Standardized tests make for honest success indicator

This summer, a Louisiana professor’s experience with whining students was part of a provocative, and welcome, piece in the Wall Street Journal about the culture of entitlement that has developed among youth. If not by every student and their parents in the state, it should be read at least by those in Bossier Parish.

The article noted that American-born college students’ attitudes about being graded served as a microcosm of an attitude that everybody was “special,” that they all were “entitled” to rewards such as good grades because they “worked hard.” By contrast, when Asian students did not earn A’s, they didn’t ask to get bumped up to a grade for which they had no merited, but instead asked how they could improve their performances.

With that in mind, I wouldn’t suspect that any of the complaining parents and students who confronted the Bossier Parish School Board this summer came from an Asian immigrant family – first, some who complained they should graduate high school because they passed their classes even though they failed the state’s required Graduate Exit Exam, then others, who had disqualified themselves from parish school’s honor programs because they had not scored at a sufficient level on the state’s iLEAP exam.

What gets the parents’ dander up is their children do well enough in the classroom, only to fail to measure up on the standardized exams. Then somehow it becomes the fault of the exam itself, or the state or parish’s policy of having the exam score inflexibly as part of the overall assessment of the child, rather than it being the simplest explanation of all – the child didn’t do what was sufficient to merit the reward.

In both the graduation and honors cases, there is a presumption that the children merit the rewards because they do well enough in the classroom. But the truth is that exams likely are far more reliable indicators of the child’s true learning than the grades.

An anecdote: my wife graduated from Parkway with a 4.0 GPA, tied for valedictorian with one of her best friends. Her other best friend, the salutatorian, was a couple of tenths of points behind, and the next student was another tenth or so behind her. Almost 20 years later, last year my nephew graduated from Airline. Almost 20 in his class had a 3.9 or better, and the average GPA was close to a 3.0.

Have students become so much more brilliant and/or their teachers so much better in the interim to achieve so much higher GPAs? I think not, if you look at the Airline 2004 and 2005 GEE scores (representing that class), in the top two categories, only 27, 32, 28, and 14 percent of Airline rising juniors and seniors scored in them for English, math, science, and social studies, respectively. The dirty secret of GPAs in high school is that they have become inflated, not just in Bossier Parish, but statewide (and far more wildly in some schools where students get ‘A’ grades for poor quality work) because many teachers are reluctant to give lower grades because, with TOPS awards for college hanging in the balance, they don’t want to deprive students of these and/or don’t want to put up with the hassle from above and below for giving more honest assessments. And it trickles down to lower grade levels as well.

Of course, there’s also the oldest fall-back excuse in the book that somebody “doesn’t test well.” Never mind that in the larger real work world tests of one kind or another are always being sprung on you so if you aren’t ready for them in school you won’t go far out of it, but in the smaller academic world my experience has been the students who make this claim, that aspect aside, almost always turn out to be fairly weak students.

Probably Bossier Parish schools could tweak their program a little bit, like allowing students to be in an honors track in one area but not another (as did the schools I attended growing up), but one of their officials hit the nail right on the head when she said if more children were allowed to take honors classes, then there would not be a lot of academic role models in the classroom for other students. You don’t give rewards only because of hard work; you distribute them when the goal is reached regardless of the amount of work. Reasonable standards are there not to deny deserving students, but to motivate all of them.

Which means the state should continue to prevent graduation of those who cannot pass the GEE and the district should continue to deny honors classes to those who do not excel on the iLEAP subject exams. Perhaps if there were less time complaining and more time studying there might not be any problem.