What happens when teachers fail the test

For Wilfredo Laboy, the news that he had failed one of Massachusetts' required literacy exams for educators - for the third year in a row - came at a particularly bad time.

By one of those weird confluences of events that give the news a tinge of humor, the state's poorest-performing district learned of its superintendent's failure the same summer the first Massachusetts seniors were denied diplomas for failing a high-stakes test. The same summer Mr. Laboy put 24 bilingual education teachers on unpaid leave for failing to pass an English fluency exam, while the Lawrence, Mass., school committee raised his salary to $156,560.

His plight became a punch line for Rush Limbaugh and agenda-pushing columnists last week, while the governor and state education commissioner - both ardent supporters of testing - rushed to Laboy's defense.

But the facts are more complicated than a talk-show one-liner. Laboy is, by all accounts, literate, articulate, and competent. He has implemented needed changes in a struggling district. English is his second language, and the test section he failed involves correctly spelling and punctuating arcane bits of dictation.

The situation may not be so much about how a superintendent could fail an exam, but whether such an exam is a useful measuring tool - and what happens when those charged with raising standards are forced to live up to them.

"There seems to be an assumption among a lot of policy makers and decision makers that the test is always right," says Joseph Pedulla, director of the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy at Boston College. "We in the business know that's not the case, that tests are fallible."

That those who know Laboy have been quick to support him isn't surprising, says Mr. Pedulla. Teachers often defend students who fail the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. "If you're sitting in the statehouse, you don't know those kids, so it's not real to you. But clearly here there's some personal knowledge, which starts to contradict the test result."

In the past decade or so, the push to test educators has spread almost as quickly as the mania for testing students. Reports of teachers who barely knew their subject fueled demands that they face standards just as their students do. Almost every state now requires testing for new teachers, and a few - such as Texas - have had even mid-career teachers prove themselves on exams.

In Massachusetts, the exam Laboy failed is part of a series of tests required of new teachers since 1998. The first time aspiring teachers took the tests, only 41 percent of them passed. Educators and some officials protested, claiming the tests were irrelevant or too hard, but others say they are what's needed to weed out unqualified teachers.

Paul Reville, director of the Center for Education Research and Policy at MassInc, a nonpartisan think tank in Boston, reviewed many of the written responses from those who failed the test. Having "people who were college graduates and yet couldn't string a sentence together was of deep concern," he says.

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