by Richard Rothstein
Testing Tots

Winter 2004/2005

Why we need a better means of evaluating our nation's youngest children


Illustration: Roxanna Bikadoroff



Perhaps it is nothing more than a reflexive decision of administration ideologues who see tests and more tests as the solution to every conceivable educational problem—or worse, a way to expose the academic failures they fundamentally believe to plague the public school system in America.


From national studies, it appears that Head Start graduates have better adolescent and adult outcomes than low-income children who weren't in the program; they are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college, they have higher earnings, and they are less likely to commit crimes. But it also appears that Head Start children, especially blacks, may get an initial cognitive boost that soon fades away, so by fourth grade their reading and math scores may be no higher than their peers'.



President Bush has assured educators that he considers it "absurd" for 4-year-olds to take tests like those given in elementary schools; yet in important respects, the flaws of the Head Start test are similar to—and perhaps more severe than—those of standardized tests for older children. As yet, nobody knows what the consequences of doing poorly on the test could be, because the federal Head Start Bureau, though determinedly pushing ahead, still can't say how results might be used. But the fear of adverse consequences alone must create incentives to "teach to the test," as high-stakes exams must do.






These haven't been scientifically validated either, but that makes them little different from the reading items. Including social and emotional items on the Head Start test would at least signal to Head Start teachers that the government was not trying to get them to make academic drills their only priority. An even better signal would be given if each child's assessment had to include a teacher's report of whether the child was up-to-date on regular pediatric and dental visits and had been given comprehensive vision and hearing screening—measures that are among Head Start's legislated objectives and that have at least as much to do with 4-year-olds' later school success as alphabet recognition.

If, as officials sometimes insist, the goal is to assess Head Start program quality and not to evaluate individual children, there is a better system already in place—one ignored by the administration in its compulsion to test first and wonder why later. Currently, federal officials evaluate the quality of every Head Start program in the nation triennially, sending teams of as many as 25 monitors—experts in management and finance, early childhood pedagogy, social-emotional development, health, and nutrition—for a full week to Head Start centers. Results of their investigations are forwarded to the government. Programs must develop plans to correct deficiencies in any area and submit to remonitoring to verify that flaws have been corrected. If the deficiencies are severe, or remain uncorrected, the government ends its contract with the Head Start operator and seeks bids for other organizations to run the community's program—a regular enough occurrence to ensure that Head Start programs take the reviews quite seriously.


There are ways this accountability system could be improved. Policymakers could join the expert teams, for example, to familiarize themselves with the challenges faced by early childhood programs. The monitoring standards could be revised to require that Head Start programs, consistent with what is now known about children's development, have somewhat higher expectations for academic skills without needlessly downgrading other important goals. And the system could require a higher level of skills in instruction and assessment from Head Start teachers—an elusive goal so long as funding for Head Start is so sparse that many teachers have no more than a high school education and are paid accordingly.

Yet even with their flaws, Head Start program reviews comprise the most comprehensive and high-quality ac-countability system in American education today. Rather than asking Head Start to ape the standardized testing regime of the No Child Left Behind law for K-12 education, we'd be better advised to ask elementary and secondary schools to submit to the kind of accountability already characteristic of the Head Start program.

Richard Rothstein is a senior correspondent with The American Prospect , a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute, a visiting professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of Class and Schools . Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect, Vol. 15, No. 11: Nov. 2, 2004. (The American Prospect, 11 Beacon St., Suite 1120, Boston, Massachusetts 02108.)

Winter 2004/2005