High Stakes Testing in the State of FloridaIn 1997, the legislature in the State of Florida passed a bill that allows all public schools in the state to be graded based on the scores of their students on the FCAT--the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test. Based on the 1999-2000 school performance grades, 997 public schools will receive funding for FY 2000 to total $1.2 million. In 1998 140 schools were rewarded. In 1999, 319 schools received the monetary award. 
Schools receive a letter grade based on set criteria. The criteria for "A" Schools is that the school must:
According to many prominent leaders in the field of education including Dr. Popham, there is a problem with this scenario. "The wrong tests are being used to judge educational quality. As a result, most schools are being inaccurately evaluated. The primary mission of American standardized achievement tests is to differentiate sufficiently among test-takers so that a student's performance can be contrasted with that of a norm group. This is a useful mission, and both parents and educators can profit from knowing, for example, that a fifth-grade child scores at the 85th percentile in reading but only at the 29th percentile in mathematics. However, to create tests that differentiate effectively, test-makers must include items that yield a reasonable degree of score-spread, that is, different scores for different students. Two kinds of items do this very well. First, an item strongly related to a student's socioeconomic status (SES) does a great job in contributing to score-spread. If such an SES-linked item is, because of its content, more apt to be answered correctly by children from affluent families than from disadvantaged families, such an item will help spread out students' scores. A student's SES, or course, doesn't change all that rapidly. SES-linked items contribute well to a test’s score-spread. A second kind of item that helps differentiate test-takers is the sort of item better suited to aptitude than achievement tests. Such items are closely related to the inherited academic aptitudes with which children are born. Children, from birth, differ in their academic aptitudes such as their verbal, quantitative, and spatial capacities. An aptitude-linked item is one more apt to be answered correctly by a child who, at birth, was genetically lucky. Again, aptitude-linked items do a super job in creating score-spread because inherited aptitudes are spread out all over the lot, and aren’t all that readily amenable to alteration. So, to the extent that standardized achievement tests contain many SES-linked or aptitude-linked items, such tests measure what children bring to school, not what they learn there. There’s another problem with standardized achievement tests that proves more than a little vexing to American principals. These tests are built to be sold throughout an entire nation- a nation in which curricular preferences vary from locality to locality. Therefore, the best market-driven test-development strategy for a publisher of nationally standardized tests is to base its test’s items on a most-common-denominator curriculum in order to create a ‘one size fits all’ test that has a better chance of being widely adopted. The only problem with that approach, for a specific school, is the test’s content may be a miserable match to what’s supposed to be taught (by district or state mandate) in that school. What happens is that the test-makers must sample from their common-denominator content or the tests would be intolerably long for children. But the content sample that’s tested may be quite different from the content that’s taught - or at least to the curricular content a principal’s teachers were supposed to be teaching. One US landmark study, conducted at Michigan State University in the early 1980s, suggests that on the basis of test-versus-textbook mismatches, there are many instances in which 50 per cent or more of what’s tested by standardized achievement tests is simply not taught in a particular school. How can the caliber of a principal’s staff be accurately assessed via students’ test scores if much of the tested content wasn’t even supposed to be taught? Because of these measurement realities, the use of students’ standardized achievement test scores to judge the quality of a school’s staff is patently unsound. And yet, throughout the US, it’s being done again and again. Even though principals, at some intuitive level, realize that they’re being appraised with the wrong yardstick, they are still under enormous pressure to improve their school’s test scores and to raise ‘standards!’ And that relentless pressure has led to a series of practices that every upright educator ought to bemoan. There are several things that can be done about this situation from the grass-roots level:
In Florida, information on this issue can be found at:
Nationally, visit:
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