October 31st. Halloween. Large-scale assessment’s favorite holiday.
Some of you are probably thinking that makes perfect sense. Ghosts, goblins, scary monsters, tricks and taunts, toilet paper hanging from the trees on the front lawn, rotten eggs hitting the house, sticking your face in a bucket of water with a bunch of snot-nosed kids in hopes of getting nothing more than an apple in return, a burning bag on the doorstep. Yup, that sounds like large-scale assessment.
The rest are scrolling through the list of holidays in your head (or mentally flipping calendar pages if you are older like me) and thinking that can’t be right.
Some lingering on holidays featuring a fictional character who claims to see and know everything and sneaks into your house at night, or perhaps one of those holidays perpetuating a biased view of history or celebrating a racist colonizer.
Other pause on the holidays that involve a lot of bluster, flag waving, speechifying, and flashy fireworks. Surely, large-scale assessment would identify with one of those.
Still others take assessment, and themselves, much too seriously to be waste any time thinking about large-scale assessment’s favorite holiday. But odds are those people don’t have a blog post to get out each week.
Of course, nobody associates large-scale assessment with Thanksgiving – that would be silly.
Solid thinking, all around, but no. It’s Halloween.
Double, double toil and trouble
Halloween – the one day in the year devoted to pretending to be something that you’re not!
You can see it now, can’t you.
Plus, there’s candy. Lots of candy.
And large-scale tests are just like everyone else when it comes to choosing costumes.
Some dress up as superheroes, pretending that they have special powers like the ability to provide actionable information to inform instruction, valid and meaningful subscores, or research-based, diagnostic information; or the nimbleness to transform a single scaled score into metrics used to evaluate programs, schools, educators, and students.
Others are drawn like moths to a flame to the latest, hottest trends (calm down NAEP, not those kinds of trends).
There was a time when every NRT wanted to be a CRT, adding achievement levels to its reports while relying on the same design principles and item selection (and rejection) procedures.
Then the buzzword was standards-based. Oh, the elaborate custom costumes, with lots of hoops and smoke and mirrors that state tests stitched together to pretend to be aligned to state standards. Or the commercial tests and their one-size-fits-all-standards costume with its alluring tropical design. Just pick the right sash for your standards and you’re dressed to impress.
For the longest time, every large-scale assessment wanted to be formative. There were a few years there that four out of five tests knocking on your door with their hand out claimed to be formative, or better yet, part of a formative system. The formative fad finally faded when people pointed out that formative assessment was not even a test, it was a process. Who wants to dress up as a process?
Of course, even today, you’ll get a few large-scale tests each year still claiming to be formative.
But through-year assessment seems to have replaced formative as the latest fad. All the cool tests now want to be through-year assessments.
Behind them are the large-scale, on-demand tests who dress up and present themselves as things they wish they were, but sadly can never be. You know, like performance events.
Then there are the “too cool for school” large-scale tests who claim to be competency-based, or curriculum-embedded (which, frankly, sounds kind of painful), or learning assessments. Problem is that nobody really knows what those things look like, so when they show up at the door on Halloween they usually elicit a confused look and leave with an apple or maybe the popcorn ball left over from last Christmas.
Of course, large-scale tests are not immune from the “slutty _________” costume craze. Those cheap, fast, and barely there tests with lots of standard error showing and just enough items to cover the really important parts.
Fire burn, and caldron bubble
Finally, no discussion of large-scale tests and Halloween would be complete without paying homage to the Great Assessment.
Every two years, the Great Assessment rises up and in the dead of winter, in the darkness before dawn, shows up at the doors of the specially selected schools to test only those students that he thinks are the most sincere, er, representative. Then at least six months later, often around Halloween, when just about everyone has forgotten about him, he rises up again out of the fog, or into the fog as it were, with scale scores (not scaled scores, mind you), achievement levels, and trend lines – all presented without a hint of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.
It’s enough to make you wonder why more large-scale assessment programs don’t try to emulate the Great Assessment. Then you remember.
There was a time, long ago and far away – it was called the 1980s – when that’s exactly what many state assessment programs did.
But then the federal government came along to put a stop to that. First, they decreed that the Great Assessment would also be a state test. When that wasn’t enough to deter states, the feds panicked and started changing all the rules (some for the better), making it impossible for state tests to emulate the Great Assessment.
The state tests had to be aligned to specific state standards. The tests had to be administered every year. Then they had to provide diagnostic individual student results. Next, they had to be administered at almost every grade level. The feds even offered to pay for much of the testing – supplementing, not supplanting state funding, of course.
It’s almost as if the feds were doing everything in their power to ensure that no other test could be like the Great Assessment – the gold standard of large-scale tests.
Just fanciful thinking on my part, I’m sure, induced by one-too-many fun-sized Snickers bars.
But what a scary, horror story that would be!
So, enjoy a piece of candy, maybe two. Appreciate your large-scale assessment and whatever costume it might be wearing this year. Administer it, examine the results, and use them for what they are worth. And then get back to the real business of educating kids.
Happy Halloween!
Image by Albani Castillo from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 