Kindergartners, sharpen your No. 2 pencils

In minutes, a roomful of students, blinking wearily under the fluorescent lights, take up No. 2 pencils and face the standardized answer sheets that hush classrooms nationwide. But as test takers go, this group seemed squirmier than usual.

Perhaps it's because many of them are young enough to suck their thumbs.

As their kindergarten teacher, 25-year-old Arielle Derby, prepared to explain the test, the group’s behavior showcased the difficulties ahead. Ronald, a delicate boy with jutting ears, gnawed a coloring book and hummed a tuneless song; across from him, a 5-year-old named Zyan leapt to his feet and shook his rear; and just then, round-faced little Eliza tossed her braids and whooped.

“This will be the first test, pretty much of any kind, that most of these kids have ever seen,” Derby said before her students arrived that morning at the Bronx Charter School for Excellence, a 6-month-old school in one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods.

Her kindergartners were about to brave one of the most controversial currents in early childhood education. This year, Derby’s students and 20,000 other kindergartners nationwide took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills –- a three-hour test spread over several days -– aimed at assessing their verbal and math skills.

In the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, school accountability has become the catchphrase and testing the yardstick. But some experts dispute the validity of the scores, arguing that young children make poor test subjects. Nevertheless, the Iowa exam represents one of several standardized tests that have crossed a new threshold -– into the classrooms of kindergartens and even nursery schools.

The sharpest change has come for some of America’s youngest students. Starting in 2003, every 4-year-old in the federally funded Head Start program was required to take a standardized exam designed to measure curriculum effectiveness. There are about 2,500 Head Start programs across the country and, to date, nearly a million 4-year-olds have taken the test. Samuel J. Meisels, an early-childhood specialist at Chicago’s Erikson Institute, called the exam “maybe the largest single testing ever conducted in the U.S.”

Meisels and other experts argued that the skills of children who can neither count nor sit still are hard to capture on written tests. “Children under about 6 or 7 are not that reliable as test subjects,” said Lillian Katz, a professor of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Their performance depends on the day or time of day. The results you get may not be reliable and it isn’t worth the trouble.”

Some of these limitations seemed evident as each of Derby’s kindergartners faced the test booklets in front of them.

“Do not do anything with it yet,” Derby said as she passed out pencils. Savian, a grinning boy close to the whiteboard, flipped his booklet open and found a page covered with line drawings of animals and objects.

“I’m coloring!” Savian said. Since the test targets children too young to read, the booklet was all pictures. Page “numbers” were distinguished by pictures, each question was “numbered” with its own picture and the answer choices themselves were also pictures. Savian was not alone in interpreting this as an invitation to color. But bit by bit, the children got the hang of it. They filled in the circles under the image corresponding to each vocabulary word that Derby read aloud. They stayed quiet. They managed to track which question was where.

Then a slight change in page-layout gummed up the works. Suddenly there were four questions crowded onto each page instead of three. Derby could no longer simply identify them as top, middle or bottom.

“Now we’re going to the third one on the page,” said Derby, reaching a question late in the test. For this response, the students had to pick out the image corresponding to the word “crater”. But they had learned ordinal numbers from the math teacher only the day before. Distinguishing exactly what their teacher meant by “third” was visibly difficult for them. Several kids answered wrong questions. Several more went back to coloring in pictures or answer bubbles randomly. Zyan -– the canary in the pedagogical coal mine -– was looking at his tummy, poking it rhythmically with his pencil, saying, “Eh! Eh! Eh!” each time he pressed on the eraser.

The author of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills pointed out that most of the problems faced by Derby’s class can be avoided. “The teacher probably didn’t follow the instructions in the administration manual,” said Dr. David Frisbie, one of three University of Iowa professors who developed the exam. He said the students are supposed to slide strips of cardstock down the page, one question at a time, to ensure everyone stays together.

Derby defended herself by saying that she had enough trouble keeping pencils out of the air and off the floor without throwing pieces of cardboard into the mix.

The principal of the Bronx charter school, Marc Etienne, agrees with critics that the test’s problems run deeper than teacher error. Because the Iowa test measures children against each other rather than against independent standards, he argued, “there’s always going to be someone at the bottom. Even if you have 10,000 brilliant children, there has to be someone at the third percentile.”

“The message you’re sending is you’re not as good as the others,” Etienne said. “But you have kids in Iowa and that’s a completely different environment than the South Bronx.”

Some parents say they appreciate the early testing. “I think it’s great. If anything is wrong they detect it,” said 32-year-old Mabel Colon, whose daughter Jasmine is one of Derby’s charges. She added, “They’re catching them at an early age.”