STUDENTS ARE BRIGHT, FUN TO TEACH, BUT NOT ACCORDING TO TEST DATA

The memo read: "We will have a Language Arts departmental meeting on Tuesday. We will be discussing last year's test results, if there are any needed changes in curriculum or instruction, and any topics of concern. I'm looking forward to discussing these topics with you."

Wording of the annual summons has varied from year to year, but my dread and apprehension are invariably the same. I'd rather have a root canal without anesthesia.

The meeting begins with our principal, Dennis Parham, a fair man and a conscientious administrator, asking us of our "concerns" about policies and problems at the junior high. Several teachers bring up different predicaments that have been troubling them. Mr. Parham intently listens to the teachers, explains his viewpoint and tries as best he can to assuage the teachers. But we all recognize that this is just a warm-up and brace ourselves for what we know is about to befall us, the real reason for this meeting: the yearly standardized test results.

However, this year I am feeling more at ease about the impending divulgement. In fact, I am even a tad eager to see how my students fared on last May's exams. In the past, I'd always known what to expect at this juncture of the meeting and shuddered in dire anticipation. I knew that my students had inevitably disappointed the school district once again.

You see, for some 10 years the state had subjected my students to the Missouri Mastery and Achievement Test or, as I've fondly called it, the Misery Mumbo-jumbo and Asinine Test, a crazy, patchwork hodgepodge of ambiguous and ineptly phrased, multiple-guess head scratchers, contrived, I've always secretly suspected, by a group of chimpanzees randomly banking away on computer keyboards in some basement room of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education or by state university professors of education.

This year, though, I had hope, because it was a new test, a national test devised by professional test makers. I had glanced over the test while my students were taking it, and it seemed to be an accurate and fair assessment. I was confident my students would perform well on it. So you can imagine my shock and frustration when the principal announced that our results were "disappointing" again.

How? I wondered. How was this possible? My students a disappointment? No. My student were a joy. They were bright, hard-working, self-disciplined, determined and fun to teach. And last year's grades reflected their progress. About one-third of my students had achieved A's, and another one-half had earned B's and C's. A disappointment? I couldn't believe it. I felt bewildered and sad.

Then Mr. Parham mentioned that he would soon be issuing teachers a readout on each student's individual test scores. This was something new. As a teacher, I had never had ready access to such information before. Maybe here was an answer to my question: How?

The following day, the individual student scores were in our school mailboxes, just as Mr. Parham had promised. I started by perusing my students' reading scores. My eighth graders' class average had been 73 percent, barely a C by the school's grading scale. But as I looked at my students reading scores, I say 100 percent after 100 percent. Indeed, 50 percent of my 75 eighth-grade students had scored 100 percent.

Next, I dropped down to my students' overall scores. Again, I say 100 percent after 100 percent. But my classes' overall score had been 68 percent, a D-plus by the school's grading scale. Now I was more puzzled than ever.

Then I noticed that included in the aggregate scoring were my four Individual Education Plan students from last year. These are students who have been periodically tested and found to be victims of learning disabilities, specifically in reading comprehension and written expression. Subsequently, their course work has been modified for years and isn't really calibrated to their grade level or to the new state standards. They had all scored zeroes on all portions of the test.

Also, I had two other pupils who had been IEP students for part of the year -- actually, most of their school lives. In fact, they had been in a special-education English class until they had apparently raised their IQ test scores enough to be dismissed from the learning-disabled program and mainstreamed into my class. They both had scored zeroes on all portions of the test.

Another student whose scores had been included had only been in my class for one quarter. Then the student had transferred to another school but returned to the junior high a few months later and was placed into another teacher's class. This student had scored zero on all portions of the test.

Finally, I checked the scores of my six test dawdlers from last year. These were students who took the entire allotted time to finish the test. I had to constantly urge them to stop wasting time and resume working on the test. Dawdlers tend to work in spurts. They'll bubble in 10 answers in 10 seconds, wait 10 or 15 minutes, then bubble in another 20 answers in 20 seconds. In the past, I've reprimanded such students in a variety of ways and even made some of them take the entire test over. It has had little impact, except occasionally a student has confessed to me that he deliberately mismarked answers on the test when forced to retake it. The dawdlers all scored zeroes on all portions of the test.

I wondered what would happen if I excluded these students' scores from my students' averages. I crunched the numbers and discovered that by eliminating these 13 students' zero scores -- seven victims of circumstance but six well-earned -- my other students had scored 90 percent on reading, an A-minus, and had an overall test score of 84 percent, a solid B.

I sat back and smiled at this confirmation of what I had known was true. My students were bright, hard-working, self-disciplined, determined and fun to teach. But then I sighed too, because I also knew that for the next 10 years my students would be subjected to another standardized test that would undoubtedly and erroneously label them "disappointments."

Raymond J. Peats is a language-arts teacher at Jackson Junior High School.