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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

What is a Jewish lesbian punk folk singer to do?
Neaten her crewcut, put on an apron and sell lots of Tupperware.
By Erin J. Aubry
[11/05/99]

The other woman
I can't wish she were dead; she may be dying.
By Jane Underwood
[11/04/99]

Unpleasantly plump
American kids are too fat and their parents are too wimpy. No one wants heavy kids to feel a burden, but is pudgy healthy?
By Anneli Rufus
[11/03/99]

Meet the Screamers
My kids are so loud they go to group speech therapy.
By Jennifer Moses
[11/02/99]

My grandparents were pioneers in the battle for visitation rights
To me, they were dependable, a security blanket I would never lose.
By Damien Cave
[11/01/99]

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Grilling our young
The SAT test coaching industry goes after kindergartners. Little blank slates mean great big bucks.

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By Jonathan Fox

Nov. 8, 1999 | Six years ago, Michael Hasty was just another anxious parent when he wrote a study guide to help his son pass the sixth-grade math portion of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). He produced the homemade guide in frustration after school officials told him there were few tools designed to help kids pass the TAAS, a battery of standardized tests that determine graduation, grade promotion and school rankings -- and set the agenda for nearly all school-reform efforts -- in test-happy Texas.

At first, Hasty didn't consider his do-it-yourself math guide more than a family tutoring aid, but when a racquetball partner offered $100 for a copy to help his son prepare for the TAAS, it didn't take him long to smell a market. Soon after, the Test Masters Company was born, and Hasty, a property tax consultant, was selling thousands of guides nationwide to worried parents, teachers and principals.

Test Masters has since diversified to the Internet, where parents as far away as South Africa pay $25 and school districts pay $1,000 a month to access practice exams and receive instant results. About 1,000 people take exams through the site every day. Today, Hasty considers his work a public service -- albeit a profitable one. "It's designed to help children pass the standards, but it's also designed to help children learn math," he says.

But not everyone considers his line of business so benign.

The runaway success of Test Masters has fired up the mammoth SAT coaching industry, already blamed for exacerbating inequality in college admissions and feeding test score hysteria. In the coming months, Kaplan and Princeton Review, the majors of test prep, will launch Web sites and publish printed guides aimed at children as young as kindergartners. They now see the K-12 test prep market as a rich vein of ore worth mining: Kaplan, for example, has funneled $25 million into product development and marketing for its new Web site.

This big-money march on the lower grades has sparked wrath from critics who say that tests encourage schools to dumb down their curriculum to fit multiple-choice tests that don't measure real learning. They liken test-focused education to a plague of locusts that leaves in its wake nervous kids, badgered teachers and a black hole where classroom innovation once existed.

Even worse, say opponents of test prep, the products of test coaching companies are accessible mainly to wealthy parents and schools. The massive expansion of companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review will come at the expense of the poorest schools, they say, which will suffer flak from politicians and lose public support when they can't raise test scores as fast as well-heeled counterparts. SAT coaching has already deepened the divide between haves and have-nots; with test prep in early grades, critics predict the gap may intensify sooner and doom lower-income students before they even leave elementary school.

"Schools will get the educational steroid that coaching makes possible," says Robert Schaeffer, public education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (Fairtest), "but they won't necessarily get any better, and gaps between rich and poor communities may grow."

For now, that warning is lost in the din of voices demanding higher educational standards, which currently means a lot more tests -- and by extension, a lot more test prep. Under the Clinton administration, "high-stakes" testing has proliferated. Currently, every state except Iowa has grade-by-grade standards detailing what students must know in English, math, science and social studies. Poor scores on tests aligned to new standards increasingly result in students being retained at their grade level, sent to summer school or denied diplomas while principals are fired and teachers get poor evaluations.

Proponents have seized on Texas and North Carolina, two test-busy states that have raised state and national test scores in recent years, as evidence that standards and tests work. Yet Texas still has the fourth lowest high school completion rate, and both states, which started out low or average in national rankings to begin with, have enacted other reforms that could account for the gains, such as lowering class sizes and raising teacher salaries. Meanwhile, other test-intensive states haven't shown improvement.

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