This kind of reform is long overdue.  Evidence here in Texas that we're ready for a shift ourselves.  This piece provides some direction.
-Angela

Report urges revamping student testing

October 21, 2014 | By John Fensterwald | 12 Comments

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Report urges revamping student testing

October 21, 2014 | By John Fensterwald | 12 Comments

With a nod to California, a new report suggests overhauling how school and student success is measured in the United States.
The report, by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the National Center for Innovation in Education at the University of Kentucky, recommends alternatives to annual standardized tests. It says there should be far more emphasis on ongoing assessments of students as part of regular classroom instruction.
Schools should focus more on “formative assessments,” the curriculum-based problems and quizzes that teachers give to students throughout the school year for feedback on how students are doing, in addition to locally developed alternatives to assessments, the report argues. The latter could include science experiments, literary essays, classroom projects and, by the senior year of high school, internship experiences and portfolios that students can present to employers and colleges.
Written by Linda Darling-Hammond, director of the Stanford program, and Gene Wilhoit and Linda Pittenger from the Kentucky center, the report also calls for the replication of elements of California’s new funding and accountability system, the Local Control Funding Formula, which it praises for directing more money toward low-income students, English learners and foster children. Student achievement will falter in an era of higher learning standards without equitable funding and dramatic improvement in the preparation of teachers, the report says.
Wilhoit is the former executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the nonpartisan organization of elected and appointed state superintendents that co-produced the Common Core State Standards. Darling-Hammond is a senior research adviser for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, the developer of the Common Core tests that California students will take next spring. She also chairs the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which oversees the state’s teacher preparation programs.
Wilhoit and Darling-Hammond say the adoption of Common Core, with its goal of preparing students for college and 21^st-century careers, marks a monumental shift in expectations of students. Wilhoit said the new standards “require students to do things they had not been asked to do before,” and to develop “habits of the mind” and abilities to solve problems, apply knowledge and think critically.
Multiple-choice, end-of-year tests, including higher quality and more complex versions such as the pending Smarter Balanced assessments, alone won’t lead students to reach those goals or adequately measure all that will be demanded of them, Wilhoit said. The report says it is critical to stop using annual tests as the chief gauge of school success and student achievement.
The report comes as Congress is deadlocked over whether to end or amend the 12-year-old No Child Left Behind law, which demanded that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014, and partisan disagreements over the role of the federal government in education.
There also is a growing backlash against standardized tests – in states opposed to sanctions under the federal law and by teachers across the nation who resent putting in weeks of preparation for annual student tests and who oppose being evaluated based primarily on student performance on tests.

Wilhoit said the new standards “require students to do things they had not been asked to do before,” and to develop “habits of the mind” and abilities to solve problems, apply knowledge and think critically.

Alliance for Excellent Education webinar

Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, co-author of the report.

Last week, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of Great City Schools, which represents most of the nation’s largest urban districts, issued a set of principles on testing that called for fewer, higher quality and “meaningful” assessments.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in response, defended quality assessments, including annual tests, as “a vital part of progress in education.” But Duncan acknowledged that in some places, tests are “dominating the calendar and culture of schools and causing undue stress for students and educators.”
Earlier this year, Reps. Chris Gibson, R-N.Y, and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., introduced a bill, supported by the National Education Association, that would require testing math and reading only once in elementary, middle and high school. The Stanford/University of Kentucky report backs this approach, proposing that students take only parts of the math or reading exam. The advantage is that students can be given more complex, multi-step problems without lengthening the time of the test. The disadvantage is that such “matrix scoring” produces school- or district-wide results, rather than individual scores.

Signs of innovation

Duncan has granted 42 states waivers from the sanctions and some of the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Some states, such as New Hampshire and Kentucky, are experimenting with alternative forms of assessments and measurements of performance. The report highlighted the seven California districts that, in obtaining an NCLB waiver, have created an accountability index with multiple measures. They will include social and emotional learning, and difficult-to-quantify qualities, like perseverance, that affect the ability to learn.
The report doesn’t directly address the federal government’s role under the new accountability system but suggests that Congress would give states more flexibility to create strategies addressing student achievement, an equitable distribution of  resources and teacher preparation. It recommends that states establish a “School Quality Review process” in which schools will be evaluated at least every five years by teachers, administrators and outside experts who will look at the full breadth of a school’s life. California’s Local Control Funding Formula established the Collaborative for Educational Excellence, which will oversee the school improvement process, but it it has yet to meet. Kentucky, Ohio and New York have adopted elements of the inspection process.
There are multiple ways to achieve the new, high standards, Wilhoit said in a webinar last week. But for that to happen, the federal government, which “ created the mess we’re in,” must step aside to allow states to innovate.

John Fensterwald covers education policy. Email him or Follow him on Twitter. Sign up here for a no-cost online subscription to EdSource Today for reports from the largest education reporting team in California.

Calif. Exit Exam Boosts Dropout Numbers

"The report's findings validate the argument that the test is hardest on students who do not have access to good schools or good teachers, said Liz Guillen, director of legislative and community affairs for the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates." The truth of the matter, is that analyses ALWAYS reveal these same kinds of inequities, but they're cast as measuring how much students have learned. This level of clarity and frankness is a necessary step toward constructive policy making. Portfolio-based evaluation is recommended. Improving these schools through better funding and improving teacher quality would also be advisable. In addition, a formative assessment approach that is also "value-added," measuring the amount of student progress would also be an important step to take.

-Angela

Calif. Exit Exam Boosts Dropout Numbers
By JULIET WILLIAMS – 3 days ago

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The number of California high school dropouts spiked in 2006, the first year seniors were required to pass an exit exam to graduate, according to a report presented Wednesday to the state Board of Education.
The analysis found that 24,000 high school seniors dropped out in 2006, about 10,000 more than just four years earlier.
The information could give ammunition to lawmakers and others who have criticized the exam, as well as those who have lobbied for alternative assessments.

The firm that prepared the report, Human Resources Research Organization of Alexandria, Va., made several recommendations to the board, including a suggestion that California explore other ways for high school seniors to demonstrate proficiency. In Massachusetts and Washington state, for example, students can be judged on a portfolio of their high school work.

Jack O'Connell, superintendent of public instruction, has consistently opposed such an option. His chief deputy, Gavin Payne, told the board that the superintendent thought all but one of the recommendations were "extremely good."

The report's findings validate the argument that the test is hardest on students who do not have access to good schools or good teachers, said Liz Guillen, director of legislative and community affairs for the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates. That applies mostly to poor and minority students, she said.

Public Advocates sued the state over the exam and sought alternatives.

The report also highlights California's persistent achievement gap and found an even more worrisome problem: Students who are black, Hispanic, poor or learning English did even worse when they were in schools with high concentrations of similar students.

That poses a challenge for policymakers trying to address the achievement gap, since the vast majority of underachieving students are concentrated in such schools.

Most students are able to pass the exam in time for graduation, although critics note that as graduation day approaches more students drop out of school and stop being counted.

In the class of 2007, for example, 93 percent of the senior class had passed the test by last May.

Students begin taking the test during their sophomore year and have multiple chances to pass the exam, which measures English, math and algebra skills.

The most recent exit exam results showed that more than 88 percent of black and Hispanic students passed the test, with both groups increasing their success rates but still lagging behind whites and Asians.

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Calif. Center Gauges Novice Teachers With Tools, Mentors

This is part of a series pubished in Edweek.org called "Testing to Teach": "Classroom measures known as formative assessments have a purpose distinct from that of end-of-year state tests. Used during instruction, they aim to provide feedback so that teachers and students can adjust what happens next in classrooms and improve the quality of teaching and learning as it’s going on.

“Testing to Teach: Using Assessment to Shape Instruction” takes a close look at a handful of formative-assessment programs to provide a sense of what such measures look like in practice."

-Angela

Published Online: May 10, 2007
Published in Print: May 16, 2007

Calif. Center Gauges Novice Teachers With Tools, Mentors

Ellen Moir left, executive director of the New Teacher Center, meets in her office with staff member Jan Miles in Santa Cruz, Calif., May 8. The center is approaching ten years of operation.
—David M. Barreda for Education Week
By Lynn Olson

Watsonville, Calif.
It’s growing increasingly common for schools to use formative assessments, classroom measures designed to steer day-to-day instruction based on what students have learned. But a California organization has put its own twist on the trend: It has developed a similar set of tools focused on what beginning teachers themselves are learning.
The New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a national, nonprofit organization that works to provide systematic support to new teachers, and more recently principals, through the use of full-time mentors. Its formative-assessment system includes tools that range from templates for planning individual lessons, to scripts that capture teacher talk and students’ reactions during a single class period, to midyear reviews of novice teachers’ growth.
Together, the tools are meant to provide a framework for guided conversations between mentors and novices that zero in on student learning and help new teachers reflect on their own practice.
About This Series
MAY 2
• Palm Readers:
Teachers in a rural New Mexico district use hand-held computers to assess students’ reading progress and target instruction accordingly.
• Critical Thinking:
Schools in Boston are gaining insight into their students’ thought processes through a locally developed reading-assessment system.
MAY 9
• New Math:
Teachers in a Texas school have shelved some of their math textbooks and turned to an online curriculum and formative-assessment resource instead.
MAY 16
• Teacher Training:
A California center is using formative assessment to help beginning teachers reflect on and improve their own work and that of their students.
“The way we’re assessing beginning-teacher growth and development is the way we want them to assess student growth and development,” said Ellen Moir, the center director. “If you think about being a brand-new teacher, there’s so much coming at you; this structure helps them see their successes and helps them focus, and not become so overwhelmed.”
On a recent morning, Erin Brown, a second-year teacher at Radcliff Elementary School here in Watsonville, contemplated a piece of kindergarten writing and then placed it in one of four piles on the desk in front of her, based on whether the student’s work was below, approaching, at, or above her expectations for how children should be writing by the end of the school year.
As she sifted through the stack of papers, she noted that her classroom, with 15 boys and three girls, the majority of them English-language learners, could get “pretty crazy.” Still, she’s working with them on learning to memorize and write high-frequency words and to begin using words that they sound out on their own. She’s also checking to see if the students write complete sentences, leave a space between each word, start each sentence with a capital letter, and end it with a period.
As she worked, mentor Marina Cook encouraged her to focus on what each student was doing well, “because it’s really easy to fall into what they are not doing.”
“How can we scaffold each one of these groups to move them toward the end-of-year goals?” she asked.
Over the course of the hour, the novice teacher and her adviser used the center’s “analysis of student work” protocol to compare Ms. Brown’s own expectations with the state and district standards for kindergarten writing, zero in on each group of pupils to figure out next steps, and delve more deeply into the work of a few individual youngsters.
Periodically, Ms. Cook offered suggestions, or asked a question that probed Ms. Brown’s understanding of how her students were performing or what she was doing in the classroom.
“I think it’s really helped me see what’s going well and what to encourage, and how to take them further,” said Ms. Brown. “I have to tell you, Marina has been a lifesaver. I honestly don’t think I could even have gotten the classroom off the ground without her.”
What’s Working
Mentors hired by the New Teacher Center are highly skilled veterans who are released from their teaching duties full time to work with a caseload of about 15 novices, each of whom they meet with about once a week.
The meetings typically start off with the mentor and the new teacher filling out a “collaborative assessment log” that reviews what’s working in the novice’s classroom, current challenges or concerns, next steps, and any support needed to move forward.
“Beginning teachers often want to start off with all the problems,” said Caroline A. Lucas, an out-reach coordinator with the center. “We really want to start with what’s working.”
As new teachers use the tools in conversation with their mentors, they’re encouraged to compare their practices to a set of professional teaching standards and assess their levels of proficiency.
The center has created a “continuum of teacher development” that describes five levels of teacher performance. As the teachers and mentors collect evidence of the teachers’ work, the continuum enables them to make judgments about their successes and challenges and to identify realistic and specific goals for improvement.
While some of the tools, such as the midyear reviews, are used at certain points during the school year, mentors can pick and choose most of the tools as appropriate. Mentors and novices keep copies of the tools in large, portable portfolios that they can refer to over the course of the school year for evidence of growth; they’re also available electronically.
‘Habit of Mind’
On the same day that Ms. Cook used the system’s “analysis of student work” with Ms. Brown, for ex-ample, mentor Cynthia Balthaser used one of the lesson-plan templates with a new 4th grade teacher to help him move away from relying on the math textbook and toward more engaging and focused lessons.
The discussion ranged from efficiently assessing students’ knowledge at the start of each lesson to determining and making visible the most important objectives for lessons. As they talked, Ms. Balthaser modified the template to highlight things the new teacher could focus on that would make it easier for him to use the template in planning lessons on a regular basis.
“Thanks to Cynthia, I know what’s next and what I have to do,” he said, admitting that he still found it hard to ask other teachers for help and incorporate their ideas into his own teaching style.
Of Radcliff Elementary’s 21 teachers, 16 are in their first three years of teaching. By using the formative-assessment tools with teachers across the school, said Principal Ulli Kummerow, “we’re used to getting together and having conversations about instruction and about students, because they are doing that all the time. It’s creating that professional habit of mind.”
California’s Pajaro Valley Unified School District, in which Radcliff is located, has also adopted the center’s formative-assessment tools, including the individual learning plans and the midyear reviews, as part of its teacher-evaluation system, so that the messages are reinforced districtwide.
Parallel Processes
But the tools would mean little without the skilled mentors who employ them. All mentors receive training in how to use the assessment tools, including a weekly forum during which they meet to pose and solve problems, practice their mentoring skills, and use formative-assessment tools to track the progress of their novice teachers in much the same way that novice teachers track the progress of their students.
At one recent meeting, coaches selected one element of the California standards for professional teaching and divided their caseload into four groups based on how close they were to meeting the standard, using an “analysis of participating teacher development” tool.
Then they selected a teacher as a case study, whose practice they analyzed more deeply based on the data they’d collected through the formative-assessment tools. After describing what the educator was able to do well, they focused on how they might support the teacher to meet the selected standard and what evidence would constitute successful growth.
Mentor Valerie Leal had been working with her case-study teacher on student engagement. Now she wanted the new teacher to understand how to use those same engagement strategies to check for student understanding during the course of a lesson. While she had modeled some lessons for the novice teacher, she worried that it had been too much information for the novice to absorb.
Mentor Maria Reynolds suggested that Ms. Leal ask the case-study teacher to focus on one student during the course of the lesson and check on his understanding, rather than trying to observe the class as a whole. The mentors also decided that Ms. Leal might videotape the model lesson so that she and the new teacher could review it together and pause and discuss what the mentor was doing and thinking at any given moment.
“It takes an enormous mentor knowledge base to do excellent formative assessment,” said Betty Achinstein, who directs the center’s research program, “knowledge of student assessment, knowledge of state content standards, and knowledge of professional standards. So investing in the mentor development is a key piece.”
‘Huge Learning Curve’
Surveys and focus groups of mentors that the center has conducted have found “a huge learning curve for mentors,” said research specialist Anthony Villar.
“Being a good teacher does not ensure you’ll be a good mentor,” he said. “Mentors say that at first they look at the tools as paperwork, as something akin to a burden.”
Later, he said, “they realize that they actually help to frame questions and organize the work in a way where you can see growth and development. But it takes a little bit of time to get there, it’s not automatic.”
Mr. Villar and others also caution that the tools cannot stand on their own. Rather, they provide an entry point for conversations between the mentor and the novice that are grounded in a strong, trusting relationship.
“We’re not here for evaluation,” Ms. Cook said after her meeting with Ms. Brown, the kindergarten teacher. “So it’s a safe harbor, and a safe place to admit what you need.”
“When we have the relationship, we can really start to challenge the teacher and keep pushing her on student achievement,” agreed Ms. Balthaser. “But if you don’t have that, you’ll get nothing but resistance.”
That’s created some tension for the New Teacher Center. With the 1998 passage of state Senate Bill 2042, regulating California’s teacher-credentialing system and setting standards for teacher-induction programs, the center is now using evidence from the formative-assessment tools to help new teachers complete their credential requirements. So far, Ms. Moir said, the center has managed to walk a fine line between evaluation and support by keeping its supportive role at the forefront.
“At the end of the day, what we’re hoping—and what we’re seeing—is that if we use formative assessment with new teachers, they’ll then use it with their kids,” she said. “Our ultimate goal is that as beginning teachers exit their induction programs, they not only value the support they received from mentor colleagues, but also value and know how to use effective assessment practices in their classrooms.”
Coverage of new schooling arrangements and classroom improvement efforts is supported by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.
Vol. 26, Issue 37, Pages 8-9