By Rob
Great investments have been made to collect and use data. The role of assessments and use of student data has shifted and it has changed the nature of education.
The standardized test, Washington’s Measurement of Student Progress, is analyzed extensively to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind. It is used to identify schools as “failing to meet adequate yearly progress.” It is used to rank-order schools. New metrics which control for the impact of poverty use this data to compare effectiveness among districts. This assessment comes at a great cost- financial, time, lost instruction, grading, and tools for analyzing. The information gained from it could be found with a smaller sample size and at a lower cost.
The Measurement of Academic Progress (MAP) tracks student growth across a school year. This test is completed by students on a laptop in a separate classroom. Our technology and curriculum coach devotes weeks to setting up the computers, scheduling, and proctoring each class. The list of goals compiled for each student is exhausting and includes standards not covered for months or years or, depending on the curriculum, not taught at all. I am pleased when the assessment result matchs my analysis of the student but often it doesn’t.
I get very little actionable intelligence from the results of my MSP or MAP scores. But increasingly I have to answer for the results.
The emphasis on testing extends far beyond MSP and MAP. Over the course of the school year my students must complete 32 mandated “common assessments” with the score recorded into a database. How the scores are used I have no idea. Increasingly these assessments feel more like an audit of my teaching than a tool for improving student learning.
Students also complete regular math and spelling quizzes. This is an additional 85 assessments. While these tests tie closely to the content they contribute to the culture of ‘no child left untested.’ My students are expected to demonstrate their proficiency 117 times throughout a 180 day school year. They are second graders. In third grade the assessment load will increase.
This certainly wasn’t my experience in elementary school. It wasn’t even the experience of my students ten years ago. And this emphasis on testing isn’t preparing my students for adulthood: The last assessment I took was four years ago.
One form of assessment has been overlooked by policy makers and more attention should be paid. It is the teacher’s ongoing examination of student progress and understanding. Teachers use this information to inform their practice and to adjust lesson pacing. It gives teachers an indication of what to re-teach or where to extend. It allows teachers to identify struggling students while there is time to arrange extra support. It requires acute observation and meaningful interactions with students. This process is at the heart of teaching; it’s where the magic happens. It happens every day… except when we're testing.
“Einstein didn’t care much about experiments. Of the three tests he proposed for general relativity, the first—that clocks should tick slower in a gravitational field—wasn’t satisfied until after his death. Early experiments tended to contradict the prediction. His second prediction, that light from distant stars would be deflected by the warped space-time around the sun, catapulted him to world fame in 1919, when observations of a solar eclipse seemed to confirm his prediction. But as historians have since shown, the 1919 measurements were equivocal at best.
The one unequivocal verification of Einstein’s theory during his lifetime was his explanation of a tiny anomaly in the orbit of Mercury. When he finally got that calculation to work, that was the only evidence he needed that space and time really were warped. “Nature had spoken to him,” wrote biographer Abraham Pais. “He had to be right.”
We now know he was. Just last year, for instance, radio signals transmitted from the Cassini spacecraft on its way to Saturn proved to be deflected by the sun by just the amount predicted by general relativity. Einstein would have been unimpressed. He believed his theory was correct because it was consistent, simple, and beautiful. “It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of Nature,” he declared in 1933.”
Well given Obama’s decision to offer waivers for meeting full proficiency in math and reading by 2014 to states able to demonstrate high standards being met and teacher/principal accountability, hopefully fewer of us will be teaching in “failing” schools.
But on testing: We as a nation need to get it together in regard to what we expect people to know and be able to do upon high school graduation that makes sense for the globalized 21st century. Right now we just seem to be chasing tail while our costly measurements show less and less proficiency. It’s nothig but testing for the sake of testing. With the possible exception of AP, I have yet to see a standardized or state test that measures increased all knowledge or the ability to think critically. All the MSP and and MAP measure is a students ability to unpack a prompt and regurgitate an answer.
And, the unfortunate corollary (sp?) is that instructional decisions like the ones you mention–the ones that are intuitive and which are what make great teachers great–are now questioned in terms of quantifiable data.
I don’t need data to tell me when kids “aren’t getting it” and I need to adjust my course of action to help ensure they do.
Thankfully, in my building, we’ve managed to resist the sameness movement to a degree, but we’re now a “failed school” in step one of improvement despite test pass rates in the 90%s, so changes may be on the way…