To announce that educational reform i s abroad in the land comes, in mid-1985, as no great revelation. Since the publication of A Nation At Risk in 1983, the nation has been literally besieged with calls for educational reform, calls that have issued from national, state, and local levels, from public and private sectors, from aca- deme, from busings and industry, from parents and other individuals-in short, from virtually all quarters. The re- sponse has been just as pervasive. Governors have cre- ated their own committees on excellence, legislatures have proposed and enacted a bevy of reform statutes, state boards of education have issued blueprints for ac- tion, local school districts-often in concert with local business and industrial interests-h.ave established their own reform comm.ittees.

What appears central to these many current reform efforts i s an almost universal call for data on how students are doing in our schools, on what they are learning, on their levels of achievement. Data on pupil achievement are seen as being vital to these reform efforts for any number of different reasons-to identify curricular strengths and weaknesses, to allocate resources, to select pupils for remedial assistance, to evaluate school and program effectiveness, to certify promotion and gradu- ation, and to report status and progress to the general public. Pupil testing programs, particularly state- and nation-wide programs, and the data these programs pro- duce have become vital components of the current ed- ucational reform movement.

Some people in the educational and measurement communities see this as a much-needed and long-awaited development. Others are not as sanguine about the use of state- and nation-wide testing programs as vehicles for educational reform. Still others fall somewhere in between. Consequently, the advisory board of EM and its editor, Frank Womer, felt there was good reason to devote a special issue of the journal to a description of how tests and test data currently are being used at na- tional and state levels and a discussion of the pros and cons of such uses. They asked me to serve as guest editor of the special issue.

As a first step, we brought together a group of content and measurement specialists to settle on an appropriate format for the special issue and to explore possible au- thors for the articles. The group consisted of four persons from The University of Michigan: Richard Bringle from the English Composition Board, Karen Wixson, a reading researcher in the School of Education, Frank Womer, and myself; two persons from the Michigan Department of Education: Edward Roeber and David Donovan, both of whom have been long involved with Michigan's state-

wide educational assessment program; and Douglas McRae, a consultant with one of the leading test pub- lishers. We settled on a format that called for a set of "presentation" articles and a set of "response" articles, and a highly visible set of authors, all of whom enjoyed national reputations in their particular areas of practice or expertise. To our good fortune, all agreed to partici- pate.

In the lead "presentation" article, Emerson Elliott and Ron Hall of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) describe succinctly a series of recent "extraor- dinary events" that have transpired at the national level, all of which are aimed at better informing policymakers and the general public about the status and progress of education in the United States, and all of which use test data as an important ingredient. Principal among these efforts i s the educational indicators project, which has led to the recently released NCES report, Indicators of Education Status and Trends. Elliott and Hall devote the major part of their article to a discussion of the nature of the indicators, how and why they were chosen, and the purposes they are intended to serve.

In the second article, Florida Commissioner of Edu- cation Ralph Turlington describes how testing programs in Florida are changing that state's educational system. For Commissioner Turlington, tests are seen as an effec- tive vehicle for educational reform and consequently are employed for a broad range of purposes, including "set- ting standards for students, making schools more ac- countable, creating growth through competition, eval- uating educational programs, and assuring the competence of educators."

While Florida takes an approach characterized by strong state directives, Connecticut, following a long tradition of local control, treads more lightly. Yet tread it does with three separate state-level testing programs, all of which are viewed as vehicles for educational re- form. Commissioner Gerald Tirozzi and his colleagues describe these programs in the third and final "presen- tation" article. The first program, CAEP, is modeled on NAEP and aimed at reporting on "the condition of ed- ucation" in Connecticut. The second program i s part of a larger state-wide basic sk i l l s program and provides for the administration of a "capstone" proficiency exami- nation for a l l grade 9 pupils in al l Connecticut schools. The third i s a recently developed mastery testing program in which particular attention i s being paid to the meas- urement of higher order thinking.

In the first of the two "response" articles, Beverly Anderson, from her position as a measurement specialist of national reputation, argues that available evidence

4 Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice

suggests strongly that state testing programs are not just a passing fad. And, she contends, because these pro- grams are building momentum and seem destined to grow, the measurement community has its work cut out if it i s to help make state testing programs useful tools for educational improvement. Arguing that a clear un- derstanding of the purposes that state testing programs are attempting to serve is a necessary first step, Anderson lays out an agenda aimed at helping groups within the measurement community decide where best to focus their professional energies.

In the second “response” article, John Guthrie and Robert Lissitz bring together the expertise and the points of view of a reading content specialist and a research methodologist. While generally concurring with the ”presenters’ ” positions that improved testing programs

can contribute positively to educational reform, they ar- gue that the ”presenters” have failed to make some cru- cial distinctions. Chief among these are distinctions among the uses of tests. For them, these distinctions should set the stage for the employment of different as- sessment strategies. They argue, in short, that the qual- itatively different decisions that wil l be made from test scores require qualitatively different approaches to measurement and test interpretation.

We think that this special issue of EM has taken a modest step toward providing a much-needed forum for dialogue, debate, and discussion on the question of whether nation-wide and state testing programs can serve as vehicles for educational reform. We hope that the dialogue, debate, and discussion wil l continue. We wel- come your comments.

Summer 1985 5