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Stressful Stereotypes Found to Undercut Girls and Minorities

California exit exam is an
unneeded barrier. It ruins lives.

By Emily Alpert

Nervousness overcame Carlos Genchis, 18, as he
sat down to fill in the bubbles the second time
he took the high school exit exam.

He already felt stupid after failing the
English portion of the test once. Studying more
or getting tutored had seemed useless to him.
And as he stared down that dreaded test, he
knew that failing could keep him from getting
his diploma, barring him from many jobs and a
college education.

"I was thinking, 'Am I going to pass it or not?
'" Genchis said. "I got so worried that I
didn't pass it. I wasn't thinking about the
test."

Queasiness over tests is nothing new. Teachers
who coax struggling students to pass the test
in San Diego Unified say that overcoming teens'
stress and fear is half the battle.

But a new study from Stanford University
suggests that stressing over the high school
exit exam is a far bigger problem for girls and
students of color than their classmates who are
white or male because they underperform even
when they have similar scores on previous
tests. It draws data from San Diego Unified and
three other California districts to draw some
troubling conclusions: Instituting the exam has
not boosted student scores. And it has slashed
the graduation rates for minorities and girls,
even when compared to white and male classmates
with the same academic chops.

Researchers chalk up the gap not to poorer
schools, biased tests or low expectations, but
to a more elusive threat: The power of racist
and sexist stereotypes to undercut how students
perform on stressful tests. It is a
controversial finding on an already politically
sensitive test that deeply divides educators
and experts on what it should take to graduate.

"What I am worried about is that you take a
white student and a black student who have the
same test scores in 8th grade. The same test
scores in 9th grade. The same test scores in
10th grade ... and the white student performs
much higher than the black student on that
test," said Sean Reardon, associate professor
of education at Stanford University, who led
the study. He added, "The reality seems to be
that it takes a higher level of skill for
minority students and girls to pass the test.
That is a real problem."

Setting the Bar or a Stumbling Block
Researchers and activists have long had qualms
about the weighty exam, which decides who will
graduate and who will not. It is a radically
different creature than most state tests, which
are used only to judge schools or gather data
and have no consequences for the students who
take them. California has repeatedly been sued
over the test and how it is implemented,
prodding the state to add more interventions
for teens who initially fail the test.

But it is also a prized way to raise standards
in schools, staunchly defended by the state
superintendent and other reformers who want
schools to become more rigorous to meet the
growing demands of a tougher global economy.
Proponents argue that a state diploma needs to
mean something so that all California schools
have the same yardstick.

"I believe that the biggest mistake we could
make is to view this report as a reason to
lower our expectations for any student, but
especially for our students of color and
females," State Superintendent of Public
Instruction Jack O'Connell wrote in a press
release responding to the Stanford study. He
requested that his staff and outside evaluators
scrutinize the study to find ways "to better
meet the educational needs of all students."

California installed the exam nearly three
years ago to set a minimum bar for a high
school diploma, pegged at the sophomore level
in English and middle school in math. That
might seem like a low hurdle, but the exam has
proved a stumbling block for many students.
Questions range from calculating percentages
and square roots to extracting the key ideas in
a sample paragraph from an essay, a play or an
employee manual. But studies of the exam and
its effects have been mixed. Many questions are
still unanswered.

Nearly a quarter of San Diego Unified students
fail either exam in their sophomore year. Some
have to take it over and over before passing. A
small minority of 80 students failed to
graduate last year solely because of failing
the exit exam, even though they met all the
other requirements to graduate, said Peter
Bell, director of research and reporting in San
Diego Unified. They are disproportionately
Latino and African American students and almost
two thirds of them are girls. That mirrors
statistics countywide, where roughly one
percent of high school seniors had not passed
the exam before the end of last year.

"The questions are confusing. You don't even
know what they're trying to ask you," said
Grethel Sagrero, a 17-year-old student at the
alternative Mark Twain High School who has
taken the test three times.

For some it has become a stumbling block. "I've
heard all these people say, 'If I don't pass
this time I will give up,'" said Antoinette
Jarrells, a Twain High student who is waiting
to see if she passed the math portion of the
test. "It makes you feel like that -- it really
does."

'More Baggage That You Have to Deal With'
The Stanford study, funded by the James Irvine
Foundation, traced students in San Diego, Long
Beach, Fresno and San Francisco over three
years from 2005 to 2007, before and after the
exam became a graduation requirement. Reardon
and his colleagues found that scores on the
11th grade English test did not rise when the
exit exam was instituted. And they found that
struggling students, those in the lowest fifth
of their classes based on their previous test
scores, were 15 percent less likely to graduate
when the high school exam was in effect.

That graduation rates dropped when the exam was
required is not surprising. The whole idea of
setting a bar to graduate is that some students
will pass it and some will fail. But what
worries Reardon is that the bar seems to be
more difficult for girls and students of color
than for their white and male classmates, even
when they have already matched them on other
standardized tests.

Among students who struggled with the tests,
girls and students of color perform worse on
the exams than their scores on previous tests
with lower stakes would predict. They performed
better on the California Standards Tests -- a
statewide exam that has no impact on whether a
student graduates -- and then fumbled on the
stressful exit exam. The result is that 10
percent of students of color and 5 percent of
girls who failed the test would otherwise have
passed it if they were not underperforming,
Reardon said.

Graduation rates dropped 15 to 19 percent among
students of color in the lowest fifth of their
classes and only 1 percent among white students
with similar academic histories, according to
the study. Struggling girls' graduation rates
dropped 19 percent while their equally
struggling male classmates' rates dropped only
12 percent.

"His results are a little disturbing," said
Lauress Wise, a principal scientist at the
Human Resources Research Organization, a
research group that studies the exit exam for
the California Legislature every year. "It
seems that even down in the lowest range,
minorities have been disproportionately
impacted."

The problem does not seem to be weaker schools
in predominantly black and Latino
neighborhoods, Reardon said, because the gap
remains when students are in the same schools.
Nor do they believe that the test is skewed
towards white students or boys.

Instead, the researchers believe the problem is
rooted in "stereotype threat" -- the crippling
fear that a person will confirm a negative
stereotype about their own race, religion,
gender or other group. It is a relatively young
and controversial theory in a growing field of
research. The idea is that girls who are
worried about proving the old canard about
girls struggling with math will struggle with
math tests. Latinos who worry about justifying
stereotypes of Latinos struggling with English
tests will falter in English.

Steven Stroessner, a professor of psychology at
Barnard College, described a recent study that
found that women using driving simulators were
more than twice as likely to hit a simulated
jaywalker when researchers told them that they
were studying whether women were worse drivers
than men. He was unfamiliar with the California
exam but called such stressful tests "a recipe"
for stereotype threat.

"If you belong to a group where people don't
think you're going to do well," Stroessner
said, "you have more baggage that you have to
deal with."

Reardon and his colleagues did not interview
students to judge what they were thinking about
during the tests. Nor did they have
physiological evidence such as brain scans to
gauge. But they found that stereotyping
explained their results better than any other
theory they could muster, from poor schools to
biased tests to tracking students.

"This is our best guess of what it is," Reardon
said.

How -- Or If -- The Exam Can Be Fixed
The contentious study seems to throw the
fundamental fairness of the test into question.
But Wise and other researchers are skeptical of
killing off the exit exam, which has drawn
attention to just how far some students have
fallen behind, without a lot more research.

Wise cautions that the conclusions that Reardon
has drawn on whether the exit exam boosts
student achievement are based on the results
from a single exam -- the California English
exam for 11th graders -- and not on earlier or
even later measures taken in senior year or
beyond. Other studies show that the exam has
pushed schools to toughen instruction and make
sure that they are teaching what is tested,
said Wise, whose own research shows that
passing rates have risen among sophomores and
juniors since the test was first introduced.

"I feel that it would be a mistake to cancel
the exam because of this," said Julian Betts, a
University of California San Diego economics
professor whose research has shown that schools
can identify students who will struggle on the
exit exam as early as 4th grade. "But
intervening earlier would do wonders to help
students pass the math part of the exam. ... It
is worrisome that kids are having trouble with
pre-algebra as late as grade 12."

Others are now left wondering how -- or if --
the exit exam can be fixed. Stereotype threat
is rooted in societal issues that are beyond
the scope of the tests. But studies show that
stereotype threat can be minimized if students
are told that anyone can do well on the test if
they persist and study, rather than being told
that the test measures their ability. Reducing
the anxiety around the test is another way to
defuse stereotype threat.

That is exactly what teachers do at many
schools tailored to struggling students. A
cheery sign in the hallway at Twain High reads
"The tassel is worth the hassle" and advertises
free food and bus tokens for an exam
preparation session. Math teacher Tina
McGlathery said she "backs off" the day before
the test and encourages her students to take
deep breaths and go slowly. Larry Mikulanis, a
veteran teacher who has spent nearly two
decades at Twain, said he coaches teens both on
grammar and getting over stress.

"The fear stops them sometimes," Mikulanis
said. "Sometimes they are just test-phobic. I
was the same way. You see the test and all of a
sudden your mind goes blank. It's a matter of
getting the fear out of them."

Genchis finally passed the English portion of
the exam on his third try after getting help at
Garfield High School, another alternative
school for students who struggle in
conventional high schools. He believes he
succeeded because of his teachers' advice.

"They said, 'It's just a test,'" Genchis said.
"'It doesn't tell everyone how smart you are.
So don't get nervous. Do the best you can.'" He
plans to graduate next year.



— Emily Alpert
Voice of San Diego
2009-04-22
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/04/22/education/829testing042209.prt

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