Spelling Test (Part I) 
By Martin Harris

Not too many years back, the latest marotte-du-jour (a little French lingo there, three words for the English "fad") was Ebonics, the idea that certain sectors of the population could and should use their own preferred speech patterns in lieu of what was contemptuously called "standard English". 

About the same time, an education system that had fairly obviously failed at teaching spelling was arguing for "creative spelling" on the theory that, as it did for William Shakespeare, a Renaissance-era dead European white guy who occasionally used alternative spelling in his sonnets, such license-to-innovate would elevate modern grade-schoolers to memorable levels of literary excellence. Cynics argued that both Ebonics and creative spelling were after-the-fact excuses for failure-to-teach/failure-to-learn in the first place; their comments were dismissed with prejudice. 

Both fads have pretty much gone away anyway, as parents figured out that it might be a good idea if their kids could actually conjugate verbs and spell words in accordance with ---ugh-- standard practice, and actually presumed to demand such instruction in their schools. Results have been mixed at best. We don't know for sure, because there are no old-fashioned spelling tests any more. You have no way of knowing whether spelling is taught better in Middlebury schools than in Rutland schools, or even whether it's taught better in Vermont than in Utah.

There is a quite limited range of nation-wide tests –one of the few is 4th grade reading -- which, under Federal regulations, a sampling of students in every state is required to take. It's called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and in its annually published results, you can actually compare, say, teaching results in Vermont and Utah and every other States. Results are uniformly dismal: there's not a single State in which the public schools get their 4th graders to score better than the low 200's out of a possible 500, meaning that about 2/3 of 4th graders can't make "proficient" in reading at grade level, even in the so-called "best" States. Understandably, educators don't like publicizing these results, so they don't.

What they prefer to publicize, in lieu of the Federal test scores, are the far-better results of locally purchased tests. In Vermont, in recent years, educators have used the New Standards Reference Exam, the Vermont Developmental Reading Assessment, and most recently, the New England Common Assessment Program. Other states have used the same deceptive ploy, using their own locally-preferred tests to cast the best possible light on their use of tax dollars in education. Typically, as an all-States chart in the 5 March issue of US News & World Report shows, the same population of 4th graders which is 2/3 non-proficient in the Federal test somehow shows up as 2/3 proficient in the preferred local tests. Three states don't admit, publicly, that they use local tests: VT, NY, and WV, and so only their NAEP score shows on the USN&WR chart. Needless to say, the US Department of Education isn't pleased.

Thus, a new and different Spelling Test has emerged, measuring not the word-construction competence of 4th graders, but the political-maneuvering competence of the Secretary of Education, Margaret Spelling.

Under the No Child Left Behind rules written by an education-union-sensitive Congress, folks who ordinarily despise "states' rights" as a secret longing for slavery, embraced the Dixiecrat concept when demanding educators' right to purchase, deploy, and publicize the results of tests of their choosing in each State. They got it. Now, the deceptive result is beginning to be widely understood, and the Secretary is beginning to come under to pressure to get a Congressional NCLB rules-change so she can calibrate the far-less-rigorous local tests against the NAEP nationwide standard. Will she be able to navigate the politics? That's the real Spelling Test. More next week.