RALEIGH – Who needs a spanking?
No, this is not a column about the propriety of corporal punishment, or about peculiar choices in personal recreation. An article in The Charlotte Observer this week spotlighted once again the flaws in North Carolina’s standardized-testing program, flaws that ought to be the centerpiece of political debate this fall among candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, legislature, and other offices.
Reporter Ann Doss Helms related the story of more than 800 students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools who were whipsawed by bureaucratic bungling. These third-, fifth- and eighth-grade students scored lower than their respective cutoffs on the state’s math exams. They were told that they would have to retake the test and achieve a passing score in order to enter the next grade.
Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, as it happens. Several years ago, when faced with the prospect of too many students failing the already-easy test, state education officials changed the rule to allow scores just below the cutoff to be considered a passing mark, on the grounds that the tests had statistical fuzziness built into them. Essentially, “close enough” was deemed to be good enough not just for nuclear bombs but also for math scores.
In the Charlotte-Mecklenburg case, the problem was that local officials assumed the fuzziness standard would be the usual three points below the cutoff score. So they notified students scoring below it that a retest would be necessary. Subsequently, the state told the school district that the fuzziness standard would be four points below, rather than three. That reclassified some 820 students as passing the math test. So CMS had to send out a second letter to those students relieving them of the requirement to retake the test.
Parents and students were, not surprisingly, frustrated and angry about the slipup. One parent told the Observer that she had heard a student had been spanked for failing the math test. Figuratively speaking, the ones who deserve a spanking are the state and local officials who have perpetuated North Carolina’s unreliable and seemingly arbitrary testing regime.
There is no perfect solution. Measuring educational achievement will always be necessary, complicated, and messy. But North Carolina has no business making up its own tests and then changing them periodically to suit political and institutional interests. The public schools need a testing program to assess the needs of individual students and to allow for comparisons across district, state, and national boundaries. Our end-of-grade and end-of-course tests meet neither of these needs. As my JLF colleagues have long argued, we should adopt one of several independent, national assessments available off-the-shelf.
The Department of Public Instruction and other defenders of the status quo contend that North Carolina should retain its own testing program because it better fits the state curriculum. This argument begs the question. Yes, curriculum and academic expectations go hand in hand, but what’s the justification for North Carolina maintaining a curriculum that does not comport with national and international standards? High-school graduates in North Carolina won’t live their lives in a bubble. They’ll travel, move around, and compete in national and international job markets. You can’t justify an inadequate testing program on the basis that it best matches up with an inadequate curriculum.
The state gets a failing grade here. The solution is not to abandon comprehensive testing altogether, as some activists prefer but most parents oppose. The solution is to give parents, students, and educators valid measurements. It’s time for state politicians to get cracking. If they need extra motivation, I suppose I could go looking for a good hickory switch.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.