Subject: Education: Watchdog of Test Industry Faces Economic Extinction - msg#00134

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February 22, 2006
On Education
Watchdog of Test Industry Faces Economic Extinction
By MICHAEL WINERIP

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. ? For more than 20 years, FairTest, a small
nonprofit group headquartered on the second floor of an old house
here, has been the No. 1 critic of America's big testing companies
and their standardized tests.

In 1987, when FairTest began publishing its list of colleges that did
not require applicants to submit SAT's, there were 51; today there
are 730, including Holy Cross, Bowdoin, Bates, Mount Holyoke and
Muhlenberg.

"The FairTest list provides an enormously valuable service for
students looking at colleges who have proved themselves to everyone
but the test agencies," said William Hiss, a Bates vice president.

A generation of education journalists, like Thomas Toch, who reported
for Education Week and U.S. News & World Report, were schooled on the
complexities and limitations of standardized testing by FairTest.

"They've helped me a lot," said Mr. Toch, who is now a director of
Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington policy research group.

On a slow day, like last Friday, Robert Schaeffer of FairTest handled
calls from The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Lakeland Ledger, Associated
Press and Hartford Courant and Bloomberg News.

On busy days, like July 13, 2004, reporters call by the dozens. That
was the day FairTest helped reveal that scoring mistakes by the
Educational Testing Service on its teacher licensing test had caused
4,100 men and women in 18 states to fail when they had actually
passed the exam.

A few years ago, California officials were considering ending their
support of the National Merit Scholarship program because it relied
exclusively on a single score on the College Board's PSAT test to
pick semifinalists.

"We contacted the College Board about validity and fairness studies
of the PSAT, but they didn't give us information that addressed our
concerns," said Michael Brown, chairman of a state committee that
makes recommendations on admissions policy for California's public
colleges. "So I asked FairTest, which got back with significant
information on the limited reliability of a single PSAT score."

Last year, the University of California system ended its financial
support of the National Merit program.

But for all FairTest's impact, its days may be numbered. Never before
has standardized testing so dominated American public education,
thanks to the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind Law. Every child from
grade 3 to high school must now take state tests. And the Bush
administration is considering extending those tests to colleges.

"With N.C.L.B., a lot of people feel the debate is over," said Monty
Neill, director of FairTest, officially the National Center for Fair
and Open Testing. "The attitude seems to be, 'Testing is so
pervasive, what's the point?' " Support from foundations has
virtually dried up and individual donations have not made up the
difference. "Our board has seriously discussed whether to fold the
operation," Mr. Neill said.

Mr. Toch, Mr. Hiss and Mr. Brown all said this would be a major loss.

"There is no watchdog over the testing industry except FairTest," Mr.
Brown said.

Christopher Hooker-Haring, dean of admissions at Muhlenberg College,
called FairTest "an important voice that pushes back against the test
mania in the U.S."

(This reporter and several others at The New York Times have used
FairTest as a source through the years. And last fall, after more
than a dozen major publications had reviewed this reporter's
children's novel, FairTest also reviewed it, in a newsletter, along
with several other children's books with testing themes.) Four
companies ? Pearson, McGraw Hill, Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin ?
along with the nonprofit Educational Testing Service, dominate the
nation's $2.3 billion testing industry. They will shed no tears if
FairTest disappears.

Kurt Landgraf, the president of the testing service, which
administers the SAT, wrote in an e-mail message: "Perhaps if they had
been more attuned to the public's support for using tests to help
teachers teach and students learn, then they might have had wider
support."

The companies criticize FairTest for dwelling on testing mistakes,
which they say are minor compared with all the successfully
administered exams. Privately, they call it NoTest, complaining that
the group never met a test it liked.

But Mr. Schaeffer said it was not so much the tests that FairTest
opposed, as the overreliance on them to make decisions about which
students get promoted and graduate, which schools are failing under
federal law and who gets a teacher's license. The test companies' own
research indicates that the margin of error is too great to use the
tests this way, he said.

FairTest has always been a David versus the testing industry. At its
high point in the mid-1990's, FairTest had seven staff members and a
budget of half a million dollars. Today it is down to one full-time
worker, Mr. Neill; one half-time employee, Mr. Schaeffer; two phone
lines; a one-room office; and a $168,000 budget.

That has not quieted them. Mr. Schaeffer pointed out after examining
Educational Testing Service's most recent public disclosure forms
that at least 21 E.T.S. executives make salaries larger than
FairTest's entire budget, starting with Mr. Landgraf, who earned
$1.07 million in 2004, and three vice presidents, who each earned
over half a million.

"Those are outrageous salaries for a nonprofit," Mr. Schaeffer said.

Mr. Landgraf countered, "The salaries we pay are benchmarked against
other organizations in the nonprofit sector and reflect our
commitment to hiring the best and brightest."

FairTest has a knack for catching the testing companies at their
worst, sometimes by using the companies' own research.

In a recent newsletter, FairTest printed an analysis of SAT results,
using, and crediting, College Board research showing the direct
correlation between family income and SAT scores. For every extra
$10,000 a family earns, children's combined math and verbal scores go
up 12 to 31 points. So children whose parents earn $50,000 score
better on average (a combined 996 SAT) than students from families
who earn $40,000 (967) but worse than students from families who earn
$60,000 (1014).

For politicians and testing executives bragging about how No Child's
testing emphasis is closing the achievement gap, these are not
promising numbers.

In 2004, the College Board demanded that its data breaking down SAT
scores by income, race and sex be removed from the FairTest Web site,
claiming that the posting was a copyright infringement. But after
FairTest showed the letter to reporters, the College Board backed
down, calling it a mistake by a junior staff member.

Chiara Coletti, a spokeswoman for the College Board, which develops
the PSAT, said the group worked hard to address California's concerns
about that test, and stood by it. She was more generous about
FairTest than her E.T.S. counterparts. Though FairTest's criticisms
are painful, she said, "every industry needs a watchdog."

Mr. Schaeffer, who is a good tester himself (his 800 math SAT helped
get him into M.I.T.), plans to keep watch until the money runs out.

E-mail: edmike@xxxxxxxxxxx



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