Education Week - April 23, 2014 - 11

National Board Ends Principal-Certification Program
By Lesli A. Maxwell
The National Board for Profes-
sional Teaching Standards last week
voted to scrap its nearly five-yearlong,
$3.5 million effort to create an
advanced certification for principals.
In a unanimous decision, the
board of directors for the National
Board agreed that financial and
administrative challenges had become
too great to continue with the
program, said Ronald Thorpe, the
president and chief executive officer
of the Arlington, Va.-based organization.
Also, too few principals had
persisted through the field- and
pilot-testing phases to generate a
large enough sample to ensure that
the scoring of participants would be
valid and reliable, Mr. Thorpe said.
"I deeply regret that this hasn't
ended up where we hoped it would
end up," Mr. Thorpe said.
The decision to terminate the program-which
had set out to mirror
the board's 25-year-old certification
process for teachers-means that
the more than 200 principals who
participated in the program's fieldand
pilot-testing phases will not receive
advanced certification.
Instead, those school leaders who
completed rigorous portfolios of
work over 18 months will receive
"written feedback on their submissions,"
Mr. Thorpe said. That feedback
will be mailed to the principals
no later than July 28, he said.
"No one is going to get a score,
because there is no valid score," Mr.
Thorpe said. "It will be narrative
and personalized to them. Participants
will also receive more scripted
feedback on how they measured up
to each of the specific principal standards
that were developed as part of
the program, he said.
'Insult to the Profession'
Jack Davern, an elementary
school principal in North Carolina
who completed the pilot program, is
stunned.
"This is a huge letdown," Mr. Davern
said. "We did not get what we
were promised."
JoAnn D. Bartoletti, the executive
director of the National Association
of Secondary School Principals, or
NASSP, said the National Board's
decision is a major blow to a yearslong
push to develop national certification
for the principal profession.
"Countless professional hours on
our part and several million dollars
were spent on this, and now
it amounts to practically nothing,"
Ms. Bartoletti said.
"More importantly, the National
Board has broken faith with a group
of committed professionals who rallied
their communities to engage in
this rigorous professional development,"
she said. "For all their efforts,
they are left embarrassed and
empty-handed."
Mr. Thorpe said the National
Board would send official letters to
district superintendents on behalf
of the participating principals and
would send press releases to local
news organizations to tout principals'
participation in the pilot.
Those gestures, Mr. Davern said,
fall woefully short of what he signed
on for when he agreed to participate
in the pilot rather than begin a doctoral
program.
"Those of us who chose to do this
did so with a high level of commitment
and sacrifice," he said. "This is
an insult to the profession."
Costs Too High
In weighing whether to recommend
that the program continue,
Mr. Thorpe said the board considered
a number of factors. The professional
standards for principals that
grew out of the effort, he said, are
respected broadly. But the high attrition
rates in both the field- and pi-
lot-test phases-some 80 percent of
the school leaders who had started
the program dropped out-signaled
that an 18-month-long process that
was entirely portfolio-based might
be too much for already overburdened
principals.
Unlike the certification process
for teachers, which involves some
portfolio work and an assessment,
the principals' process was only
portfolio-based, which requires
much more time and labor to score,
Mr. Thorpe said.
That, he said, created another big
challenge: finding sitting principals
who could or would take the time
to be trained on how to score the
portfolios and then do the scoring.
"We saw huge attrition rates there
as well," he said. And the costs for
scoring were going to be prohibitive.
"We think full scoring for principals
would be three times longer
than for the teacher certification
at a per-person cost of $6,000 to
$7,000," Mr. Thorpe said. That's
compared to scoring costs for teachers
of about $2,500 per candidate,
he said.
"The National Board vastly underestimated
the costs for doing this,"
he said.
But Mr. Thorpe said the standards
created for the principal profession
are strong and that the board would
work with other organizations-
most likely the National Association
of Elementary School Principals
and the NASSP-to carry on with the
development of a full certification
program.
That pledge does little to remove
the sting of disappointment for principals
in the pilot like Mr. Davern.
Similar to the teachers' certification
process, the principals had to
reflect on their leadership practices
and write about them; conduct surveys
and focus groups in their school
communities and prepare demographic
profiles; and submit videos
that introduced their schools and
showed them leading a meeting of
their school-leadership team.
"The process was powerful professional
development for me," Mr.
Davern said. "But it seems like
the National Board just gave up
on this."
Ms. Bartoletti said that the NASSP,
along with the NAESP, would not allow
the standards to disappear, though
it's not yet clear how the two associations
would move forward with establishing
a certification program.
"The standards still have legs and
we stand by them," she said. "And
we still stand by the need for advanced
certification for principals."
College Board Unveils 'Draft' Materials for Redesigned SAT
By Caralee Adams
After outlining the big-picture redesign of
the SAT last month, the College Board filled
in the details last week with sample questions
and information about the new scoring
system.
The New York City-based nonprofit organization
that administers the 88-year-old collegeentrance
exam unveiled a preview of the test
specifications. However, Cynthia B. Schmeiser,
the chief of assessment, said the materials were
"drafts" and subject to change before the new
SAT is introduced in spring 2016.
"We are taking a risk, albeit almost two
years before the introduction," she said. "But
we want to inform students, teachers, administrators,
and higher ed. folks well in advance
of the first administration so they do know
what to expect and they can plan for it."
One of the first things students will notice
on the new test is that there are four answers
to choose from, rather than five. College Board
research found the fifth answer added little to
the measurement value of the questions and,
in some cases, actually detracted from the
quality of the question content.
Scores also will be based only on the number
of questions test-takers answer correctly, to discourage
"extraneous test-taking strategies" and
encourage students to give the best answer they
have for every question without fear of being
penalized, according to the College Board.
The redesigned exam is estimated to take
three hours, with a 50-minute optional essay
section. The current test is three hours and 45
minutes, including a 25-minute required essay.
Results will be reported differently in the
future. The composite scores will include evidence-based
reading and writing, which will
be the sum of the reading-test score and the
writing- and language-test score; and mathematics.
Each of the two area scores will range
from 200 to 800, returning a perfect SAT score
to 1600. The optional essay will be scored
separately.
Test specifications include cross-test scores
analyzing history/social studies text and science
text, as well as multiple subscores in each area.
For instance, in the reading and writing and
language tests, students will receive a subscore
for command of evidence and relevant words
in context.
"This will be tremendously helpful to start
to move the SAT from being a status measure
to being learning actionable information," said
David Conley, the chief executive officer of the
Educational Policy Improvement Center, or
EPIC, at the University of Oregon.
Ms. Schmeiser described the SAT as an
"achievement test," based on research, and
meant to incorporate what students are learning
in challenging high school coursework.
Common-Core Alignment
Though not directly stated, the redesigned
SAT reflects the Common Core State Standards.
The announcement this spring did not specify
the common core, but College Board officials
have said it is aligning the exam to the best of
state standards, and David Coleman had committed
to aligning the SAT with the standards
when he took over as president in 2012. (Mr.
Coleman was one of the chief writers of the
common core.)
For example, it will require students to cite
evidence in support of their understanding of
texts in reading and writing. Students will have
to analyze and synthesize words and numbers,
using informational graphics. The math section
will focus on fewer topics, but ones that are
critical to college and career success.
David Bressoud, a former president of the
Mathematical Association of America who
served on the College Board Mathematics Sci-
ences Academic Advisory Committee, said the
approach is a move away from general math
aptitude to include real-world scenarios.
For instance, a question may describe a hotel
bill for a certain number of nights with sales
tax and an extra fee and have students choose
what equations to apply to solve it.
"It's not just doing a standard math prob-
lem, it's understanding how math is used," Mr.
Bressoud said.
The updated SAT won't ask for definitions of
obscure words but asks about use of a word in
the context of a passage. One sample question
has students respond to the meaning of the
word "intense" in an economics text where it
means "concentrated."
The draft reading test asks students about
what is implied in texts across a range of content
areas and has them determine which portion
best supports the answer to a given question.
In the writing and language section, testtakers
are asked to develop, support, and
refine claims in multiparagraph passages-
some with accompanying graphics-and to
add, revise, or delete information.
"I think there will be a lot of implications for
instruction in high school. It's an encouragement
for teachers to go deeper and give students
time to think," Mr. Conley of EPIC said.
The essay now has more structure. Students
will have to analyze a passage and
explain how the author builds an argument
to persuade an audience through the use of
evidence, reasoning, and/or stylistic and persuasive
devices.
Staying Competitive
The new exam "hits all the current fads
and buzzwords: critical thinking, higherorder
thinking, 21st-century skills, real-life,
authentic," just as the common core and other
assessments do, said Mark Schneider, a vice
MULTIMEDIA: See a comparison
between the SAT and relevant
common-core materials.
www.edweek.org/go/SAT-commoncore
president and fellow at the American Institutes
for Research, in Washington.
It is clear that the College Board wants
to drive curriculum, and there is a business
angle to the redesign, Mr. Schneider added.
The changes are fueled, in part, by the College
Board's concern about a growth in the
number of schools making college-entrance
exams optional and the expansion of the ACT,
among other market pressures, he said.
Paul Weeks, a vice president at ACT Inc.,
said its college-entrance exam has always
been curriculum-based, and it has no plans
to do anything in response to the College
Board's announcement. "It's a reinforcement
of what we have been doing," he said, adding
that ACT has its own continuous improvement
agenda based on curriculum surveys. ACT test
specifications are available on the organization's
website.
Jim Rawlins, the director of admissions at the
University of Oregon, in Eugene, and a former
president of the National Association of College
Admission Counseling, said that despite the
update, the SAT remains high-stakes, stressful
for most students, and, ultimately, has a sorting
function in the admissions process. Still, "it has
never been the main way that colleges determine
our admissions decisions. It is a supporting
piece of information," he said.
Said Mr. Schneider: "Ultimately, the ques-
tion is whether this will really predict college
readiness and success. We won't know that for
years."
The COLLEGE BOUND blog tracks news and
trends on this issue.
www.edweek.org/go/collegebound
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