Seizing the Moment for Better Assessment

Executive Perspective

In a recent meeting with AASA’s Executive Committee, Jack Jennings, for many years general counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and Labor, called the newly passed Every Student Succeeds Act nothing more than an accountability statute. Furthermore, said Jennings, who is the founder of the Center on Education Policy, “How can we pretend to have the same standards for all students when some districts spend significantly more than others on their educational systems?”

As happy as we all are that we have left behind No Child Left Behind, the truth is that ESSA does not offer the blueprint that can bring about a significant transformation of education as we know it. Poverty will continue to be an impediment to closing the achievement gap. Nevertheless, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was a huge accomplishment if for no other reason than it united all the national education organizations in urging its passage and it wound up as a bipartisan piece of legislation.

Wider Factors

Now we must seize the moment and take advantage of every opportunity that will put us on the right track and avoid any attempts to return to oppressive and ill-conceived federal mandates. Needless to say, the monitoring of the development of rules and regulations by the U.S. Department of Education is essential to that end.

Superintendents are used to being held accountable by their boards, by their communities, and by state and federal agencies. There is no attempt to avoid accountability, but at the same time the new ESSA accountability framework must be fair and meaningful. We can only hope the days when school systems were held accountable solely for their students’ performance on a standardized test are over.

New accountability frameworks can be and must be more encompassing of the critical factors that more accurately describe what gains are being made by students. But, as Jennings pointed out, the testing regimen remains in place. States will still be required to assess students annually in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and school districts still must report the scores according to the established subgroups.

The big difference now is that it will be up to each state to determine the academic goals and measures that will establish the degree of achievement. Each state will hold the opportunity to establish accountability models that will be meaningful and productive rather than punitive and disruptive.

Admittedly, under ESSA each state is required to include measures of academic progress that include test scores and the academic indicators must exceed nonacademic factors. Still, there is considerable leeway for developing creative accountability systems that consider the full scope of a child’s education, by acknowledging it is much more than a snapshot of performance in reading and math. But before we create accountability systems, we must determine what we want states and school districts to be accountable for.

At the moment, accountability is determined by reading and math standardized test results that are considered to be a total representation of what schools should be teaching and children should be learning. This is a simplistic and erroneous assumption that is accepted by those who seek a cheap and easy solution by which to evaluate schools. For years, test and measurement experts have told us that this use and interpretation of test scores is not valid or reliable.

Objective Metrics

While there has been much discussion over the adoption of college- and career-readiness standards, we have not identified the metrics to objectively assess whether we are preparing students for college and career. AASA is working on developing standards that go beyond test scores, incorporating metrics that focus on whether high school students are college ready, career ready and life ready.

College-ready indicators can include predetermined benchmarks for grade point average, scores on Advanced Placement exams, grades in Advanced Placement courses, and ACT or SAT test performance. Other indicators can be added. Existing research will be used to determine the acceptable benchmark for each indicator as well as for determining the number of indicators to be met by each student.

Similarly, career-ready indicators can include attendance, hours of community service, workplace learning experience, industry credential and dual-credit career pathway courses. Our students are more than a score, and we now have the opportunity to more realistically and appropriately define school success. Let’s seize the moment.