Test Drive

For the past seven years, Sam Camacho has taught language arts at Robert J. Frank Intermediate School in Oxnard, Calif., an oceanside community an hour north of Los Angeles. He has coached the boys' basketball team for nearly as long. Lately his two roles seem oddly interchangeable.

Camacho began one recent eighth-grade class by brandishing a page of the morning's Los Angeles Times, which listed the latest standardized-test scores of all the schools in the state. "This is a competition," he told his students. "What you see here is like a box score in the sports section." The school had a sorry record for the third year in a row, ranking in the bottom 20% in the state. But Camacho now has a new playbook. He spent the previous afternoon at a tutorial paid for by the school as part of a $10,500 package designed by Kaplan, the test-prep company that, for the past half-century or so, has taught students how to beat the SAT. From now on, his students will spend 50 minutes a week in his class and another 50 in math studying Kaplan's Test-Taking Strategies manual. The approach appeals to the coach in Camacho. "This class is my team, and this is the equipment they need to win this game," he explains. "What better strategy is there?"

By now, state high-stakes exams have become a fact of life in the American classroom. Less noticed is the growing presence--and power--of firms like Kaplan that teach students and their teachers how to master them. The companies, which have spent decades deflating the mystique of the sat, take a similar tack with the grade-school exams. They maintain that test taking, like telling time or double-knotting a shoelace, is a "life skill" that every child can learn and no youngster should go without. Says Jeff McCullough, Kaplan's director of training and development: "Kids who have done well...are suddenly slapped with a challenge that is so foreign to them that they underperform just because of the strangeness of the task."

Schools have needed little convincing. The market for K-12 test-prep services for state exams, which was almost insignificant three years ago, is now a booming $50 million arena dominated by familiar names such as Kaplan, The Princeton Review and tutoring powerhouse Sylvan Learning Centers, which last year launched a $900 test-prep course for students as young as those in third grade. These testing giants have been joined by hundreds of new, small-time firms that often have little to recommend them beyond their own breathless promises of higher scores. The demand will only grow with the law signed by President Bush on Jan. 8 that requires annual testing in reading and math in Grades 3 through 8 by 2005; a provision in the law also pledges up to $1,000 a child in chronically low-scoring schools, for tutoring and test training.