It’s three weeks until Mississippi’s standardized test season begins, and Candace Hamberlin is feeling the pressure.
Evidence of what’s at stake hangs all around Jefferson County Middle School, where Hamberlin is in her first year teaching eighth-grade English. Inside her classroom, a large piece of black polyester with clear pouches labeled “Data Wall” shows the current reading level of each student. The school hallways are lined with posters listing schoolwide scores on an earlier practice test. One prominently displays the grade Mississippi would assign their school if that practice test had been the real thing: 175 out of 700 points, an F.
Jefferson County is one of the smallest in Mississippi; 6,800 people spread across 527 square miles along the Mississippi River. It’s also one of the poorest, with 32 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Fayette, where the only public elementary, middle, and high school are all based, is the only city in the county, home to about a dozen churches but not a single stoplight. The county is 13 percent white, but most of those families send their kids to private or parochial schools; 98 percent of the school district’s students are Black.
Inside Hamberlin’s classroom, it’s time for test-prep drills. This period has 20 eighth graders enrolled, but only 10 are present; six have been pulled out for remedial work with a consultant the district has hired to boost test scores, and the remaining four are absent for unclear reasons. The students in the room each grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.
Much of literacy instruction at Jefferson County Middle School now begins and ends with screens. In fact, Hamberlin doesn’t lecture at all on Wednesdays and Thursdays; students spend those class periods with StudySync and i-Ready, another adaptive software program, so each can focus where they need the most help.
Their teacher can’t blame them for being sick of these exercises. The students’ lives, and hers, are dominated by the looming Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP), the set of annual standardized exams that measure their progress in language arts as well as science and math. Test prep is a year-round activity. Her students must learn how to decode the meaning of unfamiliar words, make inferences, identify the central idea of a passage, analyze tone and point of view. Every Friday brings a practice test.
Before moving to eighth grade, Hamberlin logged 25 years as an elementary school teacher. Eighth grade appealed to her because it’s all about analyzing texts, not just consuming them. That’s her idea of a good time. She remembers reading the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book four times just to make sure she didn’t miss a single detail. As she talks a group of students through a reading passage by Sojourner Truth, her passion is palpable—for the material, but even more for the puzzle-solving that reading comprehension requires.
“A lot of them think they’re studying the story,” she says afterward. “You’re not studying the story, that’s just the sprinkles on top. It’s what was she thinking, why did she say it, how did she convey her message?”
Despite her clear talent and enthusiasm for teaching, though, Hamberlin has thus far failed to convince many of her students to care about reading. Earlier in the year, barely half of the eighth graders scored high enough to pass the all--important exam, and less than 15 percent are scoring “proficient.” If that F on the final schoolwide practice test had been the real thing, it would have been disastrous; Mississippi’s letter grading system comes with steep real-world consequences. Low-performing schools can face state monitoring, while their funding is more likely to come with “accountability” strings attached. State law allows students to attend out-of-district charter schools only when their home district is failing, so low scores can result in a decrease in funding because fewer students are enrolled. Superintendents and principals know that their jobs are tied to increasing scores or at least not allowing them to drop.
Across the country, reading performance has slid for 14 years, and the problem is most extreme in middle and high school. Even in Mississippi, where the improvement in elementary school test scores has become the stuff of legend, older students are struggling. No one can quite agree on why reading scores have dropped so far.
And that’s just what the tests measure. Hamberlin’s true fears are more existential. Hamberlin wants her students to pass the exam, but what she really wants is to build them into readers; adults who can interpret a complex set of instructions, power through a confusing block of text, and—hopefully, maybe, at least a few—actually read books. “It’s as simple as understanding a conversation. How many times have you talked to someone and you’re talking about two different things?” she says. “All those skills from reading just transfer to life completely.”
Plenty of her students are smart and capable, but she’s never encountered a group less interested in reading. And neither she nor anyone else seems to have any idea how to fix it.
Panicking over standardized test scores is an American tradition. In 1983, a Department of Education commission published A Nation at Risk, a 36-page report that would become the foundation of education policy discussions for decades. Until then, standardized tests were generally administered locally, with little weight attached to scores. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has since become “the nation’s report card,” had run trial exams in a small number of schools since 1969, but only for research purposes.
Citing a decline in SAT scores over the preceding two decades, A Nation at Risk’s authors framed their concerns in geo-political terms, warning that countries like Japan and South Korea were poised to overtake the US in global economic rankings if American students didn’t make significant gains. Their language was hyperbolic to the point of scare--mongering: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” the introduction read. “As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.” One bullet point reported that one--quarter of Navy recruits could not read at a ninth-grade level, “the minimum needed simply to understand written safety instructions. Without remedial work they cannot even begin, much less complete, the sophisticated training essential in much of the modern military.”
In the four decades since, at least one of the authors of A Nation at Risk has backed away from its findings, saying the commission cherry-picked the data that best served their preexisting thesis that American schools were failing. They did accomplish their goals, though: The report called for the adoption of “more rigorous and measurable standards” in schools, and throughout the ’90s, states designed their own standardized tests to be administered across all school districts.
The march toward high-stakes testing crescendoed with President George W. Bush’s signature education reform program, No Child Left Behind, signed into law in 2002, which required standards-based exams in reading and math for every public school student in the country. Schools that didn’t meet standards risked state takeovers.
Detractors have long questioned the validity of test scores, pointing to built-in bias among other issues. Even so, state testing has become the most important measure of reading skills by a huge margin. NAEP reading scores did rise, modestly, in the first part of the 21st century (at least among elementary and middle sc