All posts in Standardized Testing

In the NY Times this weekend, they ran a story about parents in New York City schools boycotting field tests, or standardized tests written by Pearson that test what questions should go on the actual test.

The standardized test review and update is needed because the current standardized tests don't align with the Common Core standards.

From the article, a couple details emerge:

• Pearson charges the city to give sample tests that will then help them write the test; in other words, the school district is paying for kids to act as free labor and lose instructional time so that Pearson can write a test that the district can buy;
• The current tests aren't accurate enough to reliably indicate progress, and Pearson doesn't have enough information to make them accurate without using kids as subjects. From the article:
  

  The existing standardized tests no longer reflect what New York’s children are learning and do not accurately assess instruction, according to Adina Lopatin, deputy chief academic officer in the New York City Education Department.

• The new tests that are in the process of being written (the ones that don't have final form yet) will supplant the old tests (the one's that aren't accurate enough) as a means used to measure a school's progress. In other words, the means to measure progress isn't anchored to anything real, as comparing the old to the new is a rotten apples to unripe oranges comparison.

The school district is paying Pearson to have kids lose instructional time and act as unpaid market research subjects so that Pearson knows enough to write the test that will then be used to determine whether the schools are doing their job teaching the new curriculum that aligns to the new standards.

Taking a step back: Pearson was part of a small group of textbook companies, pharmacuetical companies, for-profit educational companies, and technology firms that were the original endorsing partners for Common Core. This information is no longer readily available on the current Common Core web site, but it is still accessible via the Internet Archive of the Common Core web site. Pearson also lobbies at the state and national level around education bills, and actively courts educational decision makers with junkets and other perks.

To put it more succinctly, Pearson helped write the standards. Pearson paid lobbyists to help shape the laws. Pearson sells curriculum and assessments designed to help schools meet the new needs that they helped create, while actively courting educational decision makers with "fact-finding" trips. The fact that a school can use a Pearson-written to prepare for a Pearson-written exam, and that the results of that exam determine how successful or unsuccessful that school is doing, is troublesome.

And in fairness, other textbook, media, and technology companies are in the education space are doing similar things. Pearson, however, is one of the biggest, and they also provide a good example of how companies can inject themselves into multiple points of the supply chain to meet a demand that they helped create.

New standards require new curriculum - this curriculum must be bought or developed.

New curriculum requires new assessments - these assessments must be bought or developed.

New laws tying school and teacher performance to scores on tests raises the perceived importance of standards-aligned curriculum and assessments - schools ignore the standardized approach to instruction at their peril. Or, like so many others, when faced with mounting external pressures in a system that measures test scores as opposed to learning, they cheat.

And, coincidentally, companies like Pearson who were at the table when the standards were written just happen to offer curriculum aligned to those standards, and assessments aligned to the new curriculum. Given the number of states who have adopted Common Core, we are talking about a lot of money that schools and districts now need to spend - or, in other words, given the timeline of Common Core standards adoption and the penalties for "falling behind," many school districts now have a large incentive to play it safe and just buy the curriculum. The fact that this is also a way of funneling huge amounts of public money into private companies? Meh. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?

So, to the parents in New York keeping their kids home: kudos. Keep it up.

The goal of state and national standards is laudable: ensure that every kid, anywhere in the States, gets an education of comparable content and quality. However, that idealism and good intent can get lost in a variety of ways; Tom Hoffman breaks down the various shortcomings of Commmon Core pretty effectively.

But, another side effect of national standards like Common Core is that it stimulates a need for curriculum and assessments aligned to these standards. To meet this new requirement at the state level, a service provider would need, in very general terms:

• a content team available to align content to the new standards;
• a team to design and write new assessments, or to adapt existing assessments;
• in-house expertise to align the new/adapted assessments to the standards;
• marketing copy and sales teams to push these materials to decision makers at both the state and district level.

Obviously, the details required to get this done go beyond this general list. Equally obviously, the organizations best positioned to move into this new space are the ones who have been selling to education prior to the existence of the Common Core standards, and/or organizations who played a role in creating the Common Core standards.

As of March 31, 2010, there were 65 original Endorsing partners; currently (late November, 2011) the list has swelled to 154 partners. It's also interesting to look at the number of organizations that are Common Core Endorsing Partners, and also actively lobby at the national level around Education.

It's not surprising that companies and organizations that were selling to education, and who were active in developing the Common Core standards, would also be active in paying lobbyists to help influence the legislation that would tilt the balance toward the infrastructure they were developing to service the need they were helping to create. It's also perfectly legal, but it points out a consequence of national-level standards that have gained widespread adoption within the states: Now that states have adopted these standards, schools and districts within these states now need to adopt them. In this way, national standards streamline a process where local communities send money outside their local economy by buying products manufactured by national or multinational corporations.

Leaving the influence of lobbying on our educational system aside, I would love to see an educational system where local schools could partner with local independent booksellers to buy texts, and local libraries to assemble reading lists that could be accessed by students. Setting up a system that encouraged and supported schools to work with businesses and institutions within their local communities would actually enrich the communities. When a school district sends money to Pearson, or Scholastic, or McGraw Hill, or any other multinational textbook and assessment company, that money is gone from the community, forever. An equivalent investment in the local economy would both create work and provide a needed boost to local institutions within communities - this would have an immediate benefit to these communities. It's also difficult to argue with tying schools, students, and communities together within a strong public library system.

However, national-level standards require a national-level distribution system, and local booksellers do not have the time of the expertise to align their merchandise with standards. While schools and districts have the expertise to develop assessments that align with standards, most are not funded to do this work at scale at the local level (FWIW, I'm sure that there are some schools that are doing this, and are doing a great job - please let me know about them in the comments). In this way, state and national level standards help ensure that local money leaves communities and flows to multinational corporations. The fact that these same multinational companies get increased access to lawmakers via their lobbying efforts doesn't help.

Image Credit: "Taj's broken arm" taken by Craig Allen, published under an Attribution license.

One way of changing education is to change how we assess learning.

This isn't going to be a post about standards, but we need to start with them to get into the center of the discussion (this is not to say that standards are not a subject worthy of close consideration; rather, they are just not the main focus here, today).

• Standards define curricular goals and objectives.
• Textbook companies prepare packaged materials that are "aligned to the standards." These textbooks, in theory, are designed to address the curricular goals and objectives as defined by the standards (and for fun, ask a textbook rep to demonstrate how their texts "align to the standards." Ask them to define the process by which the texts are "aligned to standards." Then, get out the boots, and enjoy the hijinks that will ensue).
• Student learning is measured by a standardized test that claims to assess a student's base of knowledge as measured against the standard.
• The "quality" of a school is determined (in part or in whole) by how students have done on the test. Test results can be a key factor in closing down schools.
• The "quality" of a teacher is determined (and in many of the merit pay schemes, teachers are rewarded or punished) based on student scores on these tests.

So, let's take an enormous, completely unjustifiable leap of faith and assume that the standards actually define something meaningful, for one reason and one reason only: this post is not about standards, it's about assessment.

When a curriculum is defined by a pre-packaged text, teachers and students are relegated to content consumers. Teachers get the text; they deliver the text; they test on the text, and teacher effectiveness is tied to how students perform on the test that purportedly measures how well students "know" the content that has been delivered to them. Any process used to "learn" the material is overshadowed by the means of assessment that defines the experience, and defines one's success or failure within that experience.

It's also worth noting that in lower performing schools, there is more motivation to stick with the "proven" or "traditional" route of using a standards-aligned text, as this provides a level of cover and plausible deniability should a school not meet growth goals. In an environment where sanctions accompany low test scores, using alternative means of working with kids is equated with gambling with kid's futures - unless, of course it's happening under the auspices of TFA, KIPP, or a charter school. Higher performing schools - where socioeconomic level appears to play a role - tend to have more freedom to experiment, largely because the threat of sanctions for "failure" is missing.

This is why serious discussions about assessment are a necessary part of the dialogue around improving education. What would an educational environment look like where, in addition to or instead of a standardized test, students had the opportunity to show their mastery via two portfolios: one defined by the school, and the second defined by the student?

The process of building a portfolio (ie, of crafting the assessment) is also a learning process. Selecting and justifying elements in a portfolio requires a level of critical, reflective thought that is not present in either preparing for or taking current standardized tests. It's a more efficient means of mastering both material and life skills than the assessments that currently claim to measure those skills.

What would teacher professional development look like if a teacher was assessed on how they provided feedback on student work? What if teachers developed professional portfolios that included curriculum they developed, modified, collaborated on, and/or shared? Most teachers create curriculum on a regular basis as workarounds for sections of the text that are weak or not suited for their classroom; what if creating and sharing these units was made an explicit requirement for growth and development as a teacher? What if this ongoing creativity and collaboration was a factor in assessing an educator's professional growth?

These shifts are possible now; they require a change in how we look at assessment, which potentially could inform changes in what and how we teach.

Changing assessment is hard. Generally, more individualized assessment takes more time. From a business place, it's hard to plan a "disruptive" business around this because you can't really streamline the time required for good feedback. The challenge (and therefore the opportunity here) is to make tools that simplify and streamline creating portfolios of work that demonstrate learning. The benefit - especially when compared to other forms of evaluation, and certainly to standardized testing - is that the process of creating and justifying the artifacts that demonstrate learning is also a process that supports and reinforces learning.

But this is a subtle point, and one that is often buried beneath the time required to assess portfolio-based projects versus the time required to process a standardized test. Ironically, the quest for efficiency in assessment has occurred at the expense of efficiency in learning.