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Teaching to the Test

William Lipscomb spends most of his day taking care of his 300 children. It's his job to make sure that the kids get to school on time, that lunch gets made and that they behave in class. .

Lipscomb is the busy principle of Sousa Middle School in Washington, D.C.. He keeps the school running smoothly and the students learning.

These days, the 16-year veteran of District of Columbia Public Schools says he is spending a lot of his time working to improve Stanford 9 test scores at Sousa. The school has consistently been one of the lowest performers on the Stanford 9 standardized test in both math and reading.

"We don't want to be known as a school with low test-scores," said Lipscomb in an interview.

The district school system began using Harcourt Educational Assessment Inc.'s Stanford 9 test in 1997. During the past four years, the test scores have been highly visible ratings on a school system that has often struggled in the past.

All of the testing data used in this article was taken from a report published by the school system's Department of Educational Accountability.

When the 1997 test scores rated four of every ten students' reading and math skills in the public school system as "below basic," there was widespread concern.

Perhaps even more disturbing, the highest scores were at the lowest grades, suggesting that the longer a student stayed in the system, the further behind that student fell.

Those scores have brought dramatic changes for the District's school system.

However, the nature of those changes, like many issues in education, is still controversial.

"The test is designed to set down a standard and measure students' skills against that standard," said Pat Anderson, the DCPS coordinator of assessment. "It's important that students are taught problem solving and critical thinking. That's what the test measures."

Iris C. Rotberg, a research professor of educational policy at the George Washington University, disagrees.

"The most significant variables that contribute to high tests scores are socioeconomic ones," said Rotberg in an interview. "Not a student's teacher's skills."

"Test scores almost always improve in the first three years," explained Rotberg. "It's simply teachers learning to teach to the test."

Whether the Stanford 9 gives D.C. teachers a high standard to reach for, or simply changes their focus, is still controversial.

"Everyone, from the Phys. Ed teacher to the science teacher is working on vocabulary and math skills," said Lipscomb. "We've increased out flexibility too."

Lipscomb said the school sometimes takes students out of social studies or science courses for extra work in language arts and math.

Since only reading and math are tested on the exam, social studies do not directly increase a student's chance of doing well.

Still, despite the controversy, the ideas of both sides overlap.

Rotberg criticized the tests. " Test scores are easy for newspapers to explain, but children and schools are more complicated then a simple score."

For the principle at Sousa Middle School, it's somewhat simpler.

"We need a way to measure success," said Lipscomb. "The test gives us a measurement and we're going to do our best to excel at it."

*This article was written for both Internet News and Journalism 112