High Schools to Offer Plan to Graduate 2 Years Early

By SAM DILLON | NY Times
Published: February 17, 2010

Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th-grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but also subjects like science and history.

The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore.

The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and its goals include insuring that students have mastered a set of basic requirements and reducing the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.

“That’s a central problem we’re trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges,” said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. “We’ve looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you’ll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided a $1.5 million planning grant to help the national center work with states and districts to get the program running, Mr. Tucker said. He estimated that start-up costs for school districts would be about $500 a student, to buy courses and tests and to train teachers.

To defray those costs, the eight states intend to apply for some of the $350 million in federal stimulus money designated for improving public school testing, Mr. Tucker said.

High school students will begin the new coursework in the fall of 2011 in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The education commissioners of those states have pledged to sign up 10 to 20 schools each for the pilot project, and have begun to reach out to district superintendents.

The project’s backers hope it will eventually spread to all schools in those states, and inspire other states to follow suit. Supporters include the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, said high school graduation requirements there had long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate.

“This would reform that,” Dr. Holliday said. “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready.”

The new system aims to provide students with a clear outline of what they need to study to succeed, said Phil Daro, a consultant based in Berkeley, Calif., who is a member of an advisory committee for the effort.

School systems like Singapore’s promise students that if they diligently study the material in their course syllabuses, they will do well on their examinations, Mr. Daro said. “In the U.S., by contrast, all is murky,” he said. “Students do not have a clear idea of where to apply their effort, and the system makes no coherent attempt to reward learning.”

Its backers say the new system would reduce the need for community colleges to offer remedial courses because the passing score for the 10th-grade tests would be set at the level necessary to succeed in first-year college courses. Failure would provide 10th graders with an early warning system about the knowledge and skills they need to master in high school before seeking to enroll in college.

Currently, many high school graduates enrolling in community colleges are stunned to find that they cannot pass the math and English exams those colleges use to determine who need remediation.

Four years ago, a bipartisan panel of national education and other policy experts, assembled by the national center, recommended a far-reaching redesign of the American educational system, including the adoption of board examinations in high schools.

Other recommendations of the 2006 panel included giving states, rather than local districts, control over school financing, and starting school for most children at age 3. Mr. Tucker said the board examination project was the broadest effort at putting the panel’s proposals into effect so far.

“One hope is that this board exam system can prepare students to move on to careers, to higher ed and technical colleges and the workplace, sooner rather than later,” said Howard T. Everson, a professor of educational psychology at the City University of New York, who is co-chairman of the advisory committee.

In that respect, the effort is similar to the growing early college high school movement, in which students begin taking college-level courses while they are still in high school and earning college credit through nearby community colleges.

States that participate in the pilot project on board examinations will pick up to five programs of instruction, with their accompanying tests, for use by the participating high schools. Those programs already approved by the national center include the College Board’s Advanced Placement, the International Baccalaureate Diploma, ACT’s QualityCore and the International General Certificate of Secondary Education programs offered both by Cambridge International and by Edexcel, part of Pearson Education.

NEW REPORT! The Reading Literacy of U.S. Fourth-Grade Students in an International Context

This report from the National Center for Education Statistics in the
Institute of Education Sciences summarizes the performance of U.S.
fourth-grade students on the Progress in International Reading
Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006 assessment, comparing their scores with
their peers internationally.

On average, U.S. fourth-graders scored higher than their peers
worldwide, with average scores higher than the PIRLS scale average
(540 vs. 500), and a greater percentage of U.S. students reaching
each achievement benchmark compared to the international median
percentage.

PIRLS is led by the International Association for the Evaluation of
Educational Achievement (IEA) and has been administered twice, in
2001 and 2006. The United States participated in both years. In
2006, 45 education systems participated, including 38 countries, 5
Canadian provinces, and the separate English- and French-speaking
education systems in Belgium.

The average score for U.S. students was:

* higher than the average score in 22 education systems

* lower than 10 education systems and>
* not significantly different from 12 education systems.

In 2001, the U.S. scored higher than 23 education systems, lower
than 3 education systems, and not significantly different from 8
education systems. Note that since 2001, several countries, as well
as subnational education systems, have been added to the overall
PIRLS participation.

Compared to 2001, the average score for U.S. students in 2006 was
not significantly different overall. On the 2006 assessment, the
average score for U.S. students in reading for literary experience
was 4 points higher than their average score in reading to acquire
and use information. In 2001, the difference was 17 points.

Other findings include the following:

* 12 percent of U.S. students reached the advanced benchmark,
compared to the international median of 7 percent.

> * 47 percent of U.S. students met the high benchmark, compared to
> the international median of 41 percent.

> * 82 percent of U.S. students met the intermediate benchmark,
> compared to the international median of 76 percent.

> * Average scores for girls on the combined reading literacy scale
> were higher than average scores for boys in 43 of the 45
> participating education systems, including the United States.

> To download, view and print the publication as a PDF file, please
> visit:
> http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2008017

> For more information on PIRLS, visit http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pirls/index.asp .

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2008017

Nebraska Swims Hard Against Testing’s Tides

Fourth grader Makenzie Pederson works on a mathematics test at Hayward Elementary School in Nebraska City, Neb., where teachers regularly meet in teams to review data from student assessments.
—James Colburn


February 21, 2007
Nebraska Swims Hard Against Testing’s Tides


Despite resistance, the Cornhusker State counts on its local assessments to meet federal mandates for school accountability.
By Rhea R. Borja

Elkhorn, Neb.

As the sky outside darkened in the face of a winter snowstorm, 3rd graders at Westridge Elementary School bent their heads over a paper-and-pencil test on electricity and magnetism. Then they walked into the hallway to take the test’s last part: connecting wires on an electromagnetic circuit board.
If students connected the wires correctly, a small motor on the board would turn on and a buzzer would sound. Their teacher watched from a few feet away as students, one by one, confidently took their places before the circuit board, their hands busily rearranging the wires. Every few minutes, the afternoon quiet was broken by a low but distinct buzz.
That kind of home-grown test of student performance—developed by educators here within the 4,200-student Elkhorn school district—is par for the course for Nebraska public schools. Not only do such assessments tell teachers what their students know, but they’re also integral to a learning-measurement system unique to the Cornhusker State.
Instead of relying on statewide standardized tests to comply with the accountability requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act—as is the case in the other 49 states—districts in Nebraska use their own academic standards and assessment systems. That’s about 264 systems, give or take a few.
“We’re a local-control state. It’s about local leadership,” said Doug Christensen, Nebraska’s plainspoken commissioner of education. “We’ve tried to preserve the integrity of what we have in this age of NCLB.”
The state’s localized assessment system is not universally admired. The state has struggled to get its system accepted by the U.S. Department of Education, for starters.
And late last month, the education committee chairman in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature introduced a bill that would replace the assessment system with statewide tests, mirroring what other states have done. A public hearing on the bill is scheduled for March 5.
Yet as more states experience battle fatigue amid struggles over accountability, some say Nebraska’s system—although challenging for educators to develop and implement—holds lessons for those looking for new options to measure K-12 performance.
The Elkhorn district was on the itinerary, for example, of a group of educators and leaders from education nonprofit groups from California, Hawaii, Minnesota, and Vermont who visited several Nebraska districts last month to pick up ideas for changing their own schools’ assessment systems. The Jan. 10-12 “study tour” was sponsored by the Forum for Education and Democracy, an Athens, Ohio-based nonprofit organization.
Another sign of such interest: Testing experts and some state education leaders met this month in New Orleans at a conference of the Washington-based Council of Chief State School Officers to discuss how federal policy could make it easier for states to create their own localized assessment systems. The Forum for Education and Democracy, which is opposed to relying on one set of tests for making such high-stakes decisions as students’ grade promotion and graduation or schools’ performance status under NCLB, was part of that Feb. 3 meeting.
“Any state can do this,” said George Wood, the director of the forum and the principal of Federal Hocking High School, in Stewart, Ohio. “It’s just a matter of whether they have the courage.”
Not that building a system of local assessments was easy. The learning curve was steep: Local educators practically had to become de facto psychometricians—experts in creating assessments and analyzing the resulting data.
“What we embarked upon was a massive mind-set change,” said Pat Roschewski, the director of assessment for the Nebraska education department.
Nebraska lawmakers set the wheels in motion in 2000, when they passed legislation requiring school districts to adopt academic standards in reading, writing, mathematics, science, and social studies. The standards had to be as hard as or harder than those the state had already adopted as a model.
Districts then had to create student assessments based on the local standards and report the results to the state. An exception exists for one subject: There is a statewide test for grades 4, 8, and 11 in writing, which state educators consider a cornerstone of learning.
At first, many teachers and administrators pushed back against the new system, called the School-based Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System, or STARS. Some even wanted Nebraska to give a standardized test like those in other states, Ms. Roschewski recalled.

Teacher-developed assessments taken by students such as 4th grader Jacob Moyer are the linchpin of Nebraska's one-of-a-kind accountability system.
—James Colburn
“We spent more time trust-building than anything else to convince teachers that this is important,” she said. “It was messy. Chaotic.”
Teachers felt overwhelmed, agreed Cherie Larson, the director of instructional services for the 1,800-student Plattsmouth community school system. But gradually, with lots of summer, in-school, and weekend training, teachers got on board. “Creating your own assessments is a big responsibility,” Ms. Larson said. “But you can do it, and do it well.”
Seven years later, state education leaders say, teachers have been trained to analyze assessment data. Now they can do a more effective job at adjusting instruction to challenge students and collaborating to fine-tune their district assessments and standards.
“It’s not a test piled on top of your curriculum,” said Renee Jacobson, Plattsmouth’s superintendent of schools. “[The system] is woven into your curriculum. It’s part of your culture.”
One major challenge, though, has been finding ways to give local educators the time and tools they need to build reliable assessments. Nebraska’s 18 educational service units, or regional education agencies, provide the bulk of the training. ESU 4, for example, based in Auburn, some 68 miles southeast of Lincoln, trains 100 to 140 teachers at a time, said Mitzi Hoback, a co-director of the agency. Teachers gather in small groups for the weeklong summer sessions.
“What does a good multiple-choice question look like? If you write an open-ended question, what does the rubric look like to [ensure] consistency in scoring?” asked Ms. Hoback, describing the training.
Teachers are assigned different academic standards, and they collaborate to craft assessments measuring students’ mastery of them. Then they pilot the assessments in their classrooms, and meet again during the school year to talk about which ones worked and why.
At Papillion-La Vista South High School, for example, biology instructor Philip McBride pairs up students and gives each team note cards lettered A to D for pop quizzes that are part of the assessment system of the 9,000-student Papillion-La Vista district, outside Omaha. The teacher then asks questions on key biology concepts, and team members figure out the answers together and hold up the right card. After that, Mr. McBride calls on a team that answered correctly to explain its answer.
Federal Officials Lay Out Assessment To-Do List
After initially rejecting Nebraska’s assessment system as out of compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act, the U.S. Department of Education is now requiring the state to take certain steps by this school year to pass muster with the federal law. To win full approval, the department says the state must:
• Conduct peer reviews of each district’s standards and assessment system and determine which districts have not met NCLB requirements, in such areas as academic content and achievement standards, technical quality, and assessment and curricula alignment;
• Describe the range of sanctions that the state will impose on districts that fail to meet standards for NCLB compliance; and
• Give evidence of peer review and approval that the assessments for English-language learners meet NCLB requirements
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education
“It helps when you hear [the answer] from your peers instead of your teacher,” said 15-year-old Miles Kellett, one of Mr. McBride’s students.
Sometimes, assessments that work in theory fall apart in reality. In the Elkhorn district just northwest of Omaha, for example, 4th grade teachers Julie Sorensen and Troy Sidders taught their students the basic physics of sailing and then had them build a sail using six straws and a piece of paper to test their understanding of such concepts as velocity and lift. If built correctly, the sails would move forward at least one meter when students blew on them.
The problem, the teachers said, was that some students watched one classmate who quickly understood how to build an efficient sail. Then they just copied him.
“It would have been great if each kid was in a room with a closed door,” said Mr. Sidders. Now he and Ms. Sorensen are reconsidering their use of the performance test and are devising other tests.
That kind of teacher teamwork and time can be hard to come by in an already crammed school day. Still, neither teachers nor districts are entirely on their own.
The state gives districts $3.5 million a year in STARS grants for staff development in assessment.
Nebraska's Top Six 'Quality Criteria' for Assessment
1: The assessments reflect the state or local standards.
2: Students have an opportunity to learn the content.
3: The assessments are free from bias or offensive language or situations.
4: The level is appropriate for students.
5: There is consistency in scoring.
6: Mastery levels are appropriate.
SOURCE: Nebraska Department of Education
In Plattsmouth, for example, the district has shaved five minutes off the end of the school day so that teachers have at least 30 minutes to meet at the end of every sixth day. Educators in the 1,360-student Nebraska City district, 48 miles east of Lincoln, meet in teams to review assessments, curriculum, and data throughout the year.
The state also sets guidelines for local assessment systems through criteria developed by the Buros Center for Testing, an independent test-evaluation, -research, and -consulting group at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Districts must annually report to the state assessment data in reading and mathematics. Over the past six years, Nebraska’s annual report card shows gradual improvement in district-reported test data in reading, writing, and mathematics. Districts will begin reporting science data to the state in 2008, and social studies results in 2009. In addition, districts administer commercial nationally normed tests, such as the Stanford-10 achievement test and CTB/McGraw-Hill’s Terra Nova tests, as well as the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Mr. Christensen, the Nebraska schools chief, said that while many states’ school systems are like pyramids, with teachers at the bottom and a few state administrators at the top, Nebraska’s is a series of concentric circles, with teachers in the center as “instructional leaders.”
“Our system is classroom-centered,” he said. “It’s got to come from the classroom up, not the capital down.” That way, he added with a laugh, “when you have a leadership role at the local level, you don’t have to have as much leadership at the state level.”
Coverage of new schooling arrangements and classroom improvement efforts is supported by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.
Vol. 26, Issue 24, Pages 32-34

Texas colleges made a deal with the devil

Waco Times-Tribune Writer, John Young’s editorial appearing in the Austin American-Statesman today, also appeared earlier this week in the Waco Times-Tribune. This piece responds to the Feb. 2, 2007
“Texans and Their Tests” report out of Inside Higher Education .

- Angela

COMMENTARY
Texas colleges made a deal with the devil
John Young, WACO TRIBUNE-HERALD

Saturday, February 17, 2007
Warning to students at Texas state colleges: You are about to get used again. Actually, your term for it might be more anatomical.

Students got used four years ago when, to reduce its share of college funding, the Legislature deregulated tuition. That pleased college administrators, who jacked up college costs.

It was another hurtful wrinkle by which lawmakers could balance the budget with "no new taxes." But a tax on students is what this was.

Now with a new Legislature, colleges stand to play the foils again. Students again stand to be on the receiving end of a royal scam.

Gov. Rick Perry proposes to spend $362 million more on higher education. As a key condition, Perry wants to implement standardized exit-level tests. Yes, standardized testing, that mesmerizing yo-yo of one-trick education reformers.

He wants to tie funding to test scores and graduation rates. He also proposes an initiative to move students through college faster.

Not surprisingly, the idea of new dollars tweaks college administrators' salivary glands. New tests? Where do we sign? We'll just make students pay for them, $25 a pop.

While administrators appear onboard, tongues wagging, those in college faculties have raised an alarm.

Texas Faculty Association president Charles Zucker told Inside Higher Ed, "We've had massive amounts of teaching to the test (in public schools).. . . Now there's a consensus that that has failed, the governor wants to institute the same plan for higher education."

His use of "consensus" is open to debate. If education's quest is to roll out drones who, when drilled under threat of retention, will do certain state-assigned tasks, maybe "accountability" is a success. But we all thought higher education was, well, higher.

As proposed, the plan would not require college students to pass the state exams to graduate. A no-stakes test. So, no over-emphasis, right?

Listen, folks. If money is attached, those tests will be high-stakes faster than Deutsche Bank can convert rubles to yen.

What kinds of tests are we talking about?

Well, let's ask Education Testing Service. It has exit-level tests for college seniors in several disciplines. But a host of disciplines don't have anything. Sounds like new business for what surely will leap-frog cellular phones as the nation's largest growth industry.

This should trouble just about anyone who isn't on the cash end of the transaction.

Standardized testing has become a dead weight on our nation's schools with far less benefit per time and dollars spent than anyone wants to acknowledge.

With Texas leading the way, states have shown they can increase test scores, but not necessarily produce thinkers or innovators.

Speaking to Inside Higher Ed, Bob Schaefer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing warned that with state-imposed testing and economic incentives attached, colleges would "narrow their curriculum to test preparation for the exit exam."

"Test scores may soar, but education quality will be undermined."

The result, said Schaefer, would be "another phony 'Texas miracle.' "

One of two things will happen under this proposal: (1) Time and money will be spent on tests that students know don't matter but which the state says are important in "rating colleges." (2) The state would impress on colleges how important the tests are, and more and more classroom content would be dictated by some far-off test maker.

Presto. You have homogenization and standardization of a once-vibrant creature, American higher education, long the envy of the world.

jyoung@wacotrib.com


Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/02/17/17young_edit.html