The studies, commissioned by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, show that between 1996 and 1998 almost twice as many black and Latino students as white students had not passed the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills exit-level test, which is required for high school graduation.
The Texas exam has been administered since 1991 and requires minimum passing scores in math, reading, and writing, for students to move to the next grade and, ultimately, to graduate.
Gary Orfield, codirector of the Civil Rights Project, said Massachusetts should take heed of what's happening in Texas and rethink a policy that makes a high-stakes exam the only measure of educational success.
''They need to figure out how to separate high standards and accountability,'' Orfield said. ''And they should be very careful not to replace already inadequate infrastructure with an even worse test drill.''
But the Massachusetts education commissioner, David P. Driscoll, said yesterday that although he has not seen the Harvard studies, other ones on the Texas exam have shown the racial and economic gap is steadily closing.
''Texas is a model,'' Driscoll said. ''It's ludicrous to blame MCAS for what has been a historical neglect of minority and poor kids in schools. MCAS is what I hope to be the tool, or at least the leverage over time to close the gap. If it doesn't, there is something drastically wrong with the system.''
The first time Latinos and blacks took the 10th-grade Texas exam, 75 percent failed. Now, the failure rate is about 40 percent. Civil rights leaders say one reason for the improvement is the practice of teachers failing ninth-graders who are deemed unlikely to pass the test the following year.
Blacks and Latinos in the Bay State are performing as poorly on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam as their Texas counterparts. About 83 percent failed it in 1998, and many expect a similar number to have failed in 1999 when the state releases results by race and gender.
Other key findings of the Harvard studies:
Pressure to raise scores leads teachers to spend class time drilling students on practice exam materials such as learning how to weed out obviously wrong answers and become accustomed to multiple-choice, computer-scored formats.
Although the passing rate for the reading section of the Texas test in high schools has risen, few students are able to use the skills to complete reading assignments outside class.
Teachers are encouraged to suspend or interrupt lessons on subjects not tested to prepare for the exam. Library research, independent projects, science experiments, and long-term writing assignments different from those being tested are being eliminated or reduced in schools with low exam scores.
In low-performing schools, the exam encourages the diversion of school resources into exam-prep materials instead of the instructional resources available to children in better-performing schools.
''We've been doing this nationally almost as a fad without thinking about what happens to kids' lives and the schools where impoverished minority kids are concentrated,'' Orfield said. ''These policies sound good, but the results are bitter.''
Cindy Rodriguez of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
wo Harvard University studies of Texas education reform say there is a deepening inequity on statewide test results between white and minority students and rich and poor students.
This story ran on page A08 of the Boston Globe on 1/7/2000.
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