Statewide student tests.

• Author: Andrade, Jane Carroll

* Put too much emphasis on single assessments.

* Are just what we need to raise achievement.

* Don't go far enough in holding teachers and schools accountable.

* All of the above.

It's the last week in April, and more than 1,000 sixth, seventh and eighth graders crowd into the gym at De Leon Middle School in McAllen, Texas. They whisper excitedly as the school band begins to play the fight song. Cheerleaders cheer. Kids perform skits and sing songs. It is a pep rally of Texas-size proportions. But this particular pep rally is not about gearing up for a football game or a fund-raiser. It is about academics. The students and teachers at De Leon are getting revved up for the annual Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test (TAKS).

You know something's changed when schools in Texas are holding rallies for tests. Although standardized testing has been a reality in many states for decades, a flurry of activity in recent years has resulted in a much higher profile and plenty of controversy for state assessment programs. Now, not only are students being tested, their teachers, schools and districts are being held accountable, as well. And the stakes are high.

"Testing for accountability has been with us in various forms probably for the last 40 to 50 years," says Joan Herman, co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) in Los Angeles. "In the last 10 to 12 years, it's the consequences attached to performance that have been growing pretty drastically."

THE CONSEQUENCES

Indeed, more states are beginning to withhold high school diplomas and retain third graders for failing to pass state tests, igniting strong emotions in parents, students and even some school districts.

In Massachusetts last year, several school districts threatened to defy the state by issuing diplomas to seniors who failed to earn a competency determination as required under the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). Phone calls from Education Commissioner David R Driscoll eventually quelled the rebellion, and a student-filed injunction to stop the graduation requirement was denied by state and federal courts.

Statewide, 92 percent of Massachusetts high school seniors passed the MCAS test. Even with remediation classes and retesting opportunities, however, 4,800 students didn't get their diplomas.

The stakes will continue to grow as states implement the complex requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) over the next decade. The new law requires states to test all students annually in math and reading in grades three through eight and at least once in math and reading in grades 10, 11 or 12, beginning in 2005-06.

Schools must use state-defined performance standards to show continuous gains--or adequate yearly progress (AYP)--in achievement for all students, including those with disabilities and limited English proficiency. Schools failing to illustrate adequate progress must offer school choice or supplemental services and may eventually face corrective action, which could include replacing staff, receiving technical assistance or even being turned into a charter school.

Advocates of high-stakes testing maintain that tough consequences are necessary to achieve the goals of education reform, which are that students and schools be held to a high standard, that students be tested on and measured against those standards, and ultimately that public school students be better prepared for higher education and the workforce. The goal of No Child Left Behind is unambiguous: that every student in America be deemed proficient or better by 2014.

States with fairly rigorous assessment systems already in place point to increasingly better test results as proof that high-stakes testing works.

"MCAS holds the whole system accountable...