Senate beats back a threat

Rocky Mountain News Editorial

4/15/07

      The anti-testing crusaders tried again this year to make Colorado's statewide tests essentially voluntary, and therefore useless for purposes of accountability. Fortunately, they failed, thanks to Sen. Ron Tupa, D-Boulder, and the three Republicans on the Senate Education Committee. Those four killed House Bill 1284, sponsored by Rep. Edward Casso, D-Thornton, and Sen. Suzanne Williams, D-Aurora.

      Williams sponsored a similar bill in 2006, and this year's version got through the House. Since this battle is sure to be fought again, it's important to understand what's at stake.

      There are already several categories of students whose scores on the Colorado Student Assessment Program are not used in calculating a school's ranking for school "report cards." This bill would have added to the list "Any student who is absent from school on the days on which the assessments are administered" as well as students whose scores are invalidated by errors in administering the tests.

      The idea is to appease a small but noisy faction of parents and others who oppose the test and either keep their own children out of school on testing days (which is their legal right) or campaign for others to do so.

      The dilemma they face is that current law penalizes a school for no-shows by treating them in the report-card calculations as having received the lowest possible score. Since the number of no-shows is small, this usually makes no difference in a school's ranking, but if a school is very close to the cut-off point between rankings, it could drop a notch.

      So parents are in a bind. If they don't allow their children to take the tests, they risk damaging their children's school.

      That's unfortunate - but the alternative is worse. If there is no penalty at all for missing the tests, schools will have an incentive to encourage weaker students to skip them, or perhaps arrange selective "errors" in giving the tests. If that happens, a school's CSAP results will be artificially inflated, misleading parents who rely on them.

      Casso had earlier withdrawn a similar bill over concerns that failing to meet federal standards for test participation could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars from Washington. We think he should also be concerned about the integrity of Colorado's testing program.