Is That Your Final Answer?

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The 25 Boston teenagers marched last Monday down the city's famed Freedom Trail, past Paul Revere's home, to the office of Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci. They were armed with 800 letters of protest and a simple demand: that the Governor sit for the standardized test that will soon decide which students graduate from the state's public high schools. When an aide told them there was no time in his schedule--the test takes more than 18 hours--the students handed over a poster-size report card on the Governor's program to raise academic performance. His marks: an incomplete, a D-minus and two F's.

As shots go, theirs wasn't heard round the world. But the students are foot soldiers in a growing revolt being waged in classrooms, car-pool lines and statehouses across the U.S. The enemy? The standardized exams being taken by so many kids in the final days of the school year. Unlike the fill-in-the-bubble tests of yesteryear, which often did little more than single out kids for accelerated classes, this exhaustive new breed of tests is increasingly used to determine not only whether students get diplomas but also whether the school gets funding and teachers get raises--not to mention whether students will spend their upcoming vacation sunning on the beach or sweating out summer school.

As the stakes have risen, so has the pressure to perform--and the frustration among parents, students and educators. In the past year, protest-the-test groups have sprouted in at least 36 states. In Colorado, more than a thousand parents, teachers and students surrounded the state capitol in March and demanded that Governor Bill Owens take the test. (He too declined.) Parents in Louisiana, Indiana and California have gone a step further, filing lawsuits alleging that the tests violate their children's civil rights. In Illinois, 200 students claimed they flunked the test on purpose. Teachers are taking to the streets, with some walking out of exams or quitting the profession entirely. Even worse, some are trying to beat the tests by any means available. In the past few months alone, allegations of teacher-assisted cheating have roiled schools in California, Florida, Maryland, New York and Ohio. A common line of defense among these teachers: they cracked under the pressure.

While few dispute the need to gauge student achievement, many are beginning to challenge the calculators. In practice, the tests have spawned an epidemic of distressing headlines: students failing--and being held back--en masse; frenzied parents enrolling first-graders in professional test-prep courses; property values being influenced by test scores in local schools. Even those schools that have posted gains say the success has come at a hefty price. Educators say they have had to dumb down their lessons to teach the often picayune factoids covered by the exams. A study released last month by the University of Virginia found that while some schools had boosted their performance on Virginia's exam, teachers had to curtail field trips, elective courses and even student visits to the bathroom--all in an effort to cram more test prep into the school day. Says the study's author, education professor Daniel Duke: "These schools have become battlefield units."