SACRAMENTO, CA -- The recent news that scores on this year's Stanford-9, California's statewide student assessment test, had risen over last year's, especially among second- and third-graders, has been greeted with optimism by education officials. But before they start to celebrate, policymakers and the public should consider
the possibility of fraud.

Copies of the Stanford-9 test are easy to obtain, the questions never change from year to year, and practice
tests with nearly identical questions are easily available. School officials often prevent low-performing students from taking the test, and there have been widespread complaints of cheating at many schools. Assuming, though, that such cheating isn't enough to explain the entire increase in test scores, then what does?

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley education professor Bruce Fuller and researcher Luis Huerta claim
that reducing class size in grades K-3, “undoubtedly is contributing to higher test scores in the early grades.” Yet, a recent study of California's class-size reduction program specifically says that it's difficult to tell if this has had a significant effect on improving test scores. One study author, RAND social scientist Brian Stecher, says that even if class-size reduction has had some positive effect, “it's small enough that it would take quite a long time to bring California up to the national average or to close the achievement gap between minority students and white students.”

Amazingly, Fuller and Huerta fail to mention perhaps the most important reason why test scores in the early
grades are rising: the changeover from whole-language reading instruction, where emphasis is placed on
recognizing whole words or even sentences by sight, to phonics-based instruction which emphasizes letter-sound
relationships to form words. Reversing more than a decade of whole-language policy, in recent years the
state Board of Education has ditched several whole-language textbook series, requested local districts to focus on phonics, and adopted rigorous phonics-based statewide reading standards for the early grades.

In addition, Gov. Pete Wilson poured hundreds of millions of dollars into phonics-based instructional programs. Wilson’s successor, Gray Davis, has continued this trend, which is supported by quality data. After examining 80 years of research, the late Harvard education professor Jeanne Chall, an expert on reading instruction, found conclusively that phonics instruction was more effective than whole-language instruction and led to higher achievement in word recognition and reading comprehension. She also found that teaching phonics was especially effective for low-income and other at-risk children.

According to the research, therefore, the rise in test scores of younger students is best explained not by
class-size reduction but by the reintroduction of phonics instruction to California classrooms. In addition to the educational lessons, the test-score episode contains common-sense principles for policymakers, parents, the public, and the media.

Before celebrating higher scores, investigate the possibility of fraud. Above all, beware of those who attribute increased test scores to programs they support but which the evidence doesn’t. Tax dollars should flow only to programs that have been scientifically proven to be effective. That will ensure that California gets high-achieving students, not just high-spending government budgets.

- Lance T. Izumi