LOS ANGELES, California — This was the year California schools went test-crazy.
In every district, students have taken the new state-mandated STAR (Standardised Testing and Reporting) test by the thousands. Based on their scores, every school in the state has been rated and placed on a scale from the lowest to the highest.
And this year Governor Grey Davis' latest pet education reform, the high school exit exam, will be implemented for many students.
This all may appear to be the result of former governor Pete Wilson's, and now Grey Davis', belief that a highly publicised commitment to the latest fad in education reform is the key to the hearts of California voters. But if that's the case, they're just two among a horde of politicians around the country who've arrived at the same conclusion.
By the turn of the millennium, every state in the US but one had adopted standards for what public school students were expected to learn in at least one subject. Forty-one of those states had gone on to adopt tests to measure student performance.
Graduation from one grade to another, and from high school itself, is now often test-determined. The ranking of schools, the resources available to them, and even the ability of parents and teachers to control the local curriculum, is increasingly determined by test scores.
Driving this almost obsessive interest in testing are factors ranging from political ambition to genuine frustration by parents and teachers with the ability of the public school system to teach its students. But testing is getting a big push from another important source, which gets much less media coverage — the testing companies themselves.
Districts and states are spending huge sums on testing and standards. That money is going to a few large companies, who are also the publishers of the textbooks that schools use for instruction.
Dominating the field are three big publishers. McGraw-Hill and its subsidiary, CTBS, publishes the Terranova test series. Harcourt Inc.'s Education Group publishes the Stanford-9 test, and Houghton-Mifflin's Riverside division publishes the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Metropolitan Achievement Test.
Together, the big three and a handful of smaller companies divide a testing market that was estimated at $218.7 million in 1999 by the Association of American Publishers. The publication of standardised tests is considered part of the market for instructional materials, which, at $3.4 billion, is over 15 times as large.
But the market for tests has been growing at an average of 7% a year for over a decade — much faster than the market for textbooks, whose annual growth rate was 3% over the last four years, according to the executive director of the association's school division, Steven Dreifler.
Houghton-Mifflin's Riverside testing operation, which sells the Iowa test, grew at a phenomenal 17% last year, while its overall textbook division grew at 9.2%. In 1997, McGraw-Hill's testing division had gross income of $95 million, and its overall educational publishing group grew 5.7% to $832 million.
Profound influence
The rising profits of test publishers have had a profound effect on the process in which the tests themselves are developed and adopted.
In November 1997, the California Board of Education overruled both state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, and the superintendents of numerous districts, and adopted the Stanford-9 test (slightly modified for California, and repackaged as the STAR test) to administer to four million of the state's students annually.
Governor Pete Wilson insisted on adopting the Harcourt test specifically, and school districts around California were forced to sign contracts with the company, worth $12 million a year, for a guaranteed period of five years. The state even insisted that all children take the test in English, including those who spoke only Spanish.
Obviously, the test didn't assess the real knowledge and skills of those children. But the kids fulfilled a more important function. They consumed the product.
The year following adoption, Harcourt's revenues from its Education Group division shot up $85 million (18%), and its profits jumped $34 million (58%).
Texan 'miracle'
Harcourt added to its remarkable revenue increases in recent years by participating in one of the most highly touted examples of this new test-driven trend in education — what Republican Governor, now presidential candidate, George Bush Jr claims as Texas' "education miracle".
Beginning as early as 1985, the company's subsidiary, Harcourt Brace Educational Measurement, was involved in developing the now-famous Texas Academic Assessment Skills (TAAS) test.
Being the test developer can be very advantageous — according to the Texas Education Agency, the company sold $25 million of elementary school maths textbooks in the state last year alone. Other contracts in other states are similarly lucrative.
Despite the money spent, uncertainty is rampant over what the test scores actually mean. Sandra Stotsky, a researcher at Harvard, says that the TAAS test, for instance, doesn't measure what politicians say it does.
"There may have been no real improvement in reading skills. There may even have been a decline", she notes, alleging that the test is made easier so more students pass.
Texas has been consumed by testing fever, in which districts and schools organise TAAS camps, hold TAAS Olympics, and bend the curriculum towards test-taking, in a high-stakes environment in which the penalties for low performance can be brutal.
Texas has no collective bargaining for teachers and promotion can depend on student scores. Urban Texas counties have even indicted a school board, fired teachers and a principal and launched investigations over allegations of test tampering.
Testing bias
Underlying the hysteria are even more basic questions about whether standardised tests reflect a bias which favours white children over racial minorities, English speakers over immigrants, and students from families with higher income over those with lower incomes.
These tests are not recent inventions. The Stanford-9 and Iowa tests go back over 60 years, and were originally developed in universities. Stanford psychologist Louis Terman, who wrote the first test in the Stanford series before World War One, was notorious for regarding racial minorities and Jews as "feeble-minded". Other early test developers held similar racist views and saw the tests as instruments to weed out the less intelligent.
Two Harcourt tests, the Otis-Lennon and Metropolitan Achievement, were recently charged with being Eurocentric and discriminatory against New Orleans's African-American students, when they were used as a basis for admission to a local high school.
For admission during the 1997-98 school year, 763 students took both tests, of whom 44% were black and 42% were white. Of those, 347 passed both tests. Among those who passed, 27% were black and 59% were white.
New Orleans was sued, a common experience — most states are sued over bias or problems with mistaken test results. The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, for instance, mounted a major legal challenge to the TAAS test, saying it has a discriminatory impact on Black and Hispanic children.
According to Maureen DiMarco, formerly California's Secretary of Education under Wilson, and now vice-president for education and government at Houghton-Mifflin, "it's hard to have a test that doesn't get sued." But, she notes, it's the state or school district that has to mount a defence and bear the legal costs, not the publisher.
Looking good
Despite these questions, and growing opposition by parents and teachers, the test market looks good for publishers.
Twenty states now work with publishers to come up with state-specific tests, called "criteria-referenced", rather than using off-the-shelf, "norm-referenced" tests, according to the American Association of Publishers' Dreifler.
Working to produce unique tests for a state can produce consulting fees for the publisher helping to develop the product, followed by sales of the test itself.
"It's a wise state that seeks the advice of a publisher when formulating standards, to ensure they're rigorous, and not too vague", DiMarco explains. "Then they can issue a better request for bids".
Publishers strive for a close relationship with the state authorities who choose instructional materials and tests. With personnel moving back and forth between the state and private sector, an education-industrial complex is beginning to emerge.
Backing the growth in testing is also what supporters refer to as the standards and accountability movement. Pushing its agenda are organisations like the Pew Charitable Trust, the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute, and corporate CEOs like IBM's Lou Gerstner.
"The standards and accountability movement is growing", DiMarco says. "Just look at how many education governors we have now. Even presidential candidates know they have to speak to these issues."
"Publishers definitely see tests as an opportunity", Dreifler concludes.
BY DAVID BACON