WaPost Goes to School Room, Misses Elephant

There's a kind of unreality running throughout today's front-page article in the Post about students who get good grades in school, and even end up on the honor roll, but fail state standardized tests:

Students and teachers offer an array of explanations for why test scores sometimes fail to match up with grades. Some students don't take the exams seriously. Some freeze up. Still others trip over unfamiliar language. And teachers sometimes are not prepped in what the exams cover, especially when the tests are new. Occasionally, some school officials suspect, classes aren't rigorous enough to prepare students adequately.

Occasionally, some suspect. You know, just maybe, every now and again.

Said one parent of an honors student who failed the state algebra exam:

"It's hard to understand a situation where you can have an Honor Roll student who doesn't pass the test. She's been an Honor Roll student since the sixth grade," she said. "I can't say I really hold her teacher accountable. . . . I just accepted the fact that Brittanie may not be a child that tests well."

The only mystery here is why everyone in the article is being so circumspect about something that should be pretty obvious: states create standardized tests because local schools, when left to their own devices, don't always hold students to high enough academic standards. They put students on honor rolls who don't belong there, pass them along to the next grade even though they haven't learned what they need to know, and ultimately hand them diplomas signifying the attainment of skills and knowledge that students haven't actually attained. Not all schools, certainly, or even most. But way too many.

How do we know this? Because every measure of what students who have graduated from public schools actually know and can do shows deep deficiencies. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress only 59% of seventeen year-olds can perform "moderately complex" procedures in math. 40% of all college students are forced to enroll in at least one remedial--that is, high school-level--course. 43% of all adults score at only the "Basic" level or below on a test of literacy. Etc., etc.

One could argue, I suppose, that the schools have set the standards right and the states have set the bar too high. But you can only make that case if you're willing to forgoe any and all arguments along the lines of "standardized tests are dumbing down the curriculum, hurting gifted students, etc."

You could also chalk it up to measurement error--inevitably, some bright students will score poorly on a given test on a given day. Then again, by the same token you would also expect the opposite to occur--students passing the standardized test who really didn't learn what they needed to know. Somehow, those students never seem to end up in the newspaper. And when you consistently come up with numbers like those cited in the article--between 12 and 25 percent of students who failed the state exam getting passing grades from their school--it's not hard to figure out what's going on. Unless, strangely enough, you're the normally reliable Post.

Update: AFTie Michelle offers a sensible take on the article.