What happens when teachers fail the test

As for Laboy, Mr. Reville says he knows the superintendent and admires some of the changes he's brought to Lawrence. The fact that a clearly literate man failed the literacy test raises some questions about its validity, he says, but "since we have that requirement, it's imperative that he meet it whether it's relevant to his job or not."

Teachers in his district agree with his logic. It's not that they think Laboy is illiterate, says Stephen Crawford, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers. It's that they want the rules to be fair.

Since Laboy was hired from New York three years ago he has failed the test three times. State officials have given him until December to pass it, but said they wouldn't immediately replace him if he fails. A ballot decision to get rid of bi- lingual education, meanwhile, is requiring all teachers to meet a fluency requirement by summer's end.

"We'd like to see [the teachers who haven't passed] get additional tutoring, additional chances to pass the test, and be permitted to work in the school system while they work toward this," says Mr. Crawford, noting Laboy could have done all those things but instead suspended the teachers without pay. (Laboy didn't return Monitor phone calls.)

Laboy didn't make the teachers any happier with his recent comments. "I'm trying to understand the congruence of what I do here every day and this stupid test," he told the local paper.

But critics of testing say they could hardly have put it better themselves.

"He's right. And the ability to pass standardized tests has little to do with how well teachers teach and students learn," says Alfie Kohn, author of "Schools our Children Deserve." "The question is why people understand the limits of standardized tests when they themselves become the victims of it, with curious lack of empathy for victims other than themselves."

In fact, the Laboy situation is just one of several recent instances that have made testing critics a bit gleeful. Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest in Cambridge, Mass., points to the recently released federal ratings of schools. Only 14 percent of Florida's schools met the federal standards, even though more than half those schools received an "A" grade just a few months ago by Gov. Jeb Bush. And in New York, teachers certified years ago by a now-defunct city board are fighting a requirement that they go back and take the state's entry-level test.

All three cases show "how subjective and political the entire game of attempting to evaluate educational quality on the basis of test scores is," says Mr. Schaeffer. Like most critics of high-stakes tests, he says he's not against high standards - just the idea that competency can be determined by a single test.

He cites one young man who wanted to be a music teacher in Massachusetts. He had graduated from the prestigious Berklee College of Music, was a composer, a conductor, and a skilled musician, and yet was denied a job because he couldn't pass the dictation section of the Massachusetts exam.

Schaeffer's proposed solution: Start requiring competency tests for two professions other than teachers: state legislators and journalists. Then, he laughs, "everybody would be on our side."

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