Assessment Coach Is Always Being Tested

One in an occasional series on the culture of testing

Kate Salerno, the 35-year-old educator who runs state testing at Falls Church High School, could not sleep one night last week. She had too much to worry about. Her biggest annual event, the Virginia Standards of Learning exams, was coming in May, and disaster was looming. She was going to have to tear up her lovingly conceived seating plan because technicians discovered that some testing rooms could not handle enough laptops.

By 4:15 a.m. Tuesday, she was e-mailing colleagues. "They probably thought I was nuts," she said later.

By 6:30 a.m. she had gotten up, dressed and, passing up a bowl of Froot Loops, walked to the high school across the street from her condominium. "I wasn't even hungry," she said.

The high-energy former college basketball player, who stands at 6-foot-1, treats testing crises like big games. Her formal title is assessment coach, a new position for Fairfax County, similar to others in the Washington region. The proliferation of testing coordinators is one of many efforts around the country to adjust to the boom in standardized testing. There's a lot riding on all the little things Salerno and her peers do to make the testing work: School reputations and professional careers can be tarnished if low scores do not improve.

Once upon a time, each teacher decided when to give a test. No one ever thought of having a full-time overseer such as Salerno. But schools are bigger, courses are more demanding and teachers are resigned to the fact that if they do not coordinate every lesson and test, students will slip through the cracks and show up on test results as bad news. This school year, Salerno is supervising more than 4,300 state tests for a school of 1,400 students. Each test is a potential headache.

Salerno walked into the high school's guidance department, unlocked a large storage closet known as "the vault" and pulled out about 100 copies of the Stanford English Language Proficiency test she was giving that day. She handed 40 to a half-dozen special education teachers as they walked into Salerno's small office festooned with Washington Redskins memorabilia. Then she walked to the school's little theater, one of her favorite testing spots because of its spacious size and soft, noise-absorbing carpet. There, she handed out SELP tests to 53 rather resentful teenagers.

"I hate this test," one student said. Another said, "It's childish."

They were children of immigrant parents and had once been labeled as having limited English proficiency, but they had worked hard on their vocabulary and grammar and thought they had shed that status. Salerno explained that federal law required her to test them two more years to follow their progress.

The SELP test was, for Salerno, a fairly easy 2 1/2 hours. She avoided the tortuous exercise in the special education room, where teachers took the essay answers that some students had typed on computers and laboriously copied them in pencil on an official answer sheet, including all errors. Those students had disabilities that entitled them to use computers. But the teachers could not paste the printed answers onto the answer sheet because the test scanner read only words written with a No. 2 pencil.

"I never said it made sense," Salerno said, rolling her eyes.

She had 20 minutes for lunch (leftovers from a Sunday barbecue) and 30 minutes to supervise junior prom ticket sales. (She is the class adviser.) Then she went to a one-hour meeting to deal with the crisis that robbed her of sleep: What can they do about those laptops?