Low Score - CJR, September/October 1999

September/October 1999 | Contents

how they played it
Low Score: Press Angst Over Standardized Tests

By James B. Kelleher
Kelleher is a writer in San Diego.

When the Department of Education produced a guide that warned educators who rely heavily on standardized exams for admissions or promotions that they might be violating federal law – who got the story right?

The proposed guide, "Nondiscrimination in High-Stakes Testing: A Resource Guide," presented what the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) characterized as a synthesis of existing law on the subject. Its key passage read, in part:

The use of any educational test which has a significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin, or sex is discriminatory, and a violation of Title VI and/or Title IX, respectively, unless it is educationally necessary and there is no practicable form of assessment which meets the educational institution’s needs and would have less of a disparate impact.

Not to worry, the OCR told journalists who bothered to inquire about the document. The guide, a draft four years in the making, broke no new legal ground, the office said. No big deal.

Because many journalists bought this line they didn’t cover the story. As a result, most readers first heard about it not through news stories, but via op-ed pieces mostly written by anti-affirmative-action conservatives.

The guide was a big deal indeed to many in education circles, including the American Council on Education, representing almost 2,000 colleges and universities, and the College Board and Educational Testing Service, which respectively sponsor and produce the well-known SAT test. The reason? As a group, African-Americans and Latinos score lower than whites on standardized tests, and women tend to score lower than men on math tests. Standardized tests clearly have a "disparate" impact on these groups. So the guide, its critics said, serves as a federal warning to educational institutions not to rely on such tests. Or a how-to-sue map if they do.

To Patrick Healy, political editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, a respected weekly that covers colleges and universities, the uproar in educational circles made the guide "an important national story." Higher education sources he spoke to thought it staked out a hard-line position in the contentious debate on the role affirmative action plays in education. They used words, he said, like "unprecedented, extraordinary." With the next issue of the Chronicle already in the mail, Healy broke the story on the weekly’s Web site (http://chronicle.merit.edu) on May 17, following up with a more comprehensive account in the print issue dated May 28.

Then . . . nothing. Or almost nothing, at least on news pages. Between May 17, when the Chronicle broke the story, and June 9, when the Los Angeles Times briefly mentioned the controversy in a B2 news column, the only major daily to touch the standardized testing tale in its news pages was The Wall Street Journal (which ran a solid A2 piece on May 26).

Neither the Los Angeles Times nor The New York Times has a Washington education correspondent, but both papers say their silence on the guide was more a question of judgment than a missed story. "The Chronicle had a different interpretation of the importance of this than we did," says Tami Dennis, interim education editor at the Los Angeles Times. "Yeah, it had education insiders upset, but how much of a difference was that going to make, really?"

David Corcoran, the education editor of The New York Times, says his initial reaction to the story was, "this is interesting, but what have they actually done?" Reporter Steven Holmes told him that "the story was less clear-cut than it seemed," Corcoran says. "He wanted to take some time to explore it more."

Into this news void rode the op-ed writers, who complained about the guide throughout May and prompted congressional hearings about it in late June. John Leo was first, with a column – the feds strike back – that ran in the New York Daily News May 22 and in U.S. News & World Report May 31. He was followed by Stephen Balch in the New York Post (May 23), John O’Sullivan in the Chicago Sun-Times (May 25), Peter Schrag in The Sacramento Bee (May 26), and a series of editorials in The Wall Street Journal, The Detroit News, The Indianapolis Star, and The Washington Times.

So readers mostly got one side of a complicated debate. Meanwhile, because the Chronicle was the first paper to report the story, press discussion about the guide was framed almost entirely in terms of higher education. But standardized tests – and their "disparate impact" – may be more important in the K-12 sphere, where foes of "social promotion" are embracing the idea of make-or-break proficiency tests that would determine whether students move up.

The New York Times did a news story about the guide on June 12, only after Abigail Thernstrom, co-author of America in Black and White, had thundered against the proposed guidelines in a June 10 piece on the Times’s op-ed page. Holmes’s June 12 story, essentially a round-up of the hostile reaction to the guide, oddly included "news stories in education journals" as among the work published by "anti-affirmative-action conservatives."

When the debate became the subject of congressional hearings before Michigan Republican Representative Peter Hoekstra’s education subcommittee on June 22, only USA Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and a college-paper wire service covered them. The Washington Post continued to ignore the story, leaving its readers to understand the issue via a June 12 op-ed piece – Coerced Diversity – by the iconoclastic Nat Hentoff. Not even Hentoff was happy with that circumstance. "The Washington Post," he says, "blew it."