When the tests fail

Testing proponents warn against overreacting. For Lawrence Feinberg, assistant director of the bipartisan National Assessment Government Board in Washington, it's "logical" that states will have to make difficult adjustments as they assign more weight to test scores in efforts to improve education for all students.

"Whenever you have a new version of a test, and you're trying to compare it to the previous year, that's very hard to do in a uniform way," says Mr. Feinberg.

But even testing proponents acknowledge that the speed with which states are being asked to implement tests is contributing to problems.

The fact that many new state-specific tests have to be developed is putting a strain on the system, says Chrys Dougherty, director of research at the National Center for Education Accountability in Austin, Texas. "One reason we're seeing these mistakes is that [the demands on] states and testing companies are exceeding the capacity of the existing tests," he says.

But he also believes that many of these testing errors will be smoothed over as both testmakers and test-takers warm up to the new routine.

Tying student performance to teacher pay, as some states do, and to school funding, as the federal law does, sometimes complicates the process, too, says Mr. Clifford. "When you put people in a position where [test results] may cost them their jobs or it may affect their pay, that increases the likelihood that there are going to be problems with the way the tests are administered," he says.

In addition to the stress of making tests more "high stakes," the sheer volume of tests that students take has prompted parents, teachers, and students to protest in recent years.

Georgia students, for example, take a battery of state-mandated exams, manufactured by three separate companies.

At the same time, the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) gives random survey tests to gather baseline information so states can see how their students measure up against other states. Then there's always the SAT for college applications – on the heels of the PSAT.

Today, there are signs that states are pulling away from some tests, at least temporarily.

Partly in reaction to this summer's dilemma, Georgia's state school board voted to make the Stanford 9 optional as an educational assessment tool for local school districts.

The state is looking to other testing mechanisms to fulfill the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act.

In the wake of problems in North Carolina, officials are considering postponing the implementation of the statewide writing assessment by two years. They expect their reading and math testing to continue, which will satisfy the federal law, but that doesn't mean they don't foresee the possibility of more bumps on the road.

"Other states like to look to North Carolina for advice on testing, but I can only say that they'll have to figure out a lot of this on their own," says Lou Fabrizio, North Carolina's test czar at the Education Department.

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