The use and misuse of test scores

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The use and misuse of test scores

As state governments across the country grapple with how to fund education, communities and policymakers alike are looking for ways to hold educators accountable for the money spent and for the quality of student learning. As a means of ensuring accountability, many states have turned to financial rewards and sanctions. Yet for any incentive to be effective, it must be based on a reliable measure of student learning and teacher success. In looking for this measure, legislators and administrators have latched on to standardized tests.

Standardized tests are intended to measure and predict a student's abilities and school readiness. They are designed to determine if a child is ready to enter school, to advance to the next level, or the type of schooling he/she should be receiving. But as the demand for accountability in education grows, test scores are also being used as the basis of performance-based accountability systems - to rate the school, as well as the child. Increasingly, scores are used outside the classroom to compare schools to each other and even to determine how much funding schools and districts should receive.

In 1996-97, 22 states were using test scores to sanction or reward school districts. That number is increasing as states look for ways to restructure their accountability systems. Twenty-three states give state boards of education the authority to intervene in academically "bankrupt" schools whose students score too low as a group. Of those states, ten allow students to leave low-performing schools, taking their proportional amount of state funding aid with them. Four of these states directly punish low performing schools by taking aid away from them. While some states use test scores as one of several accountability indicators, too many rely solely on scores.

All of this has raised increasing questions about what is appropriate and inappropriate about using student test scores to trigger policy actions that affect schools. Although the potential misuse of test scores is an issue for schools nationwide, it can have an especially strong impact on small and rural schools, due to their sizes and demographics.

Much of the research on standardized testing concludes that tests can be biased against minority and low-income students. Tests generally draw from the vocabulary and experiences of white middle and upper class students. If racial and socioeconomic factors are not controlled for, test scores may not accurately reflect student ability or aptitude. When lower test scores mean school sanctions, small communities with high poverty rates and/or diverse populations face serious consequences.

Moreover, in many small and rural schools, there may be only a handful of students taking the test upon which fiscal decisions are based. Statistically, small sample sizes are considered unreliable because too much of the outcome can be determined by chance. The results may not be representative of the quality of learning for the entire school. Small changes in the student population, such as the movement in or out of just one or two families with high or low scoring children, can introduce a particularly powerful bias.

Take the case of Wakefield (Nebraska) Community School, one of the member schools in the School at the Center Project, a partner of The Rural Challenge. Wakefield principal Jeanne Surface wrote to State Senator Ardyce Bohlke, chair of the Nebraska Legislature's Education Committee, to explain how use of standardized tests scores to reward and punish schools can be unhealthy.

Like most in rural Nebraska, the school was once racially all-white, but because of changes in the rural labor force, especially associated with a large egg processing facility in the town, about 17% of the local population is now Hispanic, many from Guatemala and El Salvador. Though the change is a challenge for everyone in the community, new comers and longtimers alike, they are facing up to it. Principal Surface told Senator Bohlke that "the integrity of a school, community, or country is reflected in how it treats its most oppressed people. We are working hard to engage our entire community into the educational environment and all of our children into revitalizing our community. It goes without saying that in small places children can more readily experience democracy because they have more access to opportunities to participate. By national and international standards, I believe we are doing an outstanding job of educating our youth. Our children, I believe, have the skills to make it anywhere they choose to go. Unfortunately, however, we have heard that by state standards we are not a 'quality school.'"

That's because, according to Surface, the school's ACT scores have fallen in recent years (though they were a full percentage point above the state average over the last five years). This year, because the scores finally dropped below the state average (still well above the national average), the school is no longer eligible for "quality incentive funding," a pot of aid money that goes only to high-performing schools.

Gladly facing up to the tough educational challenges a global economy imposes on small rural communities, this community has been stripped of access to the resources that might have made that job a little easier. And the basis? Test scores of the 13 children from that school who took the ACT. That is too much responsibility for those kids to bear.

And by the way...

A coalition of Nebraskans including many partners in The Rural Challenge's School at the Center Project and its affiliate, the Nebraska Alliance, beat back an attempt by some Nebraska business interests to get voters to adopt a constitutional amendment cutting spending for schools and locking in place the state's excessive dependence on the property tax. The vote was about 60% - 40%, despite the fact that proponents spent about $10.00 per voter to sway the results.

Test scores don't always help you even when your students do well. Consider Harold Elementary School in Floyd County, Kentucky. Scoring in the top ten among schools in test scores in five tests, and in the top ten overall, the school was closed anyway by a board controlled by state department of education appointees named to run the district due to financial mismanagement. Why? They needed to save money, and it was one of the smallest and least politically powerful schools in the county district.