Watchdog of Test Industry Faces Economic Extinction
New York Times
February 22, 2006
By MICHAEL WINERIP
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For more than 20 years, FairTest, a small nonprofit group headquartered on the second floor of an old house here, has been the No. 1 critic of America's big testing companies and their standardized tests.
In 1987, when FairTest began publishing its list of colleges that did not require applicants to submit SAT's, there were 51; today there are 730, including Holy Cross, Bowdoin, Bates, Mount Holyoke and Muhlenberg.
"The FairTest list provides an enormously valuable service for students looking at colleges who have proved themselves to everyone but the test agencies," said William Hiss, a Bates vice president.
A generation of education journalists, like Thomas Toch, who reported for Education Week and U.S. News & World Report, were schooled on the complexities and limitations of standardized testing by FairTest.
"They've helped me a lot," said Mr. Toch, who is now a director of Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington policy research group.
On a slow day, like last Friday, Robert Schaeffer of FairTest handled calls from The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Lakeland Ledger, Associated Press and Hartford Courant and Bloomberg News.
On busy days, like July 13, 2004, reporters call by the dozens. That was the day FairTest helped reveal that scoring mistakes by the Educational Testing Service on its teacher licensing test had caused 4,100 men and women in 18 states to fail when they had actually passed the exam.
A few years ago, California officials were considering ending their support of the National Merit Scholarship program because it relied exclusively on a single score on the College Board's PSAT test to pick semifinalists.
"We contacted the College Board about validity and fairness studies of the PSAT, but they didn't give us information that addressed our concerns," said Michael Brown, chairman of a state committee that makes recommendations on admissions policy for California's public colleges. "So I asked FairTest, which got back with significant information on the limited reliability of a single PSAT score."
Last year, the University of California system ended its financial support of the National Merit program.
But for all FairTest's impact, its days may be numbered.
read the rest of the article here.
February 22, 2006
By MICHAEL WINERIP
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For more than 20 years, FairTest, a small nonprofit group headquartered on the second floor of an old house here, has been the No. 1 critic of America's big testing companies and their standardized tests.
In 1987, when FairTest began publishing its list of colleges that did not require applicants to submit SAT's, there were 51; today there are 730, including Holy Cross, Bowdoin, Bates, Mount Holyoke and Muhlenberg.
"The FairTest list provides an enormously valuable service for students looking at colleges who have proved themselves to everyone but the test agencies," said William Hiss, a Bates vice president.
A generation of education journalists, like Thomas Toch, who reported for Education Week and U.S. News & World Report, were schooled on the complexities and limitations of standardized testing by FairTest.
"They've helped me a lot," said Mr. Toch, who is now a director of Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington policy research group.
On a slow day, like last Friday, Robert Schaeffer of FairTest handled calls from The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Lakeland Ledger, Associated Press and Hartford Courant and Bloomberg News.
On busy days, like July 13, 2004, reporters call by the dozens. That was the day FairTest helped reveal that scoring mistakes by the Educational Testing Service on its teacher licensing test had caused 4,100 men and women in 18 states to fail when they had actually passed the exam.
A few years ago, California officials were considering ending their support of the National Merit Scholarship program because it relied exclusively on a single score on the College Board's PSAT test to pick semifinalists.
"We contacted the College Board about validity and fairness studies of the PSAT, but they didn't give us information that addressed our concerns," said Michael Brown, chairman of a state committee that makes recommendations on admissions policy for California's public colleges. "So I asked FairTest, which got back with significant information on the limited reliability of a single PSAT score."
Last year, the University of California system ended its financial support of the National Merit program.
But for all FairTest's impact, its days may be numbered.
read the rest of the article here.
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