The investigation into what happened when city school students were given an actual test as a practice exam is still underway, says Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard. It's his opinion based on what he knows so far, however, that incompetence is to blame.

"What really bothered me the most was that nobody, not even one person, questioned the process," he says.

But the district has taken steps toward greater accountability that should prevent the problem from recurring, Brizard says. Last week for the first time, students in grades 5 through 9 in all city schools took English language arts and math exams, one of four sets of exams in those subjects that they will take this year. They are not the high-stakes tests required by New York State. These tests are designed to create an across-the-district benchmark telling where students, teachers, schools, and the district as a whole perform. The tests should expose problems that students are having while there is time to intervene and target tutorial support before the school year is over.

"We have never had a benchmark that looks at the whole district systemically," says Brizard. "The information that will come from this will be very useful. We can look at the data and know where we have been."

Brizard says the tests will not only show him which students and schools are doing well, but will also show him which teachers need professional development.

"Too much of what we do is an autopsy of what has already occurred," he says. "We don't want to know why Johnny failed math. We want to prevent Johnny from failing."

In one class that Brizard recently observed, the teacher was covering fractions, but he couldn't tell Brizard which students were advanced and which ones were not grasping the lesson. The teacher was following the curriculum correctly, Brizard says, but if he had better information, he would have been able to adjust his instruction according to the students' needs.