Avalanche of School Testing is a Bonanza for Corporate Publishers

By David Bacon, contributor

The new education bill passed in Congress will add to the deluge of testing hitting this country’s public school students at all levels. But do the tests help the students, or is their main purpose to line the pockets of test developers, test publishers and textbook companies?

By last year, every state in the US but one had adopted curriculum standards for public school students, and 41 states had gone on to adopt standardized tests to measure student performance. At the same time, however, rising protests have been challenging high-stakes testing around the country. Students at schools in New York and Massachusetts have refused to take them, risking their academic future. A rebellion by Wisconsin parents forced the state legislature to kill a proposed high-school graduation exam. In Cleveland, the NAACP charged the Ohio Proficiency Test with being racially biased, one of many such legal challenges. And a Youngstown State University study, in fact, found that the poorer the family of the student, the lower the test score was likely to be.

In Berkeley, California, a committee of the Federation of Teachers has drawn up a petition opposing the use of standardized tests entirely, with some 300 of Berkeley’s 600 K-12 teachers signing on. The petition declared that the state’s SAT 9/STAR test “is racially, culturally and socio-economically biased, unfair, and inappropriate for our students.” It does not measure student achievement or teacher quality and perpetuates the huge economic, social, cultural and language disparities among the state’s students. “High-stakes tests force us to teach in a way in which high scores become the most important goal,” explained Terry Fletcher, a third-grade teacher. “Teachers are forced to cram information into students, but not to encourage critical thinking or broader knowledge. There’s no emphasis on art or music, or even social studies. Testing really turns us into worse teachers.”

Politicians today vie with each other to appear more concerned about education, and position themselves as would-be “education candidates.” 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, which go to a few large companies who also publish the books schools use for instruction. Dominating the field are three big publishers. McGraw-Hill and its subsidiary, CTBS, publish the Terranova test series. Harcourt Inc.’s Education Group publishes the STAR test, and Houghton-Mifflin’s Riverside division publishes the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Metropolitan Achievement Test.

Test scoring is also a source of revenue. National Computer Systems (NCS), a company with a close relationship to a Harcourt, scores Ohio’s tests for about $10 million a year. Ohio parents got a surprise in 1998, when they discovered that ninth and twelfth grade students had their essays graded by a subcontractor, Measurement, Inc. For $1.4 million a year, the company employed temporary workers at close to minimum wage in a North Carolina strip mall. These workers, who had no teaching experience or education credentials, spent about two minutes looking over each paper.

Together, test publishers divide a testing market estimated at $218.7 million in 1999 by the Association of American Publishers. The publication of standardized 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 percent a year for over a decade, much faster than the market for textbooks.

Houghton-Mifflin’s Riverside testing operation, which sells the Iowa test, grew at a phenomenal 17 percent in 1999, while its overall textbook division grew at 9.2 percent. In 1997, McGraw-Hill’s testing division had gross income of $95 million, and its overall educational publishing group grew 5.7 percent to $832 million.

Test contracts are lucrative. McGraw-Hill won a $30 million contract for tests in Kentucky last year. In Mississippi, with one of the lowest per-pupil spending levels in the country, the state signed a 10-year testing contract with McGraw-Hill for a total of $29.4 million. During his presidential campaign, George Bush Jr. touted Texas’ “education miracle,” where beginning in 1985, Harcourt developed the now famous Texas Academic Assessment Skills test. Texas currently contracts for test development with NCS for $20 million a year. NCS in turn subcontracts to Harcourt, which also gets another $2.8 million a year for developing TAAS study guides.

Being the test developer can be advantageous. Harcourt’s textbooks were marketed to local districts around the state with a flier stating “Why choose Harcourt Brace for your math program?... (It is the) only program to have texts written by the same company that helps to write the TAAS tests...” Stating the connection so overtly might be considered bad form, but it didn’t hurt Harcourt, which, according to the Texas Education Agency, sold $25 million elementary-school math textbooks in 1999.

Despite the money spent, uncertainty is rampant over what the test scores actually mean. Sandra Stotsky, a researcher at Harvard, says that in Texas “there may have been no real improvement in reading skills. There may even have been a decline.” She alleges the test is made easier so more students pass. Underlying the debate are even more basic questions about whether standardized tests reflect a bias that favors white children over racial minorities, and English-speakers over immigrants.

The problem, said one activist, is that the people devising the methods for assessing student progress aren’t listening to the people who know the most about it: teachers. One problem with the STAR test, according to teachers, is that it is norm-referenced. In other words, the scores are plotted on a bell curve, and students are told their results in terms of how they rank in comparison to other students, not to a defined set of criteria. Rick Rubina, a 14-year school principal, said criteria-referenced tests are better. These compare students to set criteria. They show individual growth in knowledge for each child. But in a norm-referenced test, half of the students are always, by definition, in the bottom half of the test results.

Another activist said students need to be assessed in more difficult things: their ability to solve math problems and write creatively, their knowledge of social studies, their highest thinking skills, their ability to take initiative and accept responsibility, and their emotional intelligence.