High-stakes tests are on the rise across the country, as politicians of both parties seek to look tough on society's newest scapegoat, the young. It's called the "standards movement," and it's caused legislatures to mandate one-shot tests that determine whether a child will be held back a year in elementary school, or whether she will graduate from high school.

At the same time, a growing movement of parents and educators is resisting test mania, calling for schools that teach children to think, not to fill in the blanks.

"Testing is a cover for not dealing with the real problems of public education," says Joel Jordan, a 23-year high school teacher in east Los Angeles. "It makes the kids and the teachers a scapegoat rather than the politicians who set the conditions where teachers teach and students learn."

Jordan is a founder of the Coalition for Educational Justice, which brings teachers and parents together against high-stakes testing and in favor of smaller classes and better-prepared teachers. "The focus on tests forces teachers to narrow their curriculum, to fragment it into rote learning," says Jordan. Gil Leaf, head of a Quaker-run private school in downtown Detroit, agrees: "The movement for 'school reform' is going 180 degrees the wrong way. True reform would be to have more freedom for creative teachers, not less."

All the evidence shows that reliance on standardized testing does not improve learning. "The case against standardized mental testing is as intellectually and ethically rigorous as any argument about social policy in the past 20 years," says Peter Sacks, author of Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do To Change It. "And yet such testing continues to dominate the education system ... bolstered in recent years by a conservative backlash advocating advancement by 'merit.'"

In 1980, says Sacks, just about half of the states had mandatory testing programs; by 1998, all but two did. In 18 states, high school seniors perform well on a multiple-choice test or they don't graduate; that number is expected to rise to 26 by 2003. Parents put so much stock in tests that real estate agents advertise a neighborhood school's scores to prospective home-buyers.

With so much at stake, the pressure is on to raise scores at all costs. So school systems re-gear curricula to "teach to the test," parents pay for after-school test prep courses, and legislators allocate money to teach children how to beat the test that they themselves have mandated.

In his State of the Union speech this year, President Clinton advocated that all schools institute programs that teach students how to take tests. Massachusetts and California are spending $20 million and $10 million, respectively, on test prep courses. In the words of Michigan State Board of Education President Dorothy Beardmore, "The test has become the tail that wags the dog."

What the tests measure

Test furor continues despite universal acknowledgment, among those who have studied tests, that their predictive ability is meager. In response to a request from Congress, the National Academy of Sciences last year issued a recommendation: "High-stakes decisions such as tracking, promotion, and graduation should not automatically be made on the basis of a single test score but should be buttressed by other relevant information about the student's knowledge and skill, such as grades, teacher recommendations, and extenuating circumstances."

Even the makers of the SAT, the college entrance exam, say that their scores should not be treated as precise measures; they admit that two students' scores must differ by at least 125 points before they can reliably be said to be different.

In any case, differences in SAT scores can predict only 16 percent of the difference among freshman grades in college. Monty Neill, director of the National Organization for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), a clearinghouse for anti-test activism, points out that the single best predictor of college grades is which courses the student took in high school. Those who took tougher courses will make higher marks in college. Grades are the second best predictor, and test scores are a poor third.

Of course, the real kicker is that even college grades have almost nothing to do with success later in life; ask George Bush.

Yet administrators and politicians are anxious for hard numbers. Thus tests are promoted despite their irrelevance.

High income, high scores

The Bush syndrome enters in when you seek a predictor of students' test scores. There is one; it's money.

SAT scores for college-bound seniors increase consistently with family income, an average of 29 points for each $10,000. Those with family income under $10,000 a year average 871; those with incomes over $100,000 average 1130. The ACT, another college entrance test, shows the same trend.

The U.S. Department of Education looked at the backgrounds of students who made at least 1,100 (out of 1,600) on the SAT, which tends to be the cut-off for highly selective colleges such as those in the Ivy League. One-third came from the upper-income brackets and less than a tenth from low-income families.

Referring to a Michigan statewide test, Rich Gibson of Wayne State University says, "What MEAP measures is, first, class, next, race, and third, whether the teacher did nothing but teach to the exam."

Sacks notes, "The nation's elites now perpetuate their class privilege with rules of their own making ... legitimated and protected by a pseudo-scientific objectivity."

One reason the better-off kids make higher scores is that many take expensive test preparation courses. Hundreds of thousands of students go through test prep every year, generating over $100 million for the companies that coach them. Princeton Review guarantees to lift SAT scores by 100 points and ACT scores by 4 (out of a possible 36). The cost: $749 for 35 hours of instruction.

No dumbing down

The opponents of over-reliance on testing are not for dumbing down the curriculum. Quite the contrary. Gil Leaf notes, "Everybody agrees that by fourth grade kids should know two-place multiplication. That's a standard. But there are different ways to get there. Certainly that's true of history and literature, where the worst thing is to be a slave to the textbook and the testing process.

"In the name of standards, the curriculum is being designed to take the creative process away from the teacher. What that does is guarantee that those kinds of people we want to attract to teaching will not go, because of the lack of freedom."

And Joel Jordan says teaching to the test "takes time away from critical thinking, from projects, from enrichment activities that actually interest kids, as opposed to the mind-numbing test preparation exercises. And that widens the gap between better-off schools and inner-city schools. The schools that have middle and upper incomes, where scores already tend to be high, have no pressure to dumb down the curriculum this way."

Alfie Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve, notes that research shows that students rated by numbers "tend to lose interest in learning, they tend to pick the easiest possible task, and they tend to think less deeply and creatively."

The result, says Judy Depew, a social studies teacher in a Detroit suburb, is that "students are being trained not to be creative, critical thinkers, but cooperative, unthinking employees and citizens."

Jane Slaughter is a Detroit freelance writer.