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Md. School Board Approves New Tests

By Katherine Shaver
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 11, 1997; Page A01

The Maryland school board unanimously approved a new series of tests yesterday that students will have to pass before high school graduation, appeasing parents who objected to the exams by proposing extra state-funded teacher training and student tutoring to help students pass.

The new exams would test students' knowledge in as many as 12 subjects and would replace the state's nearly 20-year-old functional tests in reading, writing, math and citizenship that, while required for high school graduation, are now considered so basic that most students pass them in middle school.

The higher-level tests, each of which would take about three hours, also are designed to answer businesses' complaints that today's high school diplomas no longer guarantee that graduates can read or write well enough to hold a job.

"There are kids in the middle who could do it if they are challenged and kids at the bottom who will need a lot of help," said Buzz Bartlett, a member of the state Board of Education and director of corporate affairs for Lockheed Martin Corp. in Bethesda. "It will take a Herculean effort, but we're changing an education system that's been in place since the early 1900s, and it's inadequate."

The 12-member board also voted to phase in the tests over four years instead of all at once, as originally proposed, to give local school systems time to prepare. Under the plan, today's sixth-graders would have to pass as many as four tests to graduate from high school. Students in later years could be required to pass as many as 10 exams. After studying the first two years of trial test results, the board could vote to change the exams if too many students fail.

The Maryland Parent Teacher Association opposes "high-stakes" testing, but parents will find the exams more palatable if they are implemented gradually and if the state ensures that all students will be prepared equally, said state PTA President Carmela Veit.

"We're heartened because we felt they listened," Veit said.

The tests would be designed to measure whether students learned the state-mandated curriculum in 10 required courses, including three levels of English, world history, U.S. history, algebra, geometry, government and two of four sciences.

The board will decide later exactly which tests students will take when, what the cutoff score will be and whether students will have to pass each test or simply average a passing score. State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick has proposed that students be required to pass 10 of 12 tests.

Yesterday's vote enabled the state to hire a test development company to begin writing actual questions for the first batch of tests in English I, government, geometry or algebra, and biology.

Those tests will be given to ninth-graders as practice exams starting in January 1999. After a two-year trial run, the school board will vote in August 2000 on whether to proceed with requiring students to pass the tests for graduation. If too many students cannot pass, the tests could be altered or the board could vote to delay making them a graduation requirement, board members have said.

Although many parents said they support holding students and teachers to higher standards, some have complained it would be unfair if students in different jurisdictions did not have access to the same quality of teachers, school funding or extra tutoring.

Several board members said they will continue to support the tests as a graduation requirement only if the state pays for programs to ensure that students who are falling behind get tutoring or summer school help starting in elementary school.

"We don't want youngsters so far behind by the time they get to high school that they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of passing these things," said Edward Andrews, the state board's vice president and a former superintendent of Montgomery County schools.

The state shouldn't hold all students to the same, higher standards, Andrews said, "unless each student has a qualified teacher in every period of every school day, and we know that's not always the case now."

Local school officials said their teachers will need more training, particularly in how to instruct students who never mastered the basics in elementary school.

"I'll bet there are very few, if any, high school teachers in the state who are qualified to teach reading," said Michael E. Hickey, superintendent of Howard County schools. "Yet we have all kinds of high school kids who read inadequately."

Some students who read at an elementary school level will need intensive after-school tutoring and summer school, which financially strapped school systems will need the state to pay for, Hickey said.

Grasmick said her department is researching what kinds of remediation and teacher training programs local school systems already offer. The state and federal governments pay $340 million for remediation programs in Maryland, she said, but she did not know how much, if any, extra state money would be needed to help students who don't pass the first time.

"If the legislature wants accountability in schools, they have to pay for it," said Valerie Linaburg, a Howard County PTA member whose sixth-grade son, Jonathan, will have to take the tests.

The state will pay $3.8 million to administer the first batch of tests, and costs could climb to $15.5 million a year if students are required to pass 10 of 12 tests, according to state figures. Those estimates assume that 80 percent of students will pass the tests on the first try.

The board also supported Grasmick's proposal to give school systems leeway to test students in biology during the first batch of tests and to scrap the current functional test in citizenship starting next fall if school systems prove that their social studies classes cover the same material.