Albuquerque Journal

Thursday, May 27, 2004

No Child Left Behind Fails To Pass Fairness Test
By LOIS MEYER

The first lady came to town last week to read to first-graders, pose for pictures, raise campaign funds and rekindle the debate about funding of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The debate about funding completely overshadows another important issue: fairness.
    By next spring, 95 percent of students will participate in mandatory standardized testing in grades 3-9 and 11. Problems associated with standardized testing of limited English and bilingual students, including over-representation of these students in special education and school dropout ranks, have been pointed out by educational researchers for decades.
    Regardless of age or developmental endurance, test-takers are expected to stay seated, silent, and isolated from each other, while bubbling in pages of test items they often find confusing and incomprehensible. Total test time is 41/2 to five hours, distributed over two or more days, with only brief breaks between test administrations.
    Before NCLB, greater flexibility was permitted for exempting students whose English proficiency or physical disability made such testing a hardship. Today, exemptions have been squeezed in the name of "high standards" and "educational equality."
    More than 65,000 public school students in New Mexico are officially designated Limited English Proficient.
    Many thousands more struggle to comprehend "Test English." Nevertheless, NCLB strongly urges that the tests be administered in English, with tightly controlled accommodations allowed only for those whose English is obviously not yet adequate to the task.
    No politicians joined me when I observed the fourth day of English standardized testing in a second-grade bilingual classroom. If they had, perhaps the NCLB debate would shift from funding to a bipartisan demand for educational fairness.
    Within the first 11 minutes of the testing session, children began to disappear behind the flimsy textbook dividers that formed their makeshift test cubicles. Carla had slouched down on one arm while playing idly with her eraser. Felipe and Ramon had disintegrated in their seats and were staring blankly into space.
    Sofia, seemingly unconcerned as the precious test minutes slipped away, ducked under the table to tie and untie her shoelaces. Moments later she sat up, pulled several coins out of her pocket and absently played with them on top of the test booklet.
    "I've lost Sofia," the teacher said with frustration as she walked over, carefully stored the coins, rubbed the little girl's back, and tried to refocus her attention on the test.
    In this classroom, the worst scenes of test trauma were mercifully avoided. The eight children tested were the "chosen," the strongest English speakers in this bilingual class. Their English fluency had developed enough that they were no longer considered Limited English Proficient. Their 12 classmates, much more limited in English, would be tested later through Spanish.
    If these children had been speakers of Navajo, Vietnamese, Russian or almost any language other than Spanish, under NCLB they would have been tested through English regardless of their language limitations.
    For two days I witnessed the children's growing despair as they tried to locate similar sounds in English words they didn't know how to pronounce, and to discriminate multiple meanings of English words they couldn't yet read and wouldn't recognize if they could.
    This was Test English or Academic English, the kind enforced by teachers, textbooks and standardized tests. Test English is very different from Social English, the language children soak up on the street and playground in order to make friends, defend themselves and chat with visiting first ladies.
    Research indicates that some English learners can become conversationally comfortable in a new language in less than two years. Some schools even declare them fluent at this point and drop them from English support services. However, it can take five to seven years or more before these students acquire enough Academic English to compete successfully with native English speakers.
    In test sessions like the ones I observed, children quickly learn that Test English, made up of stark, incomprehensible, unpronounceable words like "lull" and "heaped" and "feeble," is emotionless, clock-driven and demoralizing.
    When the children finished, I spoke to them about the test, their experience of taking it and their feelings. The test was long and boring, they said. There was so much to read, and so many words they didn't know.
    "Lots and lots of times we just had to guess," Tito said. When Carla saw all the words, she felt hot. Sofia said it gave her "hick-a-haws," which weren't like hiccups, but more like a bad stomach ache. Everybody agreed that so many English words they didn't know made them feel very, very tired.
    How did they feel now after taking it? Bad, they confided. Dumb.
    "I think I got them all wrong," Jennifer whispered. "At first I wanted to take the test," Carla admitted, "but then it was too hard for me. I wanted to stop but they said no." Sofia said she felt bad because "you want to get the test right, but so many words, we just didn't know how to read them."
    Ramon held up his fist with the pointer finger curled tightly around until only a tiny speck of air showed through. "It's because my brain is only this big. My engine just doesn't work that good."
    Isn't it time for New Mexico legislators to put NCLB, not our children, to the test?
    If politicians had been with me in that classroom, the deeper issue about NCLB— educational fairness— might come sharply into focus. So far only one congressional candidate in the primary election, Democrat Miles Nelson, has said publicly that NCLB fails at fairness for the children and schools of New Mexico and should be repealed.
    Our elected politicians should be held accountable for their silence in the face of standardized testing which erodes our children's confidence, destroys their excitement in learning, and which is used to unfairly judge and condemn children, their teachers, parents, schools and districts, as failures.