THE TEST OF THEIR LIVES

By JAMES S. KUNEN

Commencement is not an end, it is a beginning, graduates around the country are being assured this spring. But for Catherine Cockrell's dreams and aspirations, her high school graduation ceremonies may have marked the beginning of the end.

Denied the chance to graduate with her classmates at Paris (Texas) High School, she attended the event anyway and bravely joined their celebration. "It's kind of hard," she confessed. "I'm the oddball. Everybody else has a diploma, and I don't."

Cockrell went to all her classes, did all her homework, earned all her credits. But, like just one other of her 162 classmates, she could not pass Texas' statewide high school exit exam. Cockrell had enlisted in the Army, having passed its qualifying test, and was getting ready to ship out the week after graduation. But without passing the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, she could not get a diploma, and without a diploma, her enlistment was void.

"Some people get testaphobia," she says. "I passed my math classes with flying colors, but I get to that TAAS test and my mind's like blank. I have no idea why." She'll try once more in July, but if she fails, all her plans will have come to nothing.

That's what happened to Lee Hicks, Paris High School should've-been class of '93. Had he lived 14 miles away in Oklahoma, which has no statewide exit test, he'd have received a diploma and would now be serving his country in the Navy. Instead Hicks serves customers in a Paris supermarket; he won management's Aggressive Hospitality Award for 1996. "He's a great employee, a bright young man--extremely hardworking," says store director Larry Legg. "He has the capability to go as far as he wants." But how far can one go without a high school diploma?

More and more young Americans may find themselves in Hicks' and Cockrell's shoes. So-called high-stakes testing is the latest silver bullet designed to cure all that ails public education, and accountability is the vocabulary word of the day. High schools, it is widely believed, are graduating too many kids who haven't mastered basic skills. Solution: all students, even after passing their courses, must also pass a statewide standardized "exit test" to graduate. And the test scores can then be used to gauge how well teachers and school administrators are doing their jobs.

Already 18 states have high school exit tests. National tests, endorsed by Bill Clinton and George Bush before him, will begin in 1999 with fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. The tests are supposed to serve only as a benchmark to assess educational progress, but they could one day lead to nationwide graduation standards. Now Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and IBM chairman Louis Gerstner Jr., co-chairs of last year's Education Summit, are adding to the pressure, enlisting companies to pledge that they will look at young applicants' academic records, including exit-test scores, rather than rely only on interviews and job-skill tests.

Texas is a national leader in high-stakes testing, having instituted a statewide high school exit exam in 1985 at the urging of a committee chaired by Ross Perot. Since then scores have climbed. In 1993, 51% of Texas 10th-graders passed all three sections of the TAAS--math, reading, writing--on the first try. This year 67% did. (Students get eight tries over three years.)

But low-income and minority students, often trapped in inferior schools, fail at a disproportionate rate. About 9% of the state's black and Hispanic seniors--7,380 last year--fail the exit test; less than 2% of whites do. The Texas N.A.A.C.P. has complained to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights that the TAAS has a discriminatory impact. A ruling may be announced this week. "We're not against testing," says state N.A.A.C.P. president Gary Bledsoe, "but testing should be used as a diagnostic tool, not for punitive purposes."

Cultural bias has been weeded out of most standardized tests--the SATs don't ask questions about chablis--and Texas officials insist that the TAAS is race neutral. But even if a test is fair, it can be put to uses that are not. Low TAAS scores, for example, have not been shown to correlate with the inability to do any particular job, but the lack of a high school diploma does correlate with the inability to find work. Should students poorly educated by substandard teachers be further penalized when they can't pass a test? What about good students who just don't test well? Argues Linda Darling-Hammond of Teachers College at Columbia University: "The use of tests as a sole determinant of high school graduation imposes heavy personal and societal costs without obvious social benefits."

Standardized testing was adopted early in this century, largely in pursuit of what Thomas Jefferson had called an "aristocracy of virtue and talent." Opportunities would be allotted on the basis of what you knew, not whom you knew. Reliance on tests grew, to compensate for the divergent standards in schoolrooms across the country. But tests cannot quantify qualities such as cooperativeness, creativity, or the perseverance a teenager needs to sit down in a two-room shack and do homework every night.

Critics argue that high-stakes tests can have other unfortunate consequences. Because high scores can bring rewards to the school--Texas at one point offered principals $5,000 bonuses for boosting TAAS results--while low scores invite sanctions, high-stakes tests may make it even harder for schools serving disadvantaged students to recruit the best faculty. Some schools inflate their scores by tinkering with the test pool; techniques include pushing low achievers into special education, or making them repeat a grade, which may cause them to fall further behind and ultimately drop out.

What's more, with so much riding on the test results for both students and school, there is a tendency to "teach to the test," emphasizing narrowly focused drills rather than broader--and ultimately more useful--education. "Believing we can improve schooling with tests is like believing we can fatten cattle by weighing them," says Monty Neill of FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass., advocacy group.

Proponents of testing respond that while it may be unfair to deny graduation to a kid who has passed his or her courses, it's also unfair to let a student graduate who can't read or do math. "You've got to start sometime saying to kids that the tests of the real world are going to flunk you anyway," says E.D. Hirsch Jr., author of Cultural Literacy. "Tough love is the right kind of fairness. And you have to change the system with shock treatment at some point."

Paris High School principal Randy Wade agrees. Before he took over, the school had been branded "low performing" because of its TAAS scores. "With the low-performance rating, we knew our backs were against the wall," says Wade. He aligned the curriculum to the test and shortened classes by five minutes in order to create a 35-minute, daily taas tutorial. "We realized we can identify the individual needs of all learners and do a better job--that's what I like about TAAS," he says. Still, Wade laments the denial of graduation to hardworking students and believes "there ought to be another way" to earn some sort of diploma.

Perhaps one day there will be, but for Catherine Cockrell it may be too late.