Regular testing provides a necessary gauge of both individual and collective academic achievement. That's the worthy concept behind the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Tests taken annually by third- through eighth-graders in South Carolina's public schools. Disappointing results on such tests shouldn't prompt anybody to give up on the continuing quest to improve our education system.
While test scores deliver important indicators of classroom progress, or lack thereof, they should not be construed as final judgments. They are simply incremental measures of where we are -- and indicators of how far we have to go. The protracted mission of making our schools more accountable and more productive should not be sidetracked by short-term glee, or despair, over a single set of test results.
So while those PACT results released Wednesday are discouraging in the significant decline recorded in Language Arts, the overall upward trend of the last few years in standardized test scores throughout our state's public education system, including repeated increases in SAT scores, remains an encouraging development. So do the PACT Math scores, with 26.2 percent of the state's students falling in the lowest category ("below basic"), significantly below last year's 31.8 percent.
But the increase in "below basic" scores in Language Arts, from 25.3 percent in 2002 to 29.5 percent in 2003, is troubling, even if it was the first backward step since PACT came into being in 1999. S.C. Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum cited "test fatigue" as a possible factor, pointing out that the 2003 PACT schedule, for the first time, featured four tests over two weeks instead of two tests in one week, with Language Arts coming at the end.
Gov. Mark Sanford sounded more fatigued with the education establishment's continuing reluctance to facilitate school choice, explaining: "I believe that unless you're consistently bringing a legitimate market pressure to bear on our school system, you're going to continue to see results like these that move our state in the opposite direction of where we ought to be going."
The governor's focus is sound. Expanded competition and options provided by charter schools and other school-choice initiatives will help raise classroom expectations and outcomes.
Yet the jump in PACT Math scores shows that our students can advance. So does the ability of financially "disadvantaged" students at some schools, including Stono Park Elementary, to confound the prevailing notion that children from low-income families must produce low test scores.
Accurately testing academic performance is a complex task and remains an indispensable element of educational accountability. We must persist in the annual testing of our state's students -- and in our long-term duty to enhance public education in this state.
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