11/16/97
The principle underlying Colorado's venture into statewide testing is familiar enough from the workaday world: people tend to pay attention to whatever their employer keeps track of. 
     If the chairman of the board personally scrutnizes every accident report, workers will be very conscious of safety. If the president asks to be copied in on every customer complaint, good service will be a high priority. 
     The Colorado State Assessment Program (CSAP, pronounced ``sea-sap'') is intended to harness that very natural impulse with tests that will focus students' and teachers' attention on the academic standards Colorado adopted in 1995, after a two-year drafting process that involved thousands of people. 
     In April, more than 50,000 fourth-graders took the first test, on reading and writing. Last week, the state Department of Education announced the results: in reading, 57 percent were ``proficient'' or ``advanced''; in writing, 31 percent. 
     In other words, 43 percent of state fourth-graders are behind where they ought to be in reading, and 69 percent lag in writing. 
     That's a shocker, and it was intended to be. The level of performance was deliberately set high, state officials say, but realistically the standards lay out what children must ``know and be able to do'' by the end of fourth grade in order to keep up through the rest of their school years, and after. 
     The standards have two aspects, said Gov. Roy Romer, who is proud to claim leadership on this issue. One is content _ ``What do you need to know?'' and the second is performance _ ``How good is good enough?'' 
     Or as parents might put it, what's in these standards anyway, and why didn't my kid meet them? 
     Though there's been a lot of talk about establishing specific expectations, Colorado's model content standards, reprinted below,  are too brief to be other than general. 
     1. Students read and understand a variety of materials. 
     2. Students write and speak for a variety of purposes and audiences. 
     3. Students write and speak using conventional grammar, usuage, sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. 
     4. Students apply thinking skills to their reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing. 
     5. Students read to locate, select, and make use of relevant information from a variety of media, reference, and technological sources. 
     6. Students read and recognize literature as a record of human experience. 
     Each of these is is explained further with lists of related skills; for instance, one thing students must do to meet Standard 1 is ``use information from their reading to increase vocabulary and enhance language usage.'' And each standard is interpreted for three different grade levels, K-4, 5-8 and 9 12. 
     The complete documents are available at http://cde.state.co.us/ on the department's web page. 
     But such broad and vague statements aren't what most parents think of when they read that the standards are ``specific expectations'' for what children can do. 
     Even though Standard 1 says children will apply reading strategies ``in increasingly difficult reading material at each grade level,'' does that mean Goosebumps or Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker? 
     Under Standard 4, children should be ``using reading, writing, speaking, and listening to define and solve problems'' in grades K-4. By grades 5-8, it's ``using reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing skills to solve problems and answer questions'' (emphasis mine). Are we to suppose little kids don't watch television? 
     And ``as students in grades 9-12 extend their knowledge,'' they should be using ``. . . articulate speaking'' (as opposed to inarticulate speaking, presumably). 
     The standards are specific in a few places where they shouldn't be; for example, Standard 5 says K-4 students should know how to use pull-down menus, icons and key word searches. 
     Some political correctness has crept in also; Standard 6 instructs students to ``read literature to investigate common issues and interests,'' and exactly which issues is all too clear. Fourth-graders should be reading and discussing the ways the stories they read ``reflect the ethnic background of the author and the culture in which they were written'' and in high school students are to study literature ``both classic and contemporary, from a variety of ethnic writers.'' 
     At least the standards acknowledge that there is such a thing as classic literature. 
     Fortunately, the answers to Romer's questions depend not only on the standards themselves, but also on the tests that accompany them. Along with the results, the department of education released about 25 percent of the questions from last spring's test. 
     The questions that were made public won't be used again, but comparable items will. 
     ``We'd be delighted if teachers used these items as the basis for their lessons,'' said Don Watson, head of the student assessment program at te Department of Education. 
     It's a safe bet that children will be doing a lot more writing, and if that's ``teaching to the test,'' so much the better. 
     Children spent six 50-minute periods on the test, two of them devoted principally to writing, and then revising, a story about a cat that needed a new owner. 
     The subjects chosen for such a statewide test almost have to be insubstantial, because there's no single topic that all fourth-graders have studied. But individual teachers preparing for the test can tailor their writing exercises to their classes' reading and be as demanding as they like. Come test time, their students should think it's easy to dash off fluff about Fluffy. 
     And spelling counts, as well as punctuation, capitalization and all the conventions. Not for a great deal, but enough so teachers who subscribe to the theory that children should never be corrected in such matters may have to think again. 
     So far, Colorado's test seems to have escaped most of the problems that doomed the California Learning Assessment System a few years ago _ by design, Watson said. Questions are screened for appropriateness by a panel of professional educators and community members. 
     But whether the combination of standards and tests will succeed in first concentrating students' attention and then on improving their performance _ that remains to be seen. 
     Parents should ask, ``what does this mean _ `partically proficient' in reading? `Unsatisfactory' in writing? What are you going to do about it?'' 
     But they should also ask themselves, ``What am I going to do about it?'' What children learn at home makes all the difference in how much they learn in school.