Education Week - September 18, 2013 - 25

EDUCATION WEEK
California
Puts Freeze
On Testing
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
dents without sharing information
on their schools’ performance
with them and their families is
the wrong way to go about this
transition,” and that it amounted
to “backing away entirely from
accountability and transparency.”
The missive from Washington
comes amid growing discontent in
some states that federal officials
are meddling in local education decisionmaking
and showing insufficient
flexibility as they transition to
the common core.
It was sparked by California’s de-
sire to dump most of its longtime
testing program, called STAR, for
Standardized Testing and Reporting,
in spring 2014. Instead, the
state would use the field tests in
math and English/language arts
being designed by the Smarter Balanced
Assessment Consortium, one
of two big groups of states designing
tests for the common standards.
But since that assessment isn’t
fully ready—the field test is part of
its development—the results would
not be used for accountability.
Late last week, both houses of the
legislature had approved the measure,
and Gov. Jerry Brown was reportedly
ready to sign it.
Old Mandates, New Exams
The No Child Left Behind Act requires
states to report student progress
annually on tests of reading
and math in one year of grades 3-8
and high school. The federal Education
Department can withhold a
portion of Title I funds from states
that fail to do so.
But top California education officials
feel so strongly about their
plan that they are weighing accepting
such a penalty as part of the
price of moving forward.
“We have the right to accept their
penalty,” Michael W. Kirst, the chairman
of the state board of education,
said. “There’s that option.
“There is no long-term defiance
here,” he said, noting that California’s
plan would fully comply with
the NCLB law in 2015 because it
would be giving the Smarter Balanced
tests to all students and reporting
the results as required.
“We’re trying to do the best thing
in the short run,” Mr. Kirst said,
“with the top priority being to implement
the common core quickly and
thoroughly.”
Striking back at Secretary Dun-
can, state schools Superintendent
Tom Torlakson said in a statement
that California won’t reach its goals
“by continuing to look in the rearview
mirror with outdated tests, no
matter how it sits with officials in
Washington.” He said he hoped that
federal officials would “agree that
withholding badly needed funds
from California’s students would
be a grave and serious error.”
With the urging of concerned state
schools chiefs, the federal department
announced this year that it
would consider proposals that would
allow states to avoid “double-testing”—giving
their own tests as well
as field tests created by Smarter
Balanced and the other state consortium
designing such tests, the Partnership
for Assessment of Readiness
for College and Careers, or PARCC.
Defining ‘Flexibility’
Federal officials said they would
weigh requests to allow schools to
administer only one assessment in
2013-14 to any individual student—
either the current statewide assessment
or the field test. For those
schools, accountability labels (such
as whether a school is a “priority”
turnaround school) and targeted interventions
would hold steady for a
year, with no relaxation of accountability
requirements.
Proposals for such testing flexibility
are being considered now
by federal officials. But that offer
was made explicitly only to states
that have obtained waivers from
key tenets of the NCLB law. California
is among the fewer than 10
states that have not yet obtained
such waivers.
Explaining the federal Education
Department’s priorities in an interview
with Education Week, a department
official said that states that
wish to change their testing systems
in the transition to the common core
must make sure that all students in
NCLB-required grades take a test in
both math and English/language
arts, whether those states use their
own tests or a field test of one of the
consortia’s assessments.
California’s plan, the official said,
leaves such distinctions up to the
state department of education.
But the official was less clear and
emphatic about whether states
must use tests that produce reportable
results.
The Education Department recognizes
that field tests can’t yet produce
valid results, so states would
not be required to use them for accountability,
the official said. A state
that wished to use only the field
tests would have to discuss that
prospect with the department.
“The clear expectation … is not
that every child have results, but
that every child participate in tests
in both [English/language arts] and
math, in the state’s current tests or
a field test,” the official said. “If California
would like to use a mix of STAR
and Smarter Balanced tests, that is
something we would consider.”
“Clearly, accountability for student
learning is of enormous importance,”
a department spokesman added.
“As states move to new assessments
aligned to career and college readiness,
we will work with them in a
spirit of flexibility. But simply dropping
assessment for a year isn’t the
right answer.”
California Deputy Superintendent
Deborah Sigman has said that her
state would incorporate its testing
plan into a waiver application. But
given Secretary Duncan’s reaction,
the state now appears to face a
choice between revising its plan or
losing part of its Title I money.
In the past, the Education Department
has penalized states by revoking
a portion of the administrative
part of that funding stream, but it
hasn’t yet held back any of the
Title I money that supports disad-
vantaged students. California was
the target of one such action in 2009,
when the federal department said
it had failed to show that its middle
school math tests were properly
aligned to its math standards.
The federal department has also
used the threat of such a penalty to
make states comply with the NCLB
law. In 2006, it warned 10 states
that they could lose 10 percent to
25 percent of their Title I aid if they
didn’t bring their assessment systems
into line with the law’s expectations.
Those states avoided penalties
by revising the tests.
Mr. Duncan has made no secret
of his willingness to use that lever.
Last week, the Education Department
denied Texas’ request to cut
back on testing elementary students
in higher-performing schools.
Threading the Needle
Some observers said the standoff
between California and the federal
Education Department might give
states pause as they consider seeking
double-testing flexibility.
“The secretary has said he wants
to give states more flexibility on this,
and that’s what California asked
for,” said Christopher T. Cross, the
chairman of Cross & Joftus, a California
firm that advises districts on
education issues. “They’re trying to
thread the needle from getting from
where they are today to the new assessments.
But given the secretary’s
statement, I can’t see how a state
could do that.”
In navigating that transition,
ASSESSMENT CLASH
California is moving to
replace most of its current
testing system in 2014
with common-standards
field tests in literacy and
math being designed by
the Smarter Balanced
Assessment Consortium.
State Tests to Be Eliminated:
n Mathematics, reading,
social science, grades 2-11
State Tests to Be Retained:
n Science in grades 5, 8, and 10
n Alternative assessment for students
with severe cognitive disabilities
n 11th grade assessment of college
readiness
Smarter Balanced Field
Tests to Be Given:
n To all students in grades 3-8
and 11 in districts that have
sufficient technological capacity
n In either math or literacy
SOURCE: California Department of
Education
n
SEPTEMBER 18, 2013 www.edweek.org
n
California has advanced key arguments
that resonate in many states
as they move toward the consortium
tests in 2015. It sought to avoid an
undue testing burden on students
and schools, an issue the federal department
acknowledged by offering
the flexibility to waiver states.
California also argued that sticking
with its current system risks
a mismatch between what’s being
taught and what’s being tested.
“The question here is accountability
for what?” said Mr. Kirst, the
state board chairman. “For an old
set of standards on an old test? That
confuses teachers and pushes them
in two different directions.”
Ms. Sigman, the deputy state chief,
said that an earlier move to the
Smarter Balanced system—even
with just the field-test version—
would facilitate a smoother shift to
the common standards.
“We think this is a great opportunity
for teachers and students and
parents and administrators to get
a look at what these tests are,” she
said. “Part of this is giving schools
and districts the time and space to
implement the common core.
“We don’t want to give an assessment
that’s not aligned to our current
set of standards,” she said. “We
want to have people look forward,
not backward.”
The state proposes to give the
math field test to 10 percent of its
students and the English/language
arts field test to another 10 percent.
That would meet the Smarter Balanced
consortium’s need for a scientific
sample to advance the development
of the test.
The rest of the state’s students
would be expected to take either
the math or the English/language
arts field test as well, Ms. Sigman
said, except where districts aren’t
technologically capable of giving
the computer-based test. The savings
from cutting out most STAR
testing could be applied to the
broader administration of the field
tests, she said.
All 44 states participating in one
of the assessment consortia face a
potential double-testing problem
next spring. But the computer-adaptive
format of the Smarter Balanced
assessment makes the double-testing
issue more pronounced in that
consortium’s states. That’s because
an adaptive test demands a much
larger bank of test items, which in
turn requires a bigger sample of students
to take the field test.
The PARCC exam is computerbased,
but its questions will not
adapt to the test-taker’s ability level.
The Smarter Balanced consortium
anticipates its field-testing will require
the participation of 2 million
students across its 25 member
states. PARCC field-testing will involve
about 1 million students in its
20 member states.
Equity Concerns
Some activists fear that Califor-
nia’s plan to suspend most accountability
testing would create a host
of problems. Chief among those is
the absence of information that
helps the public understand how its
schools and students are doing. But
the absence of test data for 2014 has
sparked additional concerns.
Test scores are a pivotal part of
the decisionmaking about how best
25
to serve students with disabilities
and whether to reclassify Englishlanguage
learners as proficient in
English, said Arun Ramanathan,
the executive director of the Education
Trust-West, which came out
strongly against the Golden State’s
plan to suspend most STAR testing.
Doing without such data would complicate
judgments on education for
millions of students, he said.
Additionally, he’s concerned about
the state’s plan to insist on Smarter
Balanced tests only in districts that
are technologically able to give them.
That approach, Mr. Ramanathan
said, essentially creates a divide
between wealthier and poorer districts.
If a key goal of giving the
Smarter Balanced test more broadly
is to help schools transition to the
common core, then districts that
have less technological capacity are
put at a disadvantage, he said. Students
in those districts would also
lose out on time to get used to taking
computer-adaptive tests.
“There’s a learning curve there, so
it raises some real equal-protection
questions,” Mr. Ramanathan said.
He is urging state officials to consider
sharing the results of the field
tests—if not for accountability purposes,
then for their value in providing
feedback to parents, teachers,
and students.
“It’s to the detriment to test
several million students and not
provide results to parents,” Mr. Ramanathan
said. “It’s testing for testing’s
sake. What’s it going to prove?”
‘How Things Work’
Assessment experts, however,
are generally skeptical of using
field-test results for instructional or
evaluative purposes, since they are
by definition still in development.
Consortium officials have long said
that they could not set passing
scores until after feedback from
the 2014 field tests informs adjustments
to the assessment designs.
“Field testing is an opportunity to
find out how things work when you
go to scale,” said Derek C. Briggs,
who serves on both consortia’s technical-advisory
committees and is
the chairman of the research- and
evaluation-methodology program
at the University of Colorado at
Boulder.
“There are all kinds of variables
that need to be examined,”
he said, from whether each item
measures what test designers
want it to measure, to the logistics
of getting every student in front
of a computer during a state’s defined
testing window.
It’s “theoretically possible” to
generate some very limited results
from a field test, he said, if a core
set of questions is common to all
test-takers. But any such results
would be limited to a narrow subsection
of standards in the test.
Mr. Briggs said that no valid
results could likely be generated
from one of the greatest areas of
promise in the new tests—deeper,
more nuanced information yielded
by technology-enhanced items and
performance tasks—because they
are such new and unfamiliar additions
to the testing regimen.
“You need to be very careful
about the results of field tests,” he
said, “because everything is still
in flux.”
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Education Week - September 18, 2013

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