Education Week - April 15, 2015 - 16

Dueling Assessments, Standards
Pressuring Tennessee Teachers
By Lauren Camera
Kingsport, Tenn.
When Alison Cotey, a first-year
teacher at John Adams Elementary
School here, wrote a lesson plan for
her 5th graders, she asked them to
analyze a poem littered with sound
effects and to write essays about it,
using examples and explaining their
significance.
The 23-year-old encouraged her
students to think about why author
Myra Cohn Livingston had used such
language in her poem "74th Street."
What was she trying to convey?
The exercise was meant to spur
the deep thinking required of students
by the Common Core State
Standards, the academic benchmarks
in mathematics and English/
language arts that teachers across
Tennessee are using.
But Ms. Cotey's lesson plan didn't
stop there. She then made sure her
students knew the specific vocabulary
term for each sound effect: alliteration,
repetition, onomatopoeia,
rhythm, and rhyme.
The terms were just a few on a
long list of standards that her students
will need to know to perform
well on a looming state exam. But
that exam, widely criticized for emphasizing
rote memorization over
critical thinking, assesses students
not on the common core, but on the
state's retired standards.
"The common core is a much deeper
way of thinking," Ms. Cotey said. "So
when you get to the [old standards]
and ... you have to get the kids to
back away from that deeper thinking
to more surface-level thinking, that's
a challenge."
Ms. Cotey didn't know she would
be responsible for teaching two sets
of standards until she was hired by
Kingsport schools just a week before
the first day of classes last fall. And
while she knew that the state was
battling through growing pains associated
with the common core and
had seen her fair share of Facebook
posts railing against the standards,
she wasn't prepared for the contentious
atmosphere that has become
the norm for teachers in Tennessee.
Some education policy researchers
and professors in schools of education
worry that the politicized education
arena and the state's indecisiveness
over the common core could
have significant ramifications for its
teaching corps.
In a profession that already suffers
from high attrition rates among
new teachers, the state's conflicted
attitude toward the standards could
end up pushing out its brightest
newcomers, or even worse, preventing
them from pursuing a career in
education altogether.
Indeed, after her first seven months
in the classroom, Ms. Cotey is already
questioning whether education is a career
she wants to continue pursuing.
"There have been moments
throughout this year where I've
asked, 'What am I doing here? What's
another path I can take?' "
Craving Consistency
Ms. Cotey grew up in Kingsport, a
close-knit community of about 53,000
residents nestled along the Virginia
border in the northeastern corner of
Tennessee.
She was inspired to pursue an education
degree in part by her elementary
teacher, who taught her for three
years of her childhood, in a commingled
class for grades 3-5. When she
enrolled at Samford University, a
small Christian college in Birmingham,
Ala., she followed a regimented
teacher-training track, where most of
her preparation focused on the common
core.
"Their approach was on teaching
how to write a lesson plan from a
standard so that we would be prepared
to use any set of standards
we were given," she said. "Of course,
the standards we were using were
common core."
The newly minted teacher wasn't
necessarily looking to return to her
hometown after graduation, but
when the district offered her a job a
week before the start of the school
year, she jumped at the opportunity.
Like Alabama, Tennessee has been
transitioning to the common core for
years. In fact, the Volunteer State has
spent more than $40 million preparing
its teachers for the switch, which
officially occurred this school year,
even though many districts-including
Kingsport-have been using
them for the past two years.
But last year, amid growing antipathy
toward the standards driven
largely by misconceptions that they
were a federal mandate, Tennessee's
legislature passed a law repealing
the new statewide test, aligned to the
common core, that the state had been
ready to use. Students were slated
to take the now-repealed exam-devised
by the Partnership for Assessment
of Readiness for College and
Career, or parcc-for the first time
at the end of the current school year.
Left without an assessment and
without enough time to craft a new
one, the state education department
directed districts to instead administer
the old state test, the Tennessee
Comprehensive Assessment
Program, or tcap. Since the tcap assesses
students on the old standards,
teachers must prepare their classes
using both sets of academic benchmarks-difficult
for any teacher, but
even more so for newcomers like Ms.
Cotey, who had little or no experience
with the old standards until she
began teaching in August.
"Having two sets of standards,
two lists, is just very daunting, even
though they do overlap to some degree,"
said Ms. Cotey. "And then having
an assessment that doesn't align
to what the standards are focusing on
is a very large challenge."
Adding another layer to the pressure
on rookie teachers is the fact
they are evaluated, and in some
districts, like Kingsport, even compensated,
based on their students'
test scores. On top of that, Gov. Bill
Haslam, a Republican, is orchestrating
a review of the common core that
could result in the state dropping the
standards altogether.
The state's wavering commitment
to the common core and aligned tests
has made teaching more difficult for
every educator, but especially for new
teachers like Ms. Cotey, who feel that
they can't be effective in the current
climate.
"One of the big things they taught
us in school is consistency: Be consistent
with your students," said Ms.
Cotey. "It's hard to do that when nothing
is consistent."
Teacher Preparation and Attrition
Her experience is what some researchers
are worried about.
Teaching is well-known for its attrition
rates, and most teachers who
leave do so in their first five years,
typically because of a combination of
low pay, long hours, and high levels
of stress.
In Tennessee alone, more than
5,000 educators leave the teaching
profession each year, costing the
state somewhere in the range of $23
million to $50 million, according to
a 2014 report from the Alliance for
Excellent Education, a Washingtonbased
policy organization.
Doris Santoro, an assistant professor
of education at Bowdoin College
in Brunswick, Maine, who studies
why teachers leave the profession,
said she's seen an uptick in recent
years among educators who are demoralized
because they feel the political
climate prevents them from
teaching to the best of their ability.
And while there's never been a
time when education hasn't been
political, she said the current atmoEducators
Eager, But Anxious, as They Await Testing Rollout
By Lauren Camera
Kingsport, Tenn.
New and veteran teachers here are trying
to find solace in the fact that next
school year-if everything goes according
to plan-Tennessee will finally use a test
aligned to the Common Core State Standards,
which are already in place throughout
the state.
After last year's repeal of the commoncore-aligned
test developed by one of two
federally funded consortia, the state reopened
the bidding process to testing companies
for the creation of a new state exam.
It ultimately awarded North Carolina-based
testing manufacturer Measurement Inc. the
contract, more than $100 million, last fall.
But the new test comes with its own set
of challenges.
Unlike the previous test developer, which
had more than three years to work with
teachers across several states to design and
test its exam, Measurement Inc. has less
than a year before it begins field-testing its
assessment this fall, ahead of statewide use
next spring. The development timeline has
many in the field concerned.
"It's really hard to create a test that has
validity and really gets at what we hope it
will get at," explained Barbara Stengel, a
professor of education and the director of
secondary education in the department of
teaching and learning at Vanderbilt University's
Peabody College of Education and
Human Development in Nashville.
Ms. Stengel said that developing a good
exam requires several rounds of field-testing
and data collection in order to be certain
it assesses and measures as it should.
In her view, several months is not nearly
enough time.
"We're not going to have a good test in
Tennessee next year," Ms. Stengel said. "I
just know how hard it is to come up with a
really good test that actually asks what you
really want to know and then is scored reliably
so that performance is pretty stable."
Emily Helphinstine, the literacy coordinator
for the 7,300-student Kingsport school
district, agreed.
Ms. Helphinstine belongs to a group of
teachers and administrators across the state
with whom the testing company is consulting
as it develops the exam and designs test
questions. She was supposed to meet with the
company the first week in March to provide
feedback on various parts of the blueprint for
the test, but the meeting was canceled because
of a snowstorm that paralyzed much
of the East Coast. Instead, the company sent
Ms. Helphinstine part of the blueprint, on
which she marked edits and suggestions; she
then sent it back to the company.
'Crazy' Timeline
Ms. Helphinstine called the timeline
"crazy," and said she expects that Measurement
Inc. will have to continue tinkering
with the test, even after it is administered
statewide next year.
She's particularly frustrated with the lack
of time teachers will have to prepare. The
state education department scheduled two
test training sessions for the summer, in an
effort to give teachers as much preparation
as they can get, but it's unclear whether the
test will even be finalized by then.
Ms. Helphinstine and other administrators
in the district's central office have
been trying to ready teachers and parents
to expect a significant drop in studentachievement
scores as a result of both the
delayed shift to common-core-aligned tests
and teachers and students adjusting to the
tougher standards.
Kingsport's scores already dipped last
year, when the district began transitioning
to the common core but used the old state
test, aligned to the previous standards.
That decline in scores is likely to happen
again this year, as well as next year, when
students are finally tested on the more difficult
standards.
The repeal of the previous tests and the
expedited timeline for Measurement Inc. is
especially troubling for Kingsport's teachers,
whose salary is based in part on student
test scores. The new compensation system
was created by the district's teachers,
who never considered the possibility that
the state would backtrack on a transition
three years in the making.
Faced with the likelihood of poor performance
across the state, Ms. Helphinstine is
trying to focus on a potential silver lining
for Kingsport: Because the district was an
early adopter of the common core, its students
may fare better than most. To put it
another way, Kingsport's students may account
for the highest of the low scores.
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Education Week - April 15, 2015

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