“Don’t get old.”
Those were the final words of wisdom my father shared with me as we were wrapping up a visit at the rehab center about three days before he passed away in late June 2009.
I was 50 at the time and Dad was a month shy of turning 77. I’ve cut that gap in half now at 64, but I am as certain now as I was then that he didn’t simply mean don’t get older. As George Burns said, “You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.”
I have a pretty good idea what he meant when I look at the stretch of hot, humid days forecast for this week and start thinking about carrying the air conditioner up from the basement and installing it in the window. And his meaning was very clear the other day when I finished another round of trimming the branches that hang too low over the driveway each time it rains – which I had hoped would happen less often when the calendar switched from June to July, but we’re not off to a good start.
I think about Dad’s advice a lot this time of year and not only because of the anniversary or because those physical tasks I just mentioned, along with many others, become more daunting with each passing year.
Each June, as another administration window for state tests closes, another school year comes to an end, and CCSSO wraps up another assessment conference, I think about how that advice applies to our field.
Have we let state assessment get old?
I’m afraid that we might have, and that makes me sad.
I hear lots of complaints about what’s wrong with state tests, made by people providing scant evidence to support vague claims and offering, at best, ill-conceived suggestions for how to make state assessment better.
This is not the first time, of course, that people have complained about state testing. There has been lots of complaining about state testing since the late 1980s, and about standardized testing, in general, long before that. But there were people who responded to those complaints with innovative ideas and plans to make it better.
In the 1990s, Lauren Resnick and Marc Tucker had a plan for the New Standards Project. Ross Brewer had a plan for portfolio assessment in Vermont. Rich Hill had a plan for a new type of school-based state assessment program in Kentucky.
There were states like California, Connecticut, North Carolina, Michigan, and others (even little Rhode Island) who had some pretty cool plans.
Maine and Nebraska had very different kinds of plans for state testing (i.e., local assessment). Hey, somebody had to suggest it.
In the early 2000s, with the New England Common Assessment Program we had a plan for moving state testing from the spring to the fall to better align with instructional and accountability needs.
In the 2010s, Laura Slover, Mitchell Chester and a host of others had a plan for PARCC.
Looking at the future of state assessment from my vantage point, I don’t see a new crop of plans waiting to be harvested.
I see innovators with big ideas that get shrunk down into test-sized morsels before they are shrink-wrapped and placed on the testing shelf. “Fun-size” performance assessment.
I see other innovators whose ideas I am certain represent the future of educational assessment, running as fast as they can from being associated in any way shape or form with state testing. Man, did we ever piss off a lot of people with educator evaluation. Thanks, Obama.
There are still others with ideas who would love to be included under the state testing umbrella, whom I see being shunned by those who should know better in the name of preserving the precious end-of-year summative test with its sacrosanct scale and comparable scores. (Improbable Historical footnote: “Sacrosanct” was the next level up from “Ratio” in the original draft of S.S. Stevens’ hierarchy of scales, but his editor limited him to four.)
In short, I see state assessment getting old.
Rose-Colored Glasses and Blinders
Am I seeing the past through rose-colored glasses and looking at the present with blinders on? That’s a clear sign of getting old.
You can argue that I’m too far-removed from the field at this point to see the advances that are being made and the plans being set in motion. Perhaps.
If so, do me this favor.
In the next cycle of conferences and journals, please share some actual examples, working prototypes, or at least details of how your plan to improve state tests will move from idea to implementation.
I’ll accept descriptions of how some innovative ideas that have been flying under the radar in alternate assessment programs can be brought to scale; but please, enough already about CAT. CAT is a nice tool, but it is a decades-old idea; and never forget that CAT only finally made its way into state testing thanks to a consortium of states who looked askance at the testing industry and viewed state assessment as a nuisance to be dealt with as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
You can point out that none of those historical ideas I listed in the previous section lived up to expectations, and some didn’t even work out particularly well; and you might even question, rightfully so, just how well-planned some of those initiatives were. And if that’s all you want to do, that’s fine.
There has always been, is now, and always will be, a group of people whose vocation is to tear down; bless their hearts, they’re very good at it and they serve a purpose. With proper balance, those people help regenerate a field, but allow them to burn out of control for too long and they suck all the life out of a field, to the point that it cannot recover.
We need people and states with plans like those listed above to keep state assessment moving forward – to keep it from getting old.
We need people and states willing to try, and fail, and then try again. And we need to support them. It keeps us young.
Don’t get me wrong. With all of the advances in test design and administration over the past 30 years, all the attention paid to alignment, accessibility, and adaptivity with a nod toward authenticity, a valid claim can be made that today’s end-of-year state tests are better than they’ve ever been.
But for what they can do, for the limited amount of information about individual student achievement that a single end-of-year test ever will be able to provide, we may have made state tests better than they need to be while neglecting state assessment.
I’ll freely admit now, as we did at the time, that we jumped the gun with some of our efforts to re-imagine state assessment in the 1990s.
I’ll take my chances, however, with the consequences of implementing a new idea in state assessment that’s not quite ready over the consequences of continuing to do what we have been doing.
As I sit here today, three decades later, and see the essence of state assessment essentially unchanged (i.e., data collected from a single end-of-year test), it makes me feel sad.
By focusing so much of our attention on the state test, I fear that we have let state assessment get old.
Embrace the Absurd 