Test Scores at Odds With Rising High School Grades

After class, Mullins said she had "stuck very close to the curriculum" and "was doing exactly what the county wants me to do." But when told of the more complicated questions asked in the Bowie High class, Mullins acknowledged that she sometimes modifies assignments based on the background of her students.

Mullins, 24, who began teaching two years ago because she wanted to help underprivileged children, said she had "a different caliber" of students in her classroom. "Not to dumb my kids down," she added. "I hate the bad reputation that they get, and I don't think it's fair at all. . . . Not to pass the blame, but some of these kids should never have been allowed to graduate middle school."

County Superintendent John E. Deasy said he is working hard to reduce inequities among schools and cited uneven teacher quality as a key issue. He said that the county curriculum has been standardized and that the challenge now is to ensure an equal level of instruction in every classroom by investing in teacher training and increasing the number of Advancement Placement courses.

"This is the civil rights issue of our time," Deasy said.

The potential for grade and course-title inflation is not confined to low-performing schools. Julie Greenberg, a math teacher at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, said she was under such pressure to raise grades that she used to keep two sets of books in her statistics class: one for the grades students deserved and one for the grades that appeared on report cards.

"If a teacher were to really grade students on their true level of mastery, there would be such extraordinary levels of failure that it would not be tolerated, so most teachers don't do that," she said.

At a news conference yesterday near Capitol Hill, education experts expressed concern that white and Asian students continue to score consistently higher than black and Hispanic students in all subjects. They also said the overall discrepancy between the test scores and transcripts deserves close examination. Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversaw the exams and the transcript study, called the gap "very suspicious."

"For all of our talk of the achievement gap amongst subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap," said David W. Gordon, superintendent of Sacramento County schools in California. "There's a disconnect between what we want and expect our 12th-grade students to know and do and what our schools are actually delivering through instruction in the classroom."

Lawmakers said the low test scores would reinvigorate the debate over high school reform as Congress considers the renewal of No Child Left Behind.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said "disappointing" results underscore the need to recruit first-rate teachers to low-performing schools.