost less.

And yet from 1998 to 2002, Yates High reported that 99 percent to 100 percent of its graduates planned to attend college.

Across town, Davis High School, where students averaged a combined SAT score of 791 out of a possible 1600 in 1998, reported that every last one of its graduates that year planned to go to college.

Sharpstown High School, a high poverty school that falsely claimed zero dropouts in 2002, also reported in 2001 that 98.4 percent of its graduates expected to attend college.

These reports were completely false. As with the dropout scandal, Secretary of Education Rod Paige refused to comment. One of Houston’s principals, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, said this:

Lower-level administrators inflated their figures in the hope of attracting the children of active, involved parents. More students also mean more money from the state. On paper, her school claimed that almost all of its graduates were headed for college. In fact, the principal said, most of them “couldn't spell college, let alone attend.” ⁵⁵

It might not be merely coincidental that Enron was headquartered in Houston. But Houston is not alone, as Table 4 makes clear.

Table 4: Misrepresentation of Dropout Data
Location of Story	Source	Headline	Story
1. New York	New York Times, Tamar Lewin & Jennifer Medina (July 31, 2003).	To cut failure rate, schools shed students	Many of New York's struggling students were pushed out of the school system and classified under categories that hide their failure to graduate. According to the article, "Officially the city's dropout rate hovers around 20 percent. But critics say that if the students who are pushed out were included, that number could be 25 to 30 percent. The city data make it impossible to determine just how many students are being pushed out, where they are going and what becomes of them. But experts who have examined the statistics and administrators of high school equivalency programs say that the number of “pushouts” seems to be growing, with students shunted out at ever-younger ages. Those students represent the unintended consequence of the effort to hold schools accountable for raising standards: As students are being spurred to new levels of academic achievement and required to pass stringent Regents exams to get their high school diplomas, many schools are trying to get rid of those who may tarnish the schools' statistics by failing to graduate on time. Even though state law gives students the right to stay in high school until they are 21, many students are being counseled, or even forced, to leave long before then. And yesterday, after declining to comment on the issue for two months, Chancellor Joel I. Klein conceded the point. “The problem of what's happening to the students is a tragedy,” he said, “It's not just a few instances, it's a real issue.”
2. Texas	Education Week, Jeff Archer (September 24, 2003).	Houston case offers lessons on dropouts	An analysis sponsored by Ed Week found that about half of the 108 schools throughout Texas where 70 percent or more of students were considered at risk of academic failure claimed a dropout rate of one percent or less. However, a closer examination revealed that many schools’ enrollment actually decreased by 30 percent or more by the time ninth graders reached 12th grade.
3.Houston, Texas	New York Times, Diana Jean Schemo (July 11, 2003).	Questions on data cloud luster of Houston schools	Story about continuing dropout debacle of Houston. A recent state audit found that more than half of the 5,5000 students who left during the 2000-2001 school year from 16 middle and high schools should have been declared as dropouts, but were not. One auditor noted that “many students who had left school were coded as intending to enroll in an alternative or high school equivalency program, and were, by Texas rules, not dropouts.” This coding, however, was mostly based on principal reports.
4. Houston, Texas	Houston Chronicle, Staff Writer (July 13, 2003), p. 2.	To hold accountable: Get rid of cheaters, not education accountability system	Article talking about how many high schools are increasing the number of students who are exempted from the test, but assigning the reasons for the exemption as “other.” At one school, where administration is already under investigation for faking low 2001 dropout data, “23 percent of the schools’ tenth graders did not take the TAAS during the ’00-’01 school year. Nearly four percent (five times the district average) were absent and more than four percent were exempted because of limited English or because they were special education students. A whopping 15 percent missed the test for ‘other’ reasons.”
5. Pleasanton, California	Tri-Valley Herald, Jill Tucker (April 27, 2003).	State issues annual data on dropouts	California’s dropout rates are misleading. High schools are responsible for self-reporting dropout figures which means that schools vary widely in how they define “dropout.” Dropout rates are estimated to be around 11 percent; however, graduation rates suggest that 32 percent of freshman who started high school in 1998 didn’t graduate last spring.
6. New York	Newsday, John Hildebrand (December 19, 2003), p. A26.	Freeport’s dropout problem; State audit: Rate higher than district said	Student dropout rates at Freeport High School have run more than five times higher than reported by the district, according to a recent state audit that traces the miscount to the high school, as well as an alternative evening school for troubled teens. The state probe, completed in November as part of an annual audit of districts, found that as many as 255 students or 10.4 percent of the high school’s enrollment dropped out during the ’00-’01 school year. In contrast, district officials had reported to the state losing only 46 students for the ’00-’01 year. The audit by the State Education Department found that 175 students, not 46, should have been counted as dropouts.
7. Massachusetts	Boston Herald, Kevin Rothstein (August 23, 2003).	Education expert testifies MCAS pass rate misleading	Walt Haney presents data to show that state wide results on MCAS is misleading because a disproportionate number of low-income students did not take the test. In a poor district, just 48 percent of freshman class of 2003 made it to their senior year. In contrast, 97 percent of students in a wealthier district made it.
8. Massachusetts	Metro West Daily News, Peter Reuell (Staff) (June 13, 2004).	Test numbers draw criticism: Some wonder if latest DOE stats paint false picture	For accuracy’s sake, the state’s reports ought to cover more than just who passed. “(They should say) we’re going to report what the performance of the state is broken down by the percent who pass MCAS, the percent who don't pass MCAS, the percent who drop out, the percent who are repeating a grade, the percent who move to another state and the percent who transfer to another school.”