(NAME-MCE) Minority scores lag on teaching test

[Anselmo Villanueva]

More than half of the black and Latino students who take the state
teacher licensing exam in Massachusetts fail, at rates that are high
enough that many minority college students are starting to avoid
teacher training programs, The Boston Globe reported. The failure
rates are 54 percent (black), 52 percent (Latino) and 23 percent
(white).

Note in the article below that aspiring minority teachers and
education professors first complained to the state about the tests
after it was first administered in April 1998.  How many applicants of
color would there have been by now if this situation would have been
looked at nearly ten years ago?

Anselmo
-------------

Complete story below.  For better format and tables/graphs, go to:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/08/19/minority_scores_lag_on_teaching_test/

Minority scores lag on teaching test
Panel to study failure rate, bias complaints

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff  |  August 19, 2007  The Boston Globe

More than half the black and Hispanic applicants for teaching jobs in
Massachusetts fail a state licensing exam, a trend that has created a
major obstacle to greater diversity among public school faculty and
stirred controversy over the fairness of the test.

The minority failure rate has been demonstrably higher than among
whites since the test's inception nearly a decade ago, according to
state statistics, which show that 52 percent of Hispanic applicants
and 54 percent of black applicants fail the writing portion of the
exam. By comparison, 23 percent of whites fail. Black and Hispanic
teachers also lag behind white teachers in major subject tests such as
English, history, and math.

The problem has become so acute that a state task force of teachers,
professors, hiring directors, and state education officials convened
last week to begin examining why minorities fare so much worse on the
tests.

"One of the fallouts which is particularly upsetting in our expe
rience across the colleges is fewer and fewer students of color are
even going into teaching because word has gotten out that these tests
are very difficult for them," said Sally Dias, a vice president at
Emmanuel College in Boston who is a member of the panel. "One test
should really not be a determinant of someone's career."

Stiffer federal rules about teacher quality have increased educators'
worries about the results of the teaching test, which more than 16,000
Massachusetts teachers take annually. States, under a 2001 federal
law, must show teacher competency under a bar set by the state. In
Massachusetts, school districts now risk losing federal money if they
are not making progress toward licensing all teachers.

Education school deans in the last year began expressing concerns
about the minority teachers' high failure rates to state officials and
asked the state to evaluate the validity of the test and consider
other ways of judging prospective teachers. They and others say the
minority teachers' results raise questions about whether the design of
the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure is culturally biased
and whether the quality of education that minority teaching applicants
receive is good enough.

The state's teachers have had to take a battery of tests to get their
licenses since 1998, under rules set in the 1993 Education Reform Act.
Before 1998, teachers qualified for licenses if they passed certain
college courses and had completed student teaching.

Chris Anderson, chairman of the state Board of Education, said he is
open to other ways of assessing teachers as long as standards are not
lowered.

"There's no reason to have any barriers to quality teachers if we
don't need them," he said. "But at the same time, we need to have
accountability and assurance that there are basic abilities for any
new teacher in Massachusetts."

To receive state certification, teachers must pass the reading and
writing tests, known as communication and literacy skills, as well as
exams in the subjects they teach. They can take the tests as many
times as necessary to pass, but can continue teaching only if their
school systems apply to the state for waivers, which have become more
difficult to get. Boston dismissed more than 100 teachers last year
because they were unlicensed.

Aspiring minority teachers and education professors first complained
to the state about the tests after it was first administered in April
1998, when 60 percent of white test takers passed the writing portion,
compared with 24 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics. A
similar but narrower gap still exists in reading. Asians also trail
whites but pass at a higher rate than blacks and Hispanics.

The writing test, where minorities fare the worst, asks multiple
choice questions about spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.
Teachers must also show their knowledge of grammar by editing reading
passages and defining grammatical terms. They also must write an
essay, and summarize a reading passage.

Some minority teachers have criticized the test for containing
culturally biased questions such as readings about investing in the
stock market and ancient literature that white, middle-class
applicants and those with liberal arts college backgrounds more
readily identify with. Many minority teachers in urban school systems
began their education careers as teacher aides or parent volunteers,
and earned their education degrees at night and during summer courses
in local colleges.

A Cambridge lawyer said he plans to file a class-action lawsuit
shortly against the state Department of Education and the testing
company on behalf of three minority teachers who failed the test
multiple times since 1998 and lost their jobs.

Armando Jaime, who was teaching special education on a waiver in the
Boston Public Schools for eight years, was demoted to a nonteaching
job last year after his waiver was denied because he had failed the
teaching test at least eight times since 1998. His $62,000 teaching
salary was cut nearly in half, he said, and he was forced to take a
part-time job as a waiter.

Jaime's transcript from Lesley University, where he received his
master's degree in May 2006, shows a slew of A's and B's.

"I felt devastated, thinking I went to school for nothing," said
Jaime, 46, a native Spanish speaker from Puerto Rico who was a
teacher's aide for nine years before becoming a teacher. "My degree
felt diminished."

Testing specialists disagree on whether the state's teaching tests,
administered by National Evaluation Systems Inc., are biased against
minorities. Some call the tests defective because other teacher tests
run by the company have been invalidated in the courts. In 1989, a
federal judge ruled that the company's tests in Alabama were flawed
and ordered them discontinued after a group of black teachers filed a
lawsuit.

Massachusetts has a committee that reviews the tests for bias to make
sure the content does not disadvantage test takers from different
cultural or ethnic backgrounds. But the state task force plans to
scrutinize the test more and make recommendations by December or early
next year, said Heidi Guarino, the education department spokeswoman.
In addition to 1998 results, the state recently analyzed test data
from 2003 to 2006 and established a persistent pattern of failure
among minorities, she said.

Some school system officials liken the disparity among teaching
applicants' test results to the achievement gap between black and
Hispanic students, and their white and Asian classmates.

"If you take the achievement gap of high school students, you can just
project it forward into college and into the teaching ranks," said
Nick Balasalle, an educational consultant working in the Boston Public
Schools and who belongs to the state's new task force.

He and others said minority teachers who graduate from more selective
teacher training programs fare better on licensure tests than those
who attend less selective programs. Rather than scrap teacher testing,
the state should focus on the quality of teaching colleges, many said.

"We ask the students to meet performance standards so we should do no
less for the teachers," Balasalle said.

In Boston, the school system two years ago began subsidizing courses
on the state tests for more than 650 substitute teachers, teacher
aides, and teachers who had not yet passed the tests. The Black Caucus
of the Boston Teachers Union also plans to conduct its own study
sessions for minority teachers starting this fall.

"It's at a do or die stage," said Sarita Thomas, chairwoman of the
caucus and an eighth-grade math teacher in Boston. "We're losing too
many of our good teachers because they're not given waivers or extra
time to pass these tests."

Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan at globe.com.