States Cut Test Standards to Avoid Sanctions

AUSTIN, Tex. — Security was tight when Texas State Board of Education members were given results last fall from a field trial of a new statewide achievement test. Guards stood outside their locked meeting room, and board members were asked to sign a secrecy pledge, reflecting the sensitivity of the situation.

"The results were grim," said Chase Untermeyer, a member. "Few students did well. Many students got almost no answers right."

Fearing that thousands of students would fail the new test and be held back a grade, and that hundreds of schools could face penalties under the federal No Child Left Behind law, the board voted to reduce the number of questions that students must answer correctly to pass it, to 20 out of 36, from 24, for third-grade reading.

Texas has not been alone in lowering its testing standards in recent months. Educators in other states have been making similar decisions as they seek to avoid the penalties that the federal law imposes on schools whose students fare poorly on standardized tests. Since President Bush signed the law in January 2002, all 50 states have presented plans for compliance. But some experts say there is only a veneer of acquiescence. Quietly, they say, states are doing their best to avoid costly sanctions.

Michigan's standards had been among the nation's highest, which caused problems last year when 1,513 schools there were labeled under the law as needing improvement, more than in any other state. So Michigan officials lowered the percentage of students who must pass statewide tests to certify a school as making adequate progress — to 42 percent, from 75 percent of high school students on English tests, for example. That reduced the number of schools so labeled to 216.

Colorado employed another tactic that will result in fewer schools being labeled as needing improvement. It overhauled the grading system used on its tests, lumping students previously characterized on the basis of test scores as "partially proficient" with those called "proficient."

"Some states are lowering the passing scores, they're redefining schools in need of improvement and they're deferring the hard task of achievement-boosting into the distant future," said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education who supports the law's goal of raising standards. "That's a really cynical approach."

Under the law, states that fail to comply risk losing federal education money. Schools deemed failing several years in a row must offer tutoring to low-achieving students and, eventually, can be forced into complete reorganization. But the law leaves it up to the states to establish their own standards of success.

Some experts also fault the law for requiring states to bring 100 percent of students up to proficiency in reading and math by 2014, a level they say has never been achieved in any state or country.

"The severe sanctions may hinder educational excellence," said Robert L. Linn, a professor at the University of Colorado who is the immediate past president of the American Educational Research Association, "because they implicitly encourage states to water down their content and performance standards in order to reduce the risk of sanctions."

Federal officials disagree. Dan Langan, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said the department had closely monitored all states' preparations for compliance with the law and was satisfied that the law would not bring lower standards. "The law includes safeguards to hold states accountable," Mr. Langan said. "They have flexibility to set proficiency levels, but there are enough checks in place to make sure they cannot game the system.

The 600-page law, Mr. Bush's basic education initiative, was passed with bipartisan backing four months after Sept. 11, 2001. Many prominent Democrats, however, have since withdrawn their support, including Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, who recently described it as "a phony gimmick."

Four United States senators are backing a bill that would allow states to obtain waivers from the law's requirements, and legislators in Minnesota, New Hampshire and Hawaii are considering proposals for those states to opt out of it. That would put at risk millions of dollars in federal financing, but could allow the states to avoid the costs of compliance.

In a report this month, the General Accounting Office estimated that states would have to spend $1.9 billion to $5.3 billion to develop and administer the new tests the law requires. State and federal officials disagree as to whether Congress has appropriated enough money to help the states meet those costs.

Richard F. Elmore, an education professor at Harvard, writing in the spring issue of the newsletter Education Next, called the law "the single largest, and the single most damaging, expansion of federal power over the nation's education system in history."

Mr. Langan, the Education Department spokesman, again disagreed. "This law appropriately identifies education as a national priority, and we believe it values and respects local control and autonomy," he said.

A feature of the law that even many critics praise is its promotion of learning by minority and other students whose achievement has lagged. It requires states to publish those groups' test scores separately, and imposes sanctions on schools if the scores of any group fail to meet annual targets two years in a row.

But many educators question whether schools can meet the requirement to raise all students' scores to 100 percent proficiency by 2014, and some states' plans appear intended to buy time.

Ohio, for instance, vowed to raise the percentage of students who pass statewide tests to 60 percent from 40 percent in six years, an average annual gain of 3.3 percentage points. But starting in 2010, it pledged to raise the percentage to 100 percent from 60 percent in just four years, an average annual gain of 10 percentage points, which some educators said would require a near miracle.

Mr. Finn compared Ohio's approach to a balloon mortgage in which a home buyer pays low interest in early years, but later faces soaring, unpayable rates.

Mitchell Chester, an assistant superintendent in the Ohio Education Department, defended the state's timetable, saying in an interview that Ohio needed the next few years both to raise the achievement of minority and other low-performing children to the other students' starting point of 40 percent proficiency, and to "re-engineer" instruction with a more ambitious curriculum and more teacher training. Very rapid progress in achievement will be possible thereafter, Mr. Chester said.

Dr. Linn outlined another interpretation in a recent speech to educational researchers. Ohio and other states face a huge challenge "to get through the first years without placing an overwhelming number of schools in the improvement category," he said. "Buying time allows for the possibility that the law will be modified to make progress targets more realistically achievable. The Ohio plan is, in my view, a creative way of doing that."

Texas's plans for compliance with the law are of special interest because Mr. Bush drew heavily on his record of raising test scores there to sell the federal law to Congress.

But experts have criticized the test used throughout Mr. Bush's governorship as too easy; far easier, for instance, than New York's Regents exam. Partly in response, Texas developed a new, more rigorous test, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. It fell to the Texas State Board last fall to decide how many questions students would have to answer correctly to pass it.

The stakes were high because starting this year, third graders must pass the test to advance to fourth grade and also because if thousands of students failed it, many schools might not meet the federal law's requirement of adequate yearly progress, Criss Cloudt, an associate commissioner at the Texas Education Agency, said in an interview.

"We were trying to avoid that in the same year in which we ratchet up our targets for No Child Left Behind, we would at the same time greatly increase what we expected of students on the test," Ms. Cloudt said, "because that combination was likely to cause a dramatic increase in schools not meeting adequate yearly progress."