I say that with some confidence, because my wife worked in admissions at one of those schools and I am drawing on her experience rather than mine there.

I think the critical point there, though, is the tests for both achievement and ability were providing some indications of where people stand and those in turn could assist the student and the educators with decisions about where they could, can, and should go.

If I might drop back and catch some of that in another phase, yesterday I had the opportunity to work with a group of people representing various organizations, universities, political world, the State bureaucracy, and so on, and a question which this group has mandated be addressed and that is, what is adequate education in the United States, and how should that be promulgated by the Federal Government.

Congress has asked that position papers be prepared on the subject and submitted by December and we were in fact working on one of those yesterday.

Among other things, we concluded that adequacy must be defined in terms of society as well as the individual and to have some indications of what is adequate, one must have some indicators which can be many different kinds of things.

In particular, regardless of limtiations, because they are in our world, we need some things that allow comparisons across groups and among individuals, and standardized testing for us allows that, particularly things like minimum competency testing. We need to know whether or not students can read, write, and recollect and, if they can't, what are we going to do about it.

Then you get into some questions when you are talking about things like that, whether or not students are adequately prepared to deal with those matters, and I think that is the responsibility of the public schools.

We can do that by informing parents, students, and working with teachers, and so on, and that matter can be addressed very easily. In summary, I would simply leave you with the idea that when you have a school system like Guilford County that was already performing above national norms when the mandated tests were first administered in North Carolina, that does not leave you in a position of satisfaction.

That leaves you in a position of being able to do more and we just reported to our board last night-our board of education—although I was not there because I came up here, that over a 4-year period scores have continually gone up in all areas across the system, and in every school in all the areas measured.

I think that is what we are all about in education, improvement, and do those kinds of things and to show other people there must be some standard way of doing it.

Mr. WEISS. Thank you, Dr. Priddy.

Mr. Shields?

STATEMENT OF PATRICK SHIELDS, DIRECTOR, EAST HARLEM COLLEGE AND CAREER COUNSELING PROGRAM, NEW YORK, N.Y. Mr. SHIELDS. Good morning. My name is Patrick Shields, presently the associate director of an organization known as the East Harlem Career Counseling Program.

My past experience in the field of education includes working as an assistant dean in the admissions office at Amherst College, includes teaching literacy up in Massachusetts for the New England Farm Workers Council, as well as running a neighborhood center in Holyoke, Mass.

My masters work is in educational administration at Columbia University, with emphasis in Federal policy, and I am also presently serving on an advisory committee for the College Board for a program they are trying to put together to identify talented Hispanic students throughout the country.

I have been asked to come here because I am from New York State and we have a truth-in-testing law, and so I have worked under it for the last year and I have been asked to speak about that, but it is important to note first where I work and how I work.

I work in East Harlem and the students with whom I work range in age from 14 to 27 in East Harlem and the South Bronx. Those names, of course, ring bells in your ears. They are very impoverished areas. East Harlem has an unemployment rate of around 50 percent, median income between $5,000 and $6,000, depending on the group we are talking about, whether or not it is Hispanic or black.

Those particular aspects of the community, of course, have their effects on the students I work with. The lack of employment opportunities, the welfare dependent lives of so many of the families, affect students greatly.

They are, of course, the ones for whom there are the fewest occupational jobs opportunities available in the city. The educational opportunities available to my students to make up for that, in no way compensate for the bleak occupational outlook.

In New York, 45 percent of the students who enter high school in the ninth grade do not graduate. That is in the city as a whole.

In our local academic comprehensive high school in East Harlem, there are 1,800 students, 71 of whom graduated, 7 of whom graduated with New York State Regents diplomas.

Statistics, of course, can't really talk about what those students have to go through. They don't really represent the reality of the situation there.

Walking into a high school in the morning and seeing the kids out on the steps getting high, or playing basketball over in the park across the way, says a great deal more than those statistics do, yet somehow too many of those students sometimes for our likes overcome those incredible roadblocks and continue to strive for some ill-defined measure of success in their eyes.

In other words, they stay in school or they try to get back into school. During the school year, our appointment calendar is filled up 2 and 3 weeks in advance. These are eighth- and ninth-grade students who want to go into high school, students who dropped out and want to get back in. They are, however, in the majority,

students who are in the 11th, 12th grades who are faced with the maze-like process of testing and financial aid and admission forms. It is our job as college counselors to help them through this maze. Unfortunately, the simple fact that they have made that decision to continue their education in no way does away with the obstacles that have been thrown up in front of them in the educational process.

Unfortunately, too many of those obstacles are in the form of standardized tests, and my students perform extremely poorly on those tests. It is not my purpose today to expose the negative side of standardized tests in America. The validity of those tests has been argued back and forth on both sides of the political spectrum. However, the facts and arguments of those particular arguments concerning standardized tests are germane to the discussion of how my students confront the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.

Standardized tests play an extremely important role in the educational life of the students who come to see me. In such a large system as New York, there are many, many educational options. A student coming out of the elementary school, going on into junior high school, has a number of junior high schools to choose from, and within the junior high schools, there are specialized schools.

Moving into high school, there is a myriad of five options that the student has. New York has the distinction of having some of the very finest high schools in the country-and some of the worst. The decision on who gets into the very best high schools is made upon a student's performance on one standardized test. That is not true of all the high schools.

There is no question that the guidance counseling in the schools depends a great deal upon the students. In other words, where they are guided to go to high school depends upon their results on standardized reading and math tests. Almost all of the important decisions in a student's schooling have been based all or in large part on the performance of standardized tests, and so, by the time they reach my door, they have come to perceive those tests as having some type of mystical powers.

Most frequently, this is fostered in the form of a negative selfattitude. These tests have proven them to be, in their own eyes, somewhat stupid. Given this mysticism of the test, it is often very difficult for me to prepare a student for the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

This difficulty is compounded because the test is becoming more important every year for my students in terms of their chances of attending the colleges of their choice. This is not because the admission process is getting tougher. There are less students applying to college now. It is because of the role of the test in the financial aid process.

As the Federal financial aid dollar continues to shrink in both real and inflationary terms, the competition for colleges' own campus-based money becomes much more keener, and as a total applicant pool decreases, colleges begin to compete for those students by buying them.

I know of many schools where scholarships are offered regardless of need, any kind of financial need, for three-quarters of tuition for a certain combination of SAT scores, and full scholarships for a

certain SAT score combined with a comparably higher rank in class.

Very few of the students ever receive any of those merit-based moneys, so when a student first comes to me for assistance in the college application process and I tell them that they have to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, I really am faced with a dilemma because a student, the type I work with, almost always appears extremely anxious. Their most frequent response is, "I know I am going to fail it." I see a need to try to lessen that anxiety but, at the same time, it would be unfair of me to minimize the importance of the test.

So, confronted with this when I first began to work at the East Harlem Counseling Program, I spoke to some people in other organizations and decided to establish a seminar that the students could attend for the 3 weeks before the examination where we could begin to deal with some of these problems.

The purpose of the seminar was not to further develop the students' verbal or mathematical abilities; unlike commercial prep courses, we didn't hand out vocabulary lists and algebraic and geometric concepts. We set up a course in such a way students became intimately familiar with the examination, the types of questions asked, the way the questions were phrased, and the amount of time.

The whole purpose of the course was to get the student to a point that they were so familiar with the exam and the process of taking it that they no longer harbored the fears and anxieties that he first encounters.

Mr. WEISS. The bells have rung. There is a vote on the floor of the House, so we will take a 10-minute recess.

[A short recess was taken.]

Mr. WEISS. The committee will resume its hearing.

If you will pick up, we can continue.

Mr. SHIELDS. Thank you.

I was talking about the seminars I had established to help students prepare to take the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. After a few of the seminars, two serious flaws became evident which are relevant in today's discussion. Both of these problems resulted directly from my need to resort to various commercial SAT prep guides in the absence of copies of the actual test.

Given the nature of the seminar, to instill confidence through familiarity, not having real SAT questions in the students' exercises obviously reduced our chances of success. Without actual test questions, it was difficult in most cases and impossible in many to convince the students that they were walking into the exam with accurate knowledge of what they would confront.

The second problem resulting from lack of access to the test concerned my effectiveness as an instructor of the prep course. Commercially published prep books and Educational Testing Service publications on the SAT contain all the different types of questions that are asked on the tests. The commercial texts, however, do not contain questions of consistently high quality.

You cannot compare the text and detect subtle emphasis within certain sections. The truth-in-testing legislation remedied those two problems for me. With actual copies of the SAT to show the stu

dents, I have been much more successful in instilling confidence in my students.

I believe it is telling to note attendance has doubled since we began to use the actual SAT in the course. Our preparation has been significantly more successful, and they react very favorably to having the actual copies of the tests themselves. My coaching has improved since I have been able to study the exams and compare the tests.

The enactment of truth-in-testing in New York State has also allowed us to add another dimension to our counseling services vis-avis the SAT's. Before the law, if a student came to us after taking the SAT with the feeling that he had done poorly, or if his scores were way out of line with what we had expected, we had no recourse but to sit down with the student and try to remember what he had done. Rarely were we ever successful in finding any problems.

Now, we can request a copy of the examination, the actual corrected test, sit down and begin to analyze where and how the student went wrong. This may afford us the ability to reveal concrete, nonaptitude related reasons for poor performance.

For example, a student may have guessed too often, rushed answers at the end of certain sections in order to finish and not leave blanks and, very importantly for some students, the students with the highest test anxieties, they are able to sit down and review all the questions and answers and realize that they could have performed better on the test, that they were capable of answering questions that they missed.

If their poor performance on the exam had been due to a test anxiety, they can begin to understand and deal with it.

I came here today to speak because of my personal experience with the effects of truth-in-testing legislation in New York State. I have outlined that experience, and showed its overwhelmingly positive effects on my work, with students in East Harlem. I do hope, however, that my discussion today has attested to more than just this experience.

It is my opinion that if the Educational Testing Act of 1981 is enacted and carried out in good faith, it will have its greatest effect on the most educationally disadvantaged of the students who take the SAT. It will be my students' counterparts in the urban and rural ghettos across this country who will be given a much fairer shot at succeeding in the educational process.

Truth-in-testing promises these students the opportunity to confront their attitudes toward the tests directly. As declining enrollments make tests less important for the rich who can afford the full cost of education, the shrinking financial aid dollar and the pernicious practice of no-need, merit-based awards make tests more important to the poor.

The Educational Testing Act of 1981 recognizes that "there is a continuous need to ensure equal access for all Americans to eductional opportunities of high quality." It is, however, beyond the scope of both this bill and of the powers of the Federal Government in general to legislate how students are educated on the elementary and secondary levels and how colleges choose to spend their private moneys.