Editorial: Testing, one-two-three

Remember when the education debate centered on different ways of learning math and English, and whether physical education and the arts were really as important as academic subjects?

Now, the conversation centers on testing. Is there too much, too little or just the wrong kind? Are the results being misused?

Do students cheat? Do teachers and administrators?

The stakes of testing get higher each year. Always important to students, tests are now becoming crucial to educators. The more scores matter, the more people will try to corrupt them.

A massive cheating scandal was recently uncovered in Atlanta's 48,000-student school system, with allegations of systematic answer-changing by teachers and principals. Similar accusations are being investigated in Baltimore, Philadelphia, the District of Columbia and, in New York, in the BOCES for Orange and Ulster counties.

This is quite different from the cheating of the past. It's always been understood that some students will try to ace tests they don't deserve to succeed on, and that they'll have to evade the eagle-eyed teacher and principal to do so. But now the teachers and principals are the ones with the biggest incentive to game the system.

Some say this bolsters the argument against testing and its use as a tool in evaluating both students and teachers, but that's not true. It bolsters the argument for good testing practices.

This week, New York Education Commissioner John King announced he's created a working group to review the state's testing system and create measures to ensure the integrity of standardized tests before school resumes next month. He's right to do so; there can be little doubt that as the state moves forward in using standardized tests to evaluate teachers, at least a few will try to move the results a bit in their favor. Some changes have already been made in anticipation of this.

In the past, any Regents exam that received a score of 62-64 (65 is passing) was automatically rescored to see if an error might have cost the student a passing grade. As of June, this no longer happens, because of fears local graders might boost these borderline scores to better teacher and school results. The logic is apt, but it's a tough break for kids who fail or don't graduate high school on time because of it, and would have benefitted from an honest rescoring of their test.

Starting with this coming school year, another, much broader new rule is going to bring even more significant changes. According to state officials, teachers and administrators won't be allowed to administer or grade any standardized tests in which they have a vested interest. Does this mean kids can't be tested in their own classrooms? Their own schools? No one is quite sure how it will work yet, and figuring it out should be a top priority of King's working group.

The higher the stakes of the tests, the stronger the incentives to cheat will be for everyone who stands to win or lose. If we want the results to be useful at all -- in evaluating students, teachers or schools -- we're going to have to be very serious about the difficult task of making sure they are given and graded honestly. hN