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Has the bar been raised too high? Some teachers and parents complain that the tests are too exhaustive--and exhausting--for young students. The Massachusetts test clocked in at 16 hours, spread over several weeks. Tina Yalen, an eighth-grade civics teacher, gave her opinion of the Virginia test: "Some of it looked like Trivial Pursuit to me." More worrisome is how a 10-year-old will react if his or her result is branded with a scarlet F. Says Harvard's Reville: "An overload of negative feedback runs the risk that students are going to shut down and not make an effort in the future."
This could be especially true of disadvantaged students, who routinely score much lower on these tests. "If you give me the income tax returns of all the students being tested," says Kitty Kelly Epstein, who teaches education at California's Holy Names College, "I could predict how they would score and save millions of dollars." Well-off New York City parents hire tutors to give their kids a leg up, while poorer students depend on the goodwill of teachers generous enough to tutor them after school.
Many teachers rave about the high-stakes exams, contending that they have galvanized students. But other teachers find themselves forsaking important lessons simply to "teach for the test." Even in North Carolina, whose soaring scores earned accolades in Clinton's State of the Union address, some teachers tailor upwards of 80% of their lessons to the test, according to a University of North Carolina survey. "Teachers must go way beyond textbook instruction," says Felicita Santiago, principal of a Brooklyn public elementary school, where teachers came in an hour before school to help kids get ready for the exam. "Preparing for the test is a whole shift in methods of instruction."
Another problem is the piecemeal way in which these tests are developed, with no attempt to coordinate them nationally. Last month Achieve Inc., a bipartisan resource center on standards, was host to a conference in Washington, where representatives from 20 states pledged to work toward a shared national standard by offering uniform exam questions. In the meantime, students like Lajoi probably have less to worry about than the people in charge of teaching them. The Maryland board of education has just targeted three elementary schools in Prince George's County for state takeover because of poor test results. And the county's school board voted not to renew the contract of its superintendent.
--With reporting by Melissa August and Ann Blackman/Washington, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Georgia Harbison/New York and Laird Harrison/Oakland