Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company April 13, 2000

Blue Books Closed, Students Protest State Tests

By JACQUES STEINBERG

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., April 12 -- The blue test booklet, stamped with the imprint of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and distributed this morning to 10th-grade classrooms throughout the state, contained a lone essay question that students had two hours to answer: describe why a supporting character in a favorite novel was essential to the plot.

But Jake Levin, 15, a sophomore at Monument Mountain Regional High School in the state's northwest corner, chose instead to vent his fury at the high-stakes tests sweeping the country. He closed the booklet, pulled out six sheets of looseleaf notebook paper and wrote an essay about how a standardized exam could never measure the breadth of his abilities.

He was not alone in his defiance.

From the Berkshire Mountains to Cambridge and south to Cape Cod, brushfires of civil disobedience flared in classrooms across Massachusetts today, as several hundred 10th graders, and a handful of fourth graders and eighth graders, boycotted the first of 11 days of standardized tests meant to evaluate students and schools. But next year the stakes will rise, with the sophomore class required to pass English and mathematics tests before graduation.

Today's protest was the latest, and largest, indication of rising discontent among students and parents. State boards of education and legislatures across the country are increasingly mandating such tests as a measure of what students have learned -- by 2003, Massachusetts will be one of 26 states that require students to pass at least one standardized test to graduate.

In February, at least 200 Illinois students boycotted new state English and math exams, deliberately filling in wrong answers. And in recent months, parents, teachers and students have rallied and railed against new standardized tests in Florida, Louisiana, Ohio and Wisconsin, among other states.

Some have taken their complaints to the courts, where they have argued that such tests discriminate against poor and minority children, as well as students in vocational and special-education programs.

Under intense pressure from parents, Wisconsin officials last year repealed a requirement that students pass a new state test to graduate from high school.

Mr. Levin is one of 36 sophomores who skipped the test here today and one of at least 300 statewide, according to interviews with principals and student organizers. He likened his protest to those against the Vietnam War. And as a role model, Mr. Levin cited his father, now a toy-store owner, who was almost expelled from the Putney School in Vermont for shouting anti-Vietnam slogans at Senator Robert F. Kennedy during an appearance there.

"He was a youth, and now I'm young," Mr. Levin said. "We're speaking out for what we feel is right and going against the government."

Along with several of his classmates, Mr. Levin had been stoking the statewide protest for weeks, through a Web site that they started: www.scam-mcas.org.

The protests -- staged inside and outside more than a dozen schools, as well as on the steps of City Hall in Cambridge -- were peaceful, though not without consequence: 25 students at Arlington High School, 10 miles northwest of Boston, were punished with three-day suspensions. And at least 20 students at nearby Brookline High School were immediately awarded grades of "0." Those scores will be factored into their fourth quarter averages, unless the students agree to "buy back" the grade with a five-page paper to be presented to their principal on Brown v. Board of Education and other landmark Supreme Court education cases.

The largest protest was at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, about 100 miles east of here and near Harvard, where more than 100 students boycotted the test, many of them assembling in the school auditorium for a teach-in that featured representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and FairTest, an anti-testing group.

Faced with such widespread insurrection, Cambridge school administrators chose to permit the event and leveled no punishment, on the condition that students did something constructive during the period in which the test was given. Some students across the state wrote alternate essays and worked on projects, a few did nothing.

Although some principals said they would grade the alternative work, none of it will be considered valid by the state.

The Massachusetts tests, scheduled through the end of May and totaling nearly 20 hours, were designed to assess knowledge in math, science, English and social studies through multiple-choice questions and essays. The protesters, who promised to boycott all 11 days of exams, described the tests as too long, too focused on memorization at the expense of critical thinking and too pivotal, considering that it will soon be impossible to get a diploma without a passing grade.

"One of the first things young people are taught in this country is that everybody is different and these differences should be both accepted and respected," Daniel B. Elitzer, 16, an "A" student at Monument Mountain, wrote in his alternate essay. "Different people learn in different ways. Why should all students be assessed the same way?"

But Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the state board of education, said it was entirely appropriate for the state to erect one hurdle over which all students must jump. She said that the length of the tests, however onerous, gave students ample time to show their abilities and that it was not too much to ask every 10th grader to be able to interpret a passage written on the level of Dickens or to explain how to solve a geometric problem.

"What we are asking for is knowledge that any student who wants a high school diploma worth the paper it's written on should have," said Ms. Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group. "All other measures are subjective."

State education officials emphasized that the boycotters probably represented fewer than 1 percent of the 68,500 sophomores statewide.

The students who are protesting got support from an unexpected corner: the principal's office. Tests are often written so fast that teachers have yet to cover the material, leading some principals to worry that children are being punished for the failing of adults. Never mind that those schools with the most boycotters -- virtually 1 out of every 4 sophomores at Monument Mountain skipped the test -- will probably plummet in the state rankings.

"They've done a very good job with the boycott," said Marianne Young, the principal of Monument Mountain, who moved here from Vermont this year. And then, as if giving a final grade, she added: "Excellent work!"