Education Week - January 6, 2016 - 17

The Northwest Evaluation Association,
maker of one of the most widely used interim-testing systems, the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, agreed.
"Our interims as they're designed today
are not appropriate for use as a summative,"
said Donna McCahon, the company's assessment director. NWEA is currently refining
a computer-adaptive testing system that
blends interim and summative elements,
and would be more appropriate for that use,
she said.

Need to Reflect Curriculum
To be combined for a valid summative
score, interim tests "need to be written with
a particular curriculum in mind," Briggs
said. "If they're misconnected to the curriculum, there are all kinds of problems."
For instance, one school might focus
deeply on a topic for the first few months
of the school year, and its students will do

well on that interim test, Briggs said, but a
school that chose to spread the same subject matter out across the year would risk
having its students do poorly on that first
interim.
To avoid those kinds of inequities, and to
create results that are valid and comparable statewide, schools would have to teach
shared curriculum topics in the same order,
Briggs and other experts said.
"When people realize this, they'll be
concerned. It could introduce a kind of
conformity most people would balk at,"
said Gregory J. Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at
the University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill.
To avoid pushback against "lock-step"
instruction, a state would have to engage
teachers, parents, policymakers, and others
in a dialogue-and build a strong consensus-about what should be taught and when,
experts said.

Fear of that kind of backlash, amplified by anger about federal intrusion on
instruction sparked by the common core,
was one reason that the Partnership for
Assessment of Readiness for College and
Careers, or PARCC, one of the two federally
funded testing consortia, abandoned its initial "through-course" design, which would
have spread out summative testing across
the year.
Some districts and states are already
working on blending different types of assessment into a year-end result.
New Hampshire has drawn attention
for a pilot program that uses a mixture of
tests from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and locally developed
performance tasks. About 10 other states
are investigating variations on testing that
include features such as blending year-end
summative tests with competency-based
tests given throughout the year, said Jennifer Davis Poon, the program director of the
Innovation Lab Network at the Council of
Chief State School Officers, which is working
with those states.
But states that venture into such projects should recognize that there are "a lot of
technical hurdles to overcome," Poon said. A
particular challenge in New Hampshire is
figuring out how to get comparable results
across locally developed tasks that vary from
one district to another, she said. n

Gretchen Ertl for Education Week-File

National Council on Measurement in Education, which sets standards for best practice in
assessment.
Because students come to school with such
varied levels of preparation, snapshot performance on college-entrance exams wouldn't
be a valid way to compare schools' effectiveness, Wise said. Instead, states might want
to consider using growth in college readiness,
rather than a snapshot, for their accountability systems, to show their schools' power to
boost their students' college readiness over
time, he said.
One of the aims of including the new high
school testing option in the law was to allow
states to reduce the testing burden by making
double-duty use of the college-entrance exams
that many administer widely anyway. Another
payoff could be tackling the perennial problem
of student motivation: High school students
aiming for college might be more inclined to
try hard on a college-entrance exam, while they

often don't see the point in doing their best on
state tests with no personal consequences.
But that double-duty use comes with
some big questions.
"We should ask what it would do to the
high school experience," said Gregory J.
Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "To be successful [in accountability], schools will have
to morph their curricula into college-prep
curricula. Things are going to get left out
that high schools value that SAT and ACT
content standards don't." n
Coverage of the implementation of college- and
career-ready standards is supported in part by a
grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Education Week retains sole editorial control over
the content of this coverage.
Visit the HIGH SCHOOL & BEYOND blog, which tracks news
and trends on this issue. www.edweek.org/blog

How can a state tell
teachers to teach the
standards, and then
use a test that hasn't
been proven to align
[to them]? It's a major
problem. It's like a
bait-and-switch."
SCOTT F. MARION
Executive Director
Center for Assessment

Nonacademic Data
Get Lift in ESSA
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

accurately than others.
Members of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, are interested in many of the
factors tracked by California's CORE districts,
a group of districts that developed a multimetric accountability system that includes
discipline data, social-emotional surveys, and
school climate measures, said Noelle Ellerson,
the AASA's associate executive director.
But not all indicators are created equal, and
the success of states' new accountability systems will depend on what they choose, Ellerson said in a forum at the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute last month.

Avoiding Unintended Consequences
State school chiefs are in the initial phases of
reviewing the nonacademic data they already
collect and monitoring how the U.S. Department of Education drafts regulations under
the new law as they determine how to broaden
their accountability systems, said Kirsten Taylor Carr, the program director for accountability at the Council of Chief State School Officers. Then they will likely explore a number of
indicators, deciding which can provide a better
view of how different student groups are faring
in their schools, she said.
"The underlying goal is ensuring equity,"
Carr said. "No matter what the measure is,
we'll always be thinking about does this help
us achieve that goal of equity."
ASCD has stopped short of saying which
nonacademic indicators it recommends. It
has convened an advisory group of assessment and accountability experts, state decisionmakers, local practitioners, and national
organizations to make recommendations,
David Griffith, the senior director of government relations, said.
Frustrations with the way the No Child
Left Behind law, the previous version of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act,
measured school success are "very instructive
here," Griffith said.
"We are even more so, very on guard as to
creating unintended consequences," he said.
"And there's good data being collected, but
when you start to attach consequences to it,
that can change the reporting of it."
For example, schools could skew data on
attendance by tracking it at days and times
when more students are typically in school, or
they could make it look as if they've lowered
discipline rates by replacing formal suspensions with more informal classroom removals
that wouldn't be tracked.
Still others have worried that attaching
stakes to high suspension rates will cause some
schools to ignore poor behavior they would otherwise discipline, creating a distraction-filled
learning environment for other students.
But that cautious tone hasn't dampened the
enthusiasm of "whole child" advocates who've
been pushing for more expansive data collection and tracking for years.
Hours after the Every Student Succeeds Act
was signed into law, the Dignity in Schools
Campaign, a coalition of civil rights and student groups, issued a press release urging
states to select school climate and safety as
their "other indicator" under the law. n
Coverage of learning mindsets and skills is
supported in part by a grant from the Raikes
Foundation. Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

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Education Week - January 6, 2016

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