June 27, 1998, Saturday, City Edition

    A sampling of other states with teacher certification tests shows their failure rates are typically in the 20 to 35 percent range, compared to Massachusetts' 44 percent, but most states say their failure rates were higher when the testing began.

Teacher testing specialists in several states said new exams tend to elicit high failure rates, and that pass rates almost always improve over time as students and teacher educators programs become more familiar with the exams.

In Connecticut, which many in education consider to have one of the nation's toughest teacher certification exams, more than 30 percent of first-time test-takers routinely fail, according to state officials, and 15 percent fail on a second try. Officials from Connecticut and Delaware, which routinely has a 33 percent failure rate, said their failure rates were higher when they began testing teachers in the 1980s, although exact figures were not available.

In Texas, results for the state's newer tests in specific subject areas varied from 47 percent failing the journalism test, to 19 percent failing biology and 21 percent failing secondary English in 1996-97. Sixteen percent of 14,000 prospective teachers failed the exam on teaching technique, a test Massachusetts does not offer.

Florida has had a teacher-certification test since 1986 and has raised its passing standard every two years, said Fisher, as candidates are trained more closely and become more familiar with the exams. Nevertheless, 20 percent failed the last year's reading exam, 18 percent failed English language skills, 22 percent failed the essay portion and 45 percent failed math.

"We all want the best people. But if they can't pass, then they should find another occupation," said Thomas Fisher, Florida's director of testing. "These tests are to protect the public welfare from incompetents in the classroom. That is what it boils down to."

Most of the 44 states that test teachers use exams created by the Educational Testing Service Inc. While the tests are nearly identical in each state, passing scores vary among states by as much as eight or 10 points, according to ETS data. Educators say state goals can vary: Higher passing scores ensure a narrower pool of highly qualified teachers; lower cut-off scores create a broader pool of low-scorers.

Massachusetts uses a National Evaluation Systems Inc. test, like eight other states, but NES officials in Amherst were repeatedly unavailable for comment this week. It was unclear how the Massachusetts passing score set by the Board of Education compares to that in other NES states.

Massachusetts Acting Governor Paul Cellucci and state legislators this week expressed outrage at the the high failure rate here. Some 44 percent of teachers failed based on the Board of Education's passing standard; 59 percent failed based on the stricter standard recommended by 300 educators.

"I can tell you who won't be a great teacher, the idiots who took that test and flunked so miserably," said House Speaker Thomas Finneran, a Democrat from Mattapan, in a breakfast speech Thursday before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. "It's an indictment of Massachusetts and an indictment of this nation."

Ronald Hambleton, a professor of education and psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a nationally known expert in teacher testing, said that based on his experience with other states, Massachusetts teacher candidates do not appear to be any more or less prepared to teach than typical candidates elsewhere.

He also said that most other states have adopted passing scores lower than what was initially recommended by their education panels, as the Massachusetts Board of Education here did this week.

He invited Cellucci and others criticizing student teachers to take the test themselves.

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The Boston Globe