Test Drive

The complaints boiled over when Kaplan's McCullough visited Robert J. Frank Intermediate School in mid-January for a teacher-training session. The audience of 50 teachers, many already intimately familiar with the Kaplan regimen, stayed silent throughout his 45-minute spiel. "This book is horrible," eighth-grade language-arts teacher Charles Manley told him afterward. "When you're doing the language section, you're taught to first eliminate two of the possibilities, leaving two left. That's leverage, not learning." His colleague Jamie French tells of jettisoning Greek and Roman mythology to make room for three weeks of test prep. The teachers draw little sympathy from principal Ron D'Incau, who has fielded angry calls from parents demanding to know why test scores remain so low. "Some teachers want to teach things that are nice to teach but aren't really standards," says D'Incau. "You might teach a tremendous unit on dinosaurs, but nothing in the standards calls for knowledge of dinosaurs, so you have to take it out."

It might be easier to give up the stegosaurs if the school were not still flailing. After one year of Kaplan, its scores have increased 45 points--three times the state-mandated 15-point gain--but it remains dead last in its county. The problem is that there is no solid evidence so far that this kind of preparation makes kids dependable test takers, let alone good learners. One minuscule study of five schools in Houston that used The Princeton Review's Homeroom.com found that fourth-graders who used the online assessments improved their scores twice as much as nonusers--but that study was conducted by the company itself.

Many schools are desperate to try anything. Late last spring, Durfee High School in Fall River, Mass., signed a $28,000 deal with TestU, an online test-prep newcomer, to help its students prepare for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam. Though test scores improved only slightly in their short time on the system, Durfee renewed the deal for the entirety of this year. "It's not an exact science," says the school's assistant principal Jackie Proulx. "But, by golly, every intervention we can use we will."