How to combine learning, assessment, accountability
My guests are Lisa Guisbond and Monty Neill, of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest, a non-profit organization that works to end the flaws and misuse of standardized testing.
By Lisa Guisbond and Monty Neill
You can’t fatten a pig by weighing it.
Politicians sometimes trot out this homespun expression to show they understand how frustrated many students, parents and teachers are about the way the current fixation on standardized testing crowds out time for deeper learning.
It’s a great irony of the current accountability movement that policies like No Child Left Behind starve our children of time to think, create and learn in order to measure them with simplistic tests.
In FairTest’s previous Answer Sheet guest blog, we described a way to weigh and fatten the pig at the same time. The idea is to replace standardized testing as the main measure, the tool that rules school, with classroom-based measures of student growth.
Teachers and schools would assemble evidence of learning that includes essays, research reports, and individual and group projects. This way, we would ensure that students are having meaningful learning experiences (not just filling in test bubbles) and look at the results of those experiences to see how they are progressing.
Now we look at the slightly more complicated question of how to use multiple measures and growth measures to provide accountability.
Multiple-measure accountability systems use classroom-based records of student growth in various subjects as a major part of the evidence of how schools are doing.
Other factors could include student grades, graduation and dropout rates, the percentage of students who advance to the next grade, portion of students taking honors/advanced level classes and Advanced Placement classes, college enrollment and persistence rates, employment histories after high school, surveys of school climate, and, yes, scores on standardized tests.
In contrast to NCLB’s narrow approach, this collection of data paints a multidimensional picture of how schools are doing. By giving schools credit for addressing different facets of a good education, they are encouraged to create richer, more well-rounded educational experiences for children.
FairTest and the Forum on Educational Accountability have developed the framework for such a system as an alternative to NCLB.
One knock on this approach is that these types of evidence can’t be processed and reported as quickly as test scores. But the importance of speed depends on purpose. Accountability should not be about quickly labeling schools under-performing and meting out punishments, which can make the learning climate worse. It should be about gathering multifaceted data and using it to guide improvements.
Another criticism is that the mix of evidence is not as “objective” as standardized test results and is less reliable. But there’s no way to measure the kind of critical thinking kids should acquire without using open-response questions and larger projects that need to be assessed by human beings.
The question is what we really want: A narrow curriculum measured by cheap, fast, limited tests, or a richer curriculum that can only be evaluated with more complex evidence?
The details of how to process this richer set of data can get complicated quickly, but it is far from impossible.
Nebraska successfully implemented a statewide system comprised of locally developed assessments that often included classroom-based work. The state system was designed so that assessments were based on the state’s academic standards (or state-approved local standards), had consistent scoring, were unbiased and were developmentally appropriate.
The benefits, according to Nebraska educators, were many, including helping teachers learn how to do their jobs better, assess more accurately and deeply, and gather and organize the evidence of learning that can demonstrate to parents, communities and policy-makers what students have achieved. Unfortunately, the Bush administration helped kill the innovative Nebraska program.
Another good example is the Learning Record, developed first in England for literacy (reading, writing, speaking, listening) for use with low-income children, many of whom had first languages other than English. The LR provides a well-structured method for assembling a rich array of evidence of student learning.
The question is not whether classroom-based evidence can be used for public reporting and accountability. It can and has.
The challenges are whether the U.S. is willing to go beyond a fixation with narrow definition of "objectivity," whether it will invest in training teachers how to teach and assess learning well, and whether it will turn accountability into a helpful tool instead of a destructive punishment.
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| May 21, 2010; 11:30 AM ET
Categories: Guest Bloggers, Lisa Guisbond, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Standardized Tests | Tags: accountability and nclb, accountability movement, assessment and accountability, fairtest, lisa guisbond, monty neill, no child left behind, standardized tests
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