Erica Young

How the Colorado Student Assessment Program is Leaving Children Behind

Education is at once fundamental, controversial, essential and important. Here in the US, estimates of education spending for elementary and secondary schools hover in the one trillion dollar mark (ed.gov). Of this, the federal government is responsible for about eight percent, or eighty billion dollars. As per the omission of education from the Constitution of the United States, most of the onus for school funding is assumed to rest with the states. However, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, unprecedented authority was granted to the federal government in the form of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. With this sweeping education reform, the federal government clinched the strings to a very hefty purse. In Colorado, as of 2008, the state budget for education received a whopping thirteen percent of its funding from the federal government (Bill 09-259), making the state accountable to federal standards designed to ensure that no child is left behind.

Of the nearly five million persons living in the State of Colorado in 2008, about one million reported Hispanic origins (census.gov). A fifth of the population is hard to ignore, and yet for students outside of the dominant, English, middle class culture, it’s difficult to feel anything but marginalized. The Colorado Student Assessment Program, or CSAP, is a standardized test administered biannually to over half a million elementary and secondary students in order to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Teacher pay, student attrition, special needs programs and federal funding all depend on the results of the test. Though the CSAP is offered in both English and Spanish, the administration, execution, and grading requirements are unfair and biased in favor of the dominant English speaking culture. The NCLB Act, and specifically its incarnation in Colorado schools as the CSAP, disadvantages native Spanish speaking students so that the dominant English speaking power structure is perpetuated, and the majority of wealth made from the labor of the disenfranchised stays centralized in the hands of the privileged few. Given the role culture and language have in the social construction of knowledge and thus the healthy development of children, it is imperative we redress the flaws inherent in the CSAP and challenge the national standards of education reform to better prepare tomorrow’s leaders for the global economy we are creating today.

As parents, teachers and tax payers, it is our duty to protect our children from static, rote learning that promotes the dominant class ideology and reproduces the socioeconomic class strata generation after generation. What’s so bad about the current class system? And why should those with money want to level the playing field, anyway? Under the current capitalist paradigm in the US, twenty percent of the population owns eighty percent of the wealth (Domhoff) and therefore dominates the rules of behavior in our society. Poverty, and more accurately, the gross inequity of class, taxes us all; those who qualify as the ‘haves’ will inevitably pay for the ‘have-nots’ in the form of health care, crime rates and the lost potential of the next generation. Many persons with economically disadvantaged backgrounds cannot afford the time or money required for higher education and instead remain entrapped by working-class roots and a lack of cultural capital, or the educational and cultural knowledge in a social exchange system that, when accumulated as with traditional financial capital, often implies power and status within the dominant culture. It should also be noted that the most economically disadvantaged sectors of the US are generally minorities and immigrants (census.gov). This correlation between poverty and race is firmly entrenched in a history of slavery and colonialism. Activist and critical theorist Peter Mclaren understands, too, that “Cultural capital is reflective of material capital and replaces it as a form of symbolic currency that enters into the exchange system of the school” (Darder, et al. 81). Thus, the economically deprived do poorly on standardized tests that determine the level of cultural acquisition, not academic achievement, which such students have attained. Under the guise of commanding proficiency, standardized tests measure the degree to which students agree to assimilate into the dominant culture and the degree to which they agree to remain subordinate to the dominant culture.

In order to understand the role of class in standardized testing, it is first important to understand some history of education in the US. The NCLB of 2001 is the most recent, and controversial, revision of a federal educational act that arose in the wake of the Cold War. The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was signed into law to “ …help ensure that highly trained individuals would be available to help America compete with the Soviet Union in scientific and technical fields” (ed.gov/overview). Though this was the inaugural step in federal education legislation, the act preserved local and state control of schools and curriculum. During the ensuing decades, and spurred on by the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation and poverty awareness, the NDEA was transformed into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The ESEA legislated federal expenditures for elementary and secondary schools in an effort to increase educational opportunities for poor and minority children, including native Spanish speakers, but still, “The federal government was forbidden to intervene on local school policies [and] in local pedagogical and curriculum decisions” (Berlak 270). Today, the NCLB Act is an incarnation of that same ESEA signed into law under President Johnson in 1965. What makes the NCLB Act so controversial is the role funding plays in federal control of local schools, the correlation between the McGraw-Hill Company and President Bush, and the lack of a clear standard of accountability to which schools are being held accountable, and finally, the spike in cheating and drop-out rates from disadvantaged students who are unable to meet school standards of accountability.

Let’s take a look at the forces at work in preparing, publishing, and scoring the test. In Colorado, the McGraw-Hill company holds that honor. In fact, CTB, a division of McGraw-Hill, services twenty three states with student assessment contracts now required under the NCLB Act. Essentially, federal funds are channeled directly to McGraw-Hill via contracted states as a direct result of the NCLB Act. According to the Colorado State budget, over twenty million dollars is allocated for student assessment. Of that figure, nearly twenty-three percent ($4,604,907) is funded by the federal government (Bill 09-259). The numbers speak for themselves, and though the McGraw-Hill representative I contacted refused to elaborate on the company’s student assessment contract with Colorado, it can be safely assumed that the company earns a cool fifteen million or more per annum from the taxpayers of Colorado—all thanks to the monopoly McGraw-Hill has on standardized test production. It can be further noted that of that fifteen million, 3.5 million comes directly from federal funds, suggesting McGraw-Hill may have had a stake in the passage of the NCLB Act.

Further inquiry into the 2000 presidential campaign contributions yielded little in the way of actual figures, but several newspaper articles and internet watchdog sites support the claim that Harold McGraw, CEO and President of the McGraw-Hill Companies, contributed a sizable amount and lobbied ferociously in favor of George W. Bush, the former US President who signed the NCLB Act into law just a year after taking office in 2001 (Berlak 281). In addition to owning Business Week Magazine and Standard & Poors (the finance reporting company that produces the S&P500), McGraw-Hill is one of the three largest textbook publishers in the US. McGraw-Hill also publishes a primer on the NCLB Act, and, according to their website, they are the largest phonics, test prep and test administering agency in the US (ctb.com). Coincidence or commercial alliance?

Armed with some history of federal and state schooling responsibilities and equipped with knowledge of corporate investment in federal education reform, let’s take a look at how Colorado earns its federal funding. The Colorado Student Assessment Program, or CSAP, has been administered to Colorado students since 1997, when they were first administered in a single grade level. Today, grades three through ten must take the tests twice a year to comply with the NCLB Act. Colorado state law mirrors the NCLB by declaring that states may “administer tests in other languages except that any student who has participated in the English language proficiency program (created pursuant to 22-24-104) for more than a total of three school years must take the English version of the statewide assessments” (Statute 22-7-409). Accepting that children under twelve develop second language skills at a far more advanced rate than that of adults, could one presume that it’s fair to demand English speakers of other languages have a mere three years to acquire the grammar, vocabulary and cultural traditions of a language other than their own? The NCLB sure thinks so, but offers accommodations in response to this question, stating clearly in the law that:

“…if the local educational agency determines, on a case-by-case individual basis, that academic assessments in another language or form would likely yield more accurate and reliable information on what such student knows and can do, the local educational agency may make a determination to assess such student I the appropriate language other than English for a period that does not exceed two additional consecutive years” (NCLB 1451.x)

Getting beyond the generous allowance of an additional two years for English language acquisition, this law disregards the fact that classroom teachers, especially those trained in a rote tradition, are more apt to misunderstand language difficulty and instead label it as slow-learning. When students are labeled as slow-learning, challenged or deficient, educators are more likely to dismiss them as hopeless cases. In a predictable pattern, these hopeless cases are marginalized and have very few supporters to rally on their behalf for additional testing accommodations. In an article written for the Harvard Educational Review, Oscar Lopez Jr, originally from Guatemala and now a sixteen year old junior in a US high school, poignantly illustrates this in a letter response to NCLB. He states, “Because of my ethnicity and where I come from, people expect me to fail in America’s school system and not stand a chance in postsecondary education. I am a minority. …America already assumes I won’t amount to much” (Wilson 712).

The CSAP test reinforces the young Mr. Lopez’s interpretation of Latino expectation in the US. The CSAP is not blatantly biased; if it were, it may not have made it past initial revisions in our ethnically conscious era. Instead, the CSAP is far more insidious, reinforcing dominant culture at the most subtle level. It may not seem obvious at first, but after a close examination of some released writing prompts, it will be easy to understand how students like Oscar Lopez reach the conclusions they do.

To begin our examination, I shall start with the 2004 third Grade CSAP writing prompts. The English language prompt reads: “What makes you happy? Write a paragraph in which you describe something that makes you happy and explain why it makes you happy” (CSAP 2004). The Spanish language version reads: “Escribe un párrafo en que describas algo bueno que tu hiciste o que viste hacer a otra persona y por que esa fue una buena acción” (CSAP 2004)¹. The difference may seem innocuous, but the subtle forces of hegemony are hard at work. Unwittingly, test writers have reinforced stereotypes of Latinos in service, Latinos as subordinate. The English version is passive and the Spanish version active, suggesting the dominant culture need not ‘do’ anything to secure happiness, while the Spanish speakers must inevitably be of service, working to obtain what the dominant culture possesses. Test writers further complicate matters by supposing students may not have a response for their own actions, but might remember another’s buena accion, suggesting an undertone of failure. The question seems to imply native Spanish speakers don’t do enough good actions on their own and would therefore need to look to others to fulfill test requirements. This leads me to wonder why a direct translation did not suffice. One might argue the two different prompts were intended to address the complicated question of cultural capital; it could be assumed that two distinct topics are more culturally conscious. Yet isn’t the question “¿Qué te hace feliz?”² just as applicable in Spanish-speaking households as in English speaking households?

Moving on to the 2003 fourth grade prompts, we continue the same trend. In English, the prompt reads:

“Have you ever listened to someone’s problem, done something special for someone, or helped around the house? When we help others, we often help ourselves. Tell about a time when you felt good because you helped someone. Be sure to include what you did and how you felt about it.” (CSAP 2003)

Compare this to the Spanish version:

“Por las tardes asistes a un programa después de la escuela. Una tarde, dos nuevos niños entran al programa. Te acercas a ellos para hacerte amigos y descubres que ellos no hablan tu mismo idioma. Escribe un cuento sobre como lograste hacer amistad con los niños.” (CSAP 2003)³

Here, the discrepancy is a bit more obvious. Though the fourth grade English prompt may at first seem reminiscent of the third grade Spanish prompt, but there are vast and glaring differences. The content jumps out immediately: the English version is entirely ego-centric, never suggesting the students look beyond their own actions for inspiration. And like the third grade English prompt about happiness, the fourth grade English prompt goes so far as to suggest that by helping others, we help ourselves, perpetuating the selfish values of the dominant culture and cultivating early feelings of individuation and entitlement. The Spanish language version stands in sharp contrast. Though it may be true that more low income families participate in the after-school extended day programs and that many minorities fall into a lower income bracket (census.gov), it is wrong to assume this is somehow relevant to a standardized test. This line of questioning implies after school programs are the standard for Spanish speaking households. Thus, the students are segregated into those that have parents who may devote more time to child care in the afternoons (the English speakers), and those that are not available until later in the work day (the Spanish speakers). Second, though it may also be true that many others in the school may not speak Spanish, it is wrong to suggest that the onus is on the Spanish speaker to make friends. In this instance, I wonder why the English version didn’t make use of the same question, subtly working to infuse a sense of responsibility in the English speaking students.

As with the evaluation of content, there are big differences in the form and word choice between the two prompts. The last sentence of the English prompt gives very specific directions about what to address in the writing, much like an outline, directly soliciting a ‘what’ and a ‘how’ from the English speakers. The last sentence of the Spanish language version offers much more freedom from construction, soliciting a story rather than offering an outline. Setting the Spanish speakers up to write a story will likely lead to a reduced grade which is based on a rubric designed to address specifics such as the “what” and “how” of the English language prompt. Even more despicable, the Spanish prompt is priming Latino children to take a subservient role in intercultural relationships, demanding they take responsibility to assimilate into their new cultural landscape and absolving the English speaking children of their responsibility to their classmates. In her article “Bringing Bilingual Education Out of the Basement,” Sonia Nieto highlights another valid, though disheartening, fact: “…language-minority students are often physically isolated from their English-speaking peers, [and] this separation adds to their alienation” (471). Thus, after years of isolation in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes, and after 16 required CSAP exams which subtly reinforce stereotype and low expectations, is it any wonder that youth such as Oscar feel slighted by an underhanded system of oppression?

Disparity between the CSAP tests is directly related to the NCLB Act and the perpetuation of the dominant ideology. Robert Sternberg writes of the NCLB Act and its impact on the cycle, stating “the ‘No Child’ Law inadvertently encourages schools to encourage their weaker students to drop out. In this way, those students’ test scores will not reduce scores for the school” (¶6). The cycle goes like this: Spanish speakers enter the school system and face inherent bias and alienation. Labeled as ‘slow’ or Limited English Proficient, they do poorly on standardized tests, negatively affecting the amount of money schools will receive as a reward for higher scores. Spanish speakers are encouraged to drop out of school early so schools may discount those poor scores. Without a high school diploma, this native Spanish speaking youth enter the workforce and find manufacturing or service sector jobs that pay little and trap them in a cycle of poverty. Now, the dominant English speaking culture ensures the perpetuation of a pool of cheap, uneducated labor. Taking advantage of the cycle of oppression, the dominant culture continues to profit and subjugate the Spanish speaking population, all the while maintaining hold on both financial and cultural capital.

Evidence of the cycle exists in the graduation rates for the State of Colorado. Graduation rates reached a ten year high in 2003, just a couple years after the instatement of the NCLB Act. Since then, however, graduation rates have been declining steadily, reflecting a trend potentially related to low test scores. Because the CSAPs are given only until grade 10, the 2003 graduation rates (in black) show a graduating class unadulterated by consistent CSAP testing as required by the NCLB Act of 2001. The rates for 2008 (in gray) show a graduating class subjected to at least six years of testing, or twelve CSAPs. The difference is striking:

. Fig. 1 ^§

We are sending the message to our children that English speakers are entitled to wealth, fulfillment, and happiness, and that Spanish speakers are lazy, not worth the trouble, and only here to serve the dominant class. Is this truly the legacy we want to perpetuate? The findings represented herein are the tip of the iceberg, yet this body of evidence is already strong enough to support the need for radical change in the state and federal approach to testing in schools. By doing away with standardized testing which measures cultural acquisition and acquiescence to prescribed social roles, we could instead focus on teaching our children to embrace a multicultural school landscape, giving students the tools to navigate an increasingly shrinking world. By exploring economically disparate experiences, students gain perspective outside of their own spheres of reality and become more tolerant of the world around them, less likely to act out in fear or hatred. By engaging a multifaceted view of learning and appreciation of learning styles, we cultivate emotionally sound dancers, engineers, artists, doctors, thinkers, activists, and so much more! Nieto reminds us that “…all classrooms in the future will have students whose first language is not English, even if they do not currently serve such students” (469). Are we going to allow ourselves to be governed by our collective fear of the “other”, or are we going to acknowledge how much cultural and economic prosperity we stand to gain by integrating a multicultural, bilingual landscape into our every day reality, to find the truth in E Pluribus Unum⁴?

Notes

1. Translation: “Write a paragraph in which you describe something good that you did or that you saw someone else do and why it was a good action.”

2. Translation: “What makes you happy?”

3. Translation: “In the afternoons you attend an after-school program. One afternoon, two new children enter the program. You approach them to make friends and discover that they don’t speak your same language. Write a story about how you managed to make friends with the children.”

4. Translation: “Out of Many, One”; Latin slogan most commonly associate with the US legal tender and found on the Seal of the United States.

^§Graph constructed with selected data from CDE 2008 Graduation rates. Access to full statistics can be found in Work Cited reference. LEP is Limited English Proficient. Rates are in percentage on a 100 point scale:

Works Cited

Berlak, Harold. From Local Control to Government and Corporate Takeover of School Curriculum: The No Child Left Behind Act and the Reading First Program. Ed. H. Svi Shapiro and David E. Purpel. Critical Social Issues in American Educaiton. 3rd ed. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. 267-85. Print.

Domhoff, G. William. "Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power." UC Santa Cruz - Sociology. University of California at Santa Cruz, Sept. 2005. Web. 25 Oct. 2009. <http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html>.

McLaren, Peter. Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts. Ed. Antonia Darder, Marta P. Baltodano, and Rodolfo D. Torres. The Critical Pedagogy Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2009. 61-83. Print.

N.a. “Colorado Graduation Rates by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Instructional Program.” Colorado Education Statistics: Class of 2008 Graduation Data. Colorado Department of Education, 06 August, 2009. Web. 30 November, 2009.

N.a. "CTB/McGraw-Hill - About CTB." CTB/McGraw-Hill | Educational Assessments for Pre-K, K-12, and Adults. McGraw Hill Companies, 2009. Web. 25 Oct. 2009. <http://www.ctb.com/static/about_ctb/about_ctb.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=2534374302061857&CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673264971&bmUID=1256519701305>.

N.a. "Federal Role in Education." U.S. Department of Education Home Page. ED, 06 May 2009. Web. 25 Oct. 2009. <http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/role.html>.

N.a. "Unit of Student Assessment - Unit of Student Assessments." Colorado Deptartment of Education Home Page. Colorado Department of Education, 30 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Oct. 2009. <http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/documents/csap/usa_index.html>.

N.a. "US Census Bureau 2000 QuickFacts." State and County QuickFacts. US Census Bureau, 04 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Oct. 2009. <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/>.

Nieto, Sonia. Bringing Bilingual Education Out of the Basement and Other Imperatives for Teacher Education. Ed. Antonia Darder, Marta P. Baltodano, and Rodolfo D. Torres. The Critical Pedagogy Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2009. 469-484. Print.

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, §§ Title 1-1002-1901 (2002). Print.

S. 09-259, CO Cong., Colorado General Assembly 28 (2009) (enacted). Print.

Statute 22-7-409. Assessments. Colorado State Revised Statutes (1997) (enacted). Print.

Sternberg, Robert J. Good Intentions, Bad Results: A dozen reasons why the No Child Left Behind Act is failing our schools. Ed. James C. Kaufman and Elena L. Grigorenko. The Essential Sternberg: Essays on Intelligence, Psychology, and Education. New York: Springer Company, 2008. 479-82. Print.

Wilson, Howard Eugene, ed. "High School Students' Perspectives on the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act's Definition of a Highly Qualified Teacher." Harvard Educational Review 76.4 (2006): 698-724. Print.