IN A COUNTRY WHERE HIGH SCHOOL KIDS of every stripe seem to favor the same uniforms of baggy pants or midriff-baring shirts, it can be hard to spot differences in class background. But one giveaway for juniors and seniors lies in the contents of their backpacks--there's a good chance that the more affluent will be toting test-prep materials from companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review. These are the top firms that teach courses designed to give kids a leg up on those all-important college-entrance exams, the SAT and ACT, as well as graduate school equivalents like the GMAT and LSAT. Such programs have long been controversial because, at $1,000 per 12-session course, they provide children of the affluent yet another unfair advantage in life, teaching them how to game the tests that largely determine admission to selective colleges and universities--tests that are themselves of dubious intellectual value.
Now, after years of exacerbating class differences among the college-bound, test-prep companies are expanding their offerings downward to cover children as young as six. The reason is the testing mania spawned by the school reform movement. In the 1990s, outraged by the low quality of so many public schools, many states, encouraged by Washington, imposed rigorous tests that students must pass before they can advance to the next grade. Sensing an opportunity, companies like Kaplan Inc. began developing prep courses for those tests and marketing them to the anxious parents of K-through-12 students. This fever peaked last year with the passage of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which requires such tests for every public school student in America in grades three through eight by 2006. Schools failing to meet annual test score standards for three straight years risk being shut down or reconstituted with new teachers, and their students must be offered private tutoring vouchers paid for by the federal government. Unsurprisingly, test-prep companies see the law, and especially its provision for federal tutoring vouchers, as a vast new opportunity. "The market for test prep is on fire," says Amy Wilkins, a senior analyst at the Education Trust.
To see these courses at work, I recently visited Kaplan's Score! Educational Center in Alexandria, Va. Sandwiched between a Whole Foods Market and a Starbucks in a typical suburban strip mall, the center was teeming with eager grade-schoolers, some of them fresh from soccer practice in red jerseys and cleats. Academic competitiveness was already in full bloom. "I want to be ahead of people, not behind them," announced one of the young soccer players, Kayvon Naghdi, who can recite by heart his score on the Virginia Standards of Learning test. Said Jessica Peraertz, proud mother of eight-year-old Isabella, "I think [Kaplan] has actually made her be ahead of other kids in her class" As students stationed themselves before computers for a two-hour tutoring class, parents hovered nearby monitoring their children's progress or ducked out to grab a latte. The one constant was that they seemed every bit as determined for their child to excel as those of older students eyeing Yale and Harvard. Critics of high-stakes tests are up in arms against this creeping obsession. "There is this testing bandwagon momentum that is really getting out of hand," says Arnold F. Fege, president of Public Advocacy for Kids and a longtime activist for public schools. Critics like Fege worry that, like the SAT test prep, kiddie test prep will inordinately benefit children of the affluent; that it will draw money and emphasis from classroom learning; and that it will stress tactics and strategy over actual learning. "It reduces the motivation for learning to simply beating the tests," says Monty Neill, executive director of Massachusetts-based FairTest. "The test prep companies are sort of vultures picking at the body of the school"
As a matter of fact, this new test prep boom may actually do more good than harm. Indeed, if it's done right, K-12 test prep could have the opposite effect of what its critics anticipate, helping close the achievement gap rather than widen it, increase student learning rather than distract from it, and perhaps serve as one of the keys to effective standards-based education.
Teaching Kids to Score
At the Alexandria Score! center, one student stood apart from the rest. A study in urban-suburban Contrast, 17-year-old Antwain Proctor sported a bright white t-shirt with "Score!" emblazoned on the back, baggy denim shorts, a nylon headband, and a stone in his left ear. Antwain had recently completed his sophomore year in high school, reading at just a second-grade level, with math skills at a fifth-grade level. Given his age and performance level, conceded Score!'s David Smith, "he's not our typical student." But he is a testimony to the possibilities of test prep.
Antwain escaped an abusive father only to drift between foster homes until his aunt, Shirley Proctor, adopted him four years ago. He has repeatedly failed Maryland's high-school exit exams and is awaiting the results of the math exam he retook in October. Desperate to get her son up to speed, Shirley signed him up for weekly visits to the Alexandria Score! center this summer, with encouraging results: After just four months, Antwain has gained almost a full grade level in both math and reading.
On the day I visited, he was plugging away at a computer terminal As I watched, a math question flashed on his screen: "11x13=?" Antwain scratched away on a clipboard and typed in his answer, 26. Try again, the computer told him. Antwain raised his hand, and one of the center's "coaches" came over.
"One times one is two, right?" Antwain asked.
"One times anything is itself, remember?"
They went back through the problem together, step by step, on Antwain's clipboard.
Companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review earned their reputations by helping students beat college entrance exams, but as this episode indicates, their programs for elementary and middle school tests--especially for kids who are lagging in school--seem to be different. The SAT, not directly based on any curriculum, is a distinctly more abstract measure of aptitude and cleverness. Consequently, SAT test-prep courses teach test-taking strategies designed to maximize one's score, not a formal body of knowledge. Good state tests, on the other hand, measure whether a student has mastered the curriculum taught in the classroom. So test-prep courses like Antwain's focus on learning the material supposed to have been learned in school. This sort of prep work is less tactical, and more like homework. Because state-standard tests are supposed to measure actual learning, prep courses teach substance over strategy.
A sampling of test-prep publications indicates that their materials do seem more academically oriented than SAT-prep books. Kaplan's "No-Stress Guide to the 8th Grade MCAS," for the Massachusetts test offers lessons on fractions, percentages, and geometry as well as help with writing and reading comprehension. Which is not to say that it lacks tips for gaming the exam. The math section, for example, offers a strategic reminder to study up on triangles "since they are the MCAS makers' favorite shape" And the English composition section advises students to pay more attention to arguments than to grammar because the test assigns more points for the essay's content. But on the whole, the emphasis appears to be on learning.
The emphasis on teaching certainly seems to be benefiting Antwain. His mother is thrilled that he's finally learned how to sound out words. "I feel like I'm learning more," he told me in between math exercises. "Since I've been coming here, I've been doing better"
In fact, good test prep, says Eva Baker, a testing expert and education professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, could be a real boon to poor children. She likens it to the Japanese "jukus," the extraordinarily popular after-school prep programs for children who are gunning to pass the highly competitive middle and high school entrance exams that determine their academic future. "My experience has been--it was counterintuitive--but what I saw going on [in the jukus] was more fun and more interesting for the kids than what I saw going on in the school," she said. "If they were simply drudgery, the kids wouldn't want to go, and they would complain" Antwain's case bears this out. "He doesn't look at it as doing school work," says his mother, who sends two of her children to Score!. "Some days, I don't feel like driving there. But they bug me about going."
Antwain is lucky. He has a devoted adoptive mother who is determined to help him in school and can foot the $129 monthly bill for Score!. "I'm handling it," she says. "Sometimes you've got to cut back other things, [but] as long as he passes, and he can come out reading, then it's all worth it."
