Another round of required tests worries some teachers

SALEM, Ore. -- As he plans out his next couple of weeks of lessons at the Grant Community School, teacher Daniel Jamsa already knows there will be some gaps in the schedule.

The eighth-graders will be missing a history lesson while they take a standardized test. The seventh-graders will be missing a health class or two, also for testing time. And the sixth-graders will have to skip a language arts session to take their tests.

For Jamsa and his fellow teachers and students at Grant, frequent standardized tests are a fact of life. A decade of education reform has pushed schools to test students more often, and rewards or penalizes the schools based on the results.

And now, the testing demands are about to get even greater.

Under No Child Left Behind, President Bush's centerpiece education law, schools during the 2005-06 academic year will be required for the first time to test their students in reading and math every year from third through eighth grade.

Currently, tests given only at selected grades are used to determine a school's overall performance under No Child Left Behind. In Oregon, for example, it is third, fifth, eighth and 10th grades. (Oregon already tests sixth- and seventh-graders, too, but the results do not count yet under the federal education law.)

Costly and time-consuming

Around the country, some educators complain that standardized tests are costly and time-consuming and interfere with learning by leading schools to "teach to the test," or emphasize the memorization of facts that are likely to be on the exam, instead of letting students exercise their imaginations and explore other topics.

"I don't like the emphasis on testing," Jamsa said. "As a scientist, I think it is not about discrete packets of information -- it should be about learning to think critically."

The math and reading test results are used to determine whether a school is making enough progress in the federal government's eyes. If a school does not make enough gains, it can face sanctions. For example, its students could be given the option to transfer out, or the school could even be taken over by the state.

Educators and researchers said adding more tests will probably result in an increase in the number of schools identified as not making sufficient progress. Already, one-third of all schools nationwide are not measuring up.

Also, some schools will have to scramble to set up wider testing. According to the nonprofit Education Commission of the States, standardized testing at every grade from third through eighth is in place in only about half the states.

The Government Accountability Office has estimated that it would cost states $1.9 billion to $5.3 billion between 2002 and 2008 to put all the tests required by No Child Left Behind in place.

Educators said that because of the new requirements, more schools may concentrate harder on reading and math, because those are the subjects being tested.

"Particularly for the lower-performing schools, they won't be able to attend to the full range of curriculum, because they will want to avoid being identified as not making adequate yearly progress," said Brian Gong, executive director of the Dover, N.H.-based National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. "It will be interesting to see whether higher-performing schools have broader curriculums."

Some teachers say that standardized tests can be valuable.

Donna Williams, a math teacher at Taylor County Middle School in Campbellsville, Ky., said her seventh-graders will take a math assessment test for the first time next year.

"I can look at those scores, and the areas they fell down in and see what I need to do differently, what I didn't stress enough," she said. "It will make me reflect on my teaching."

But more tests also translates to a loss of precious classroom time, and may take away from other areas, Jamsa and others said. Jamsa said, for example, that a 13-year-old student of his is engrossed in building a hydrogen fuel cell car.

"The cardinal sin of testing is to teach to the test, and that is all we do right now," said Warren Phillips, a former Time magazine teacher of the year from Plymouth, Mass.