Test-Score Inflation

We shouldn’t get too excited about SAT-9 gains over the last two years in California (July 18). In their book, “The Manufactured Crisis,” David Berliner and Bruce Biddle summarize research showing that students always score higher each year on commercial tests. There were gains of two points each year on the California Achievement Test in the 1980s, and 1 1/2 points each year on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

Nobody is quite sure why commercial test-score inflation happens, but it does. That’s why commercial tests need to be recalibrated every so often. This general tendency for commercial test scores to increase accounts for half of the increase in grades two and three in the SAT-9 reading test since 1998 and all of the increase in grades four through seven. It also suggests that SAT-9 reading scores in California have actually declined slightly in grades eight through 11.

STEPHEN KRASHEN

Professor of Education, USC

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At my daughter’s school, the principal has made reading a priority. There are read-a-thons, daily reading records, “1000 Days to Reading Success” (beginning with reading instruction in kindergarten), Christopher Nance’s special reading program, the “Cool Cougar Reader” program and a reading competition where the class that reads the most books gets to throw water balloons at the principal. One-third of my daughter’s first-grade class was pulled out of class each day for special reading intervention, at the expense of math, social studies, music and physical education.

And yet, compared with 1999, her school’s reading scores in the elementary grades either remained the same or went down. However, in math, which received much less emphasis, the scores all improved. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

My daughter has learned to dislike reading already, and she still has at least 11 more years of school. What a shame.

LISA WILKIN

El Segundo