The effort to develop a new assessment system is the subject of a commentary by Robert Rothman:

A Seamless System of Assessments

Is testing a waste of time? Teachers seem to think so. In a 2006 survey, 71 percent of them said that students took too many standardized tests, and 62 percent called testing a “necessary evil.”

Yet when Oregon introduced its online testing system, which allows students to take the tests up to three times a year, teachers embraced it. They apparently did not think the testing burden was either excessive or evil.

Why? Because the Oregon test delivers near-instantaneous results that show teachers how students perform on particular content strands, such as geometry or measurement.

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To envision how such a system might shift school practice, consider what has happened in the retail industry. In the past, retail stores would close their doors for a day each year to take inventory. Now, thanks to the accurate and instantaneous information bar codes allow, retailers can keep track of their inventory in real time, 365 days a year. This is not to say that students are commercial products, or that we want to slap bar codes on their foreheads. But a comprehensive assessment system could provide continuous, coherent, and high-quality information on student performance that teachers, school leaders, and district and state administrators could use to improve teaching and learning.

In such a system, assessment is neither excessive nor evil. Nor is it a waste of time. On the contrary, assessment—and the information it provides—is a vital tool to improve instruction, learning, and school practice.

This bar code theory of assessment (sorry – can’t shake the image) surely could be continuous, but, can it be coherent and high quality? Think about how your kids are maturing and how they learn?

Competition opened yesterday for $350 million in federal money to design new ways of assessing what students learn. Rules for the contest make clear that the government wants to leave behind multiple-choice testing more often in favor of essays, multidisciplinary projects, and other more nuanced measures of achievement.

Guaranteed to come to a state near you:

Of the $350 million set aside for new tests, the Education Department plans to award one or two grants of up to $160 million each for “comprehensive assessment systems,” and one $30 million grant that is only for development of end-of-course tests at the high school level. All grants will run for four years.

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States must band together in groups, or “consortia,” of 15 or more to apply for the comprehensive-testing grant, with five states designated as “governing,” or leading, partners. Grant applicants for the high school testing program must also have five states designated as “governing,” but face no other minimum group-size requirement.

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Tests must be able to measure if students are mastering a “common set of college- and career-ready” academic standards, and those standards must be adopted by the end of 2011. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, with the support of 48 states, have led a move to write common standards, which are undergoing final revision. Federal officials have used states’ commitment to those standards as incentives in other programs, such as the main Race to the Top competition.

If we put this much time and money into new tests, and pull together all of these public and private players, sooner or later, we will be hearing calls for testing ALL kids. So, I would suggest you read through this piece and familiarize yourself with the process and the players. Read Race to Top Rules Aim to Spur Shifts in Testing.

The Junior Meritocracy
Should a child’s fate be sealed by an exam he takes at the age of 4? Why kindergarten-admission tests are worthless, at best.

Let’s start with the most basic problem: School starts in kindergarten. No matter how a child is doing at that moment, no matter where that child is in the great swoop of his or her developmental arc, that’s when parents send their kids off to school.

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There was a time, not that long ago, when few parents attempted to prep their 4-year-olds for kindergarten-admission exams. But then a few more began to do it, and then a few more after that, and then suddenly, normal-seeming people with normal-seeming values began doing it, too, and an arms-race mentality kicked in.

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As it turns out, intelligence tests miss lots of things, not just creativity. And perhaps that explains why IQs alone are not especially good predictors of excellence. In the twenties, for instance, Lewis Terman, a psychologist and deep believer in intelligence testing—it was he who revised Alfred Binet’s original test and came up with the Stanford-Binet model—started a now-famous longitudinal study of nearly 1,500 California children with extremely high IQs. He grandiosely called it “Genetic Studies of Genius,” and his hope was to show that these children, whom he called “exceptionally superior,” would one day form the backbone of the nation’s intellectual and creative elite, making crucial advances in sciences and public policy and the arts.

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One of the most compelling reasons to get rid of it, he [Nelson, head of Calhoun school] notes, isn’t because the test is intellectually pointless. It’s because it’s emotionally insidious. “When we resort to any kind of measure of kids that’s supposed to be qualitative at a young age,” he says, “no matter how cheerfully we do it, no matter how many lollipops we hand out to de-stress the process, young children are extraordinarily discerning. They absorb their parents’ anxiety about it, they absorb the kinds of judgments people are making about them. So there’s a process of organizing kids in a hierarchy of worth, and it’s beginning at an age that’s criminal.”

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Given his druthers, Meisels, at Erikson Institute, says he’d try to get a more comprehensive picture of the child. “And that can only be found through watching children in classroom situations,” he says. “And looking at the products of their work. And getting to know them. And that can be done through observational assessments.”

I try to interrupt him, but he anticipates my objection. “It’s not very practical, I know,” he says. “It means teaching teachers how to do it. It’d be more expensive.

In reading through this piece I found myself muttering that it is about time this picture gets painted. The head of Calhoun school is quoted as saying, “I want kids who are cynical enough at age 4 to know that there’s really something wrong with someone asking them these things and think, ‘I’m going to screw with them in the process!”

My thought is that we would all be better off if more parents were skeptical of the process of schooling for their kids.

Read the whole piece here.

Board to consider homeschool, online class restrictions

by Emily Gersema, The Arizona Republic

The Gilbert Public Schools governing board is mulling a series of proposals that would impose new restrictions on students who are home-schooled but take a few GPS courses, and junior high and high school students who take online courses.

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The message of this policy is largely philosophical. Board members such as Helen Hollands and president Thad Stump have said at recent work study sessions they believe the district needs to emphasize traditional classroom instruction as the preferred method of learning.

The board stresses in its proposal: “It is the belief of Gilbert Public Schools that students learn best in a traditional classroom setting.”

Homeschoolers are the focus of these restrictions and on most levels they make sense. But how will proposals like these play out in Arizona’s quest for Race to the Top money?

These are defined on White House blog as:
• transforming our lowest-performing schools
• using timely information to improve the way we teach our children
• outstanding teachers and principals in our classrooms and our schools
• higher standards and better assessments that prepare our kids for life beyond a classroom

Excerpts from his remarks:

America’s national mission: improving our schools not in unrealistic ways, not in abstract ways, not in pie-in-the-sky ways — in concrete ways we are putting our resources behind the kinds of reforms that are going to make a difference.

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And I want to get into some details about this because I want you, as parents, as well as the educators, to understand what the data and the science and the studies and the research show actually make a big difference in terms of school improvement — because that’s what we are basing this stuff on. We didn’t just kind of make it up, didn’t just do it because it sounded good, this is what the research shows is really going to make a difference.

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The first measure is whether a state is committed to setting higher standards and better assessments that prepare our children to succeed in the 21st century. And I’m pleased to report that 48 states are now working to develop internationally competitive standards — internationally competitive standards because these young people are going to be growing up in an international environment where they’re competing not just against kids in Chicago or Los Angeles for jobs, but they’re competing against folks in Beijing and Bangalore.

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I also challenge states to align their assessments with high standards — because we should — we should not just raise the bar, we should prepare our kids to meet it. There’s no point in having really high standards but we’re not doing what it takes to meet those standards. And I want to be clear. This is not just about more tests, because I know that in the past people have been concerned about, you know, is this about standardized tests, or are we going to have our young people being taught to the test? That’s the last thing we want.

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And that’s why the fourth measure we’ll use in awarding Race to the Top grants is whether a state is focused on transforming not just its high-performing schools, not just the middle-of-the-pack schools, but the lowest-performing schools. (Applause.) We’ll look at whether they’re willing to remake a school from top to bottom with new leaders and a new way of teaching, replacing a school’s principal if it’s not working, and at least half its staff — (applause) — close a school for a time and then reopen it under new management, even shut down the school entirely and send its schools — send its students to a better school nearby.

These remarks are about public schools but that gives little comfort that homeschoolers will not get swept up in this reform. For homeschoolers, assessments and data collection are the broom and dustpan of this reform. Homeschoolers have seen many reforms and survived, but, not without study, understanding and effort.

Some reading:

The Common Core State Standards Initiative

Forty-Nine States and Territories Join Common Core Standards Initiative

Homeschooling in the Age of Obama

Common Core Standards In The News