Watch out for that first step. It’s a doozy! – Ned Ryerson
It’s a precarious time for state testing.
The wolves are howling at the door as we cower in the houses they have built for us out of straw man arguments. A survey of elite institutions across the country reveals that the only required course in graduate programs in measurement and testing is self-flagellation. Teachers’ unions, natural and sworn enemies of state testing, smell blood in the water.
And that’s the good news.
In the past, those challenges would be mere speed bumps as we continued down the road of building better tests.
Unfortunately, as the year comes to an end and I have finished asking all of the big questions, my takeaway is that we have gone as far as we can go along the road of building better on-demand, end-of-year, standardized, summative state tests.
That is not to say that we cannot continue to build better and better tests. We can. We should. And some people will.
The potential of including computer-based simulations in state tests is stimulating. I geeked out trying to decipher the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that is the system one testing company proposed for collecting data from and scoring their science simulations. And AI offers us the promise of finally being able to measure 21st century skills on standardized tests before we get too much deeper into the 21st century.
But better tests are not the answer.
You can’t get there from here
We have been building better tests for decades now. As Joe Biden’s father once said to him, or maybe it was Claudine Gay who said it, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
Any gains from building better tests, no matter how much more efficient, accurate, precise, reliable, valid, and fair they may prove to be will be incremental, at best, infinitesimal, at worst, and most likely large enough to be statistically significant or produce a modest effect size, but imperceptible in any practical sense.
State tests are good at what they do. State assessment needs to do more – so much more.
As I suggested in previous posts, the future of state-supported assessment lies in curriculum-embedded assessment.
Unfortunately, natural selection has weeded out of large-scale testing people adept at collaborating and interacting directly with educators.
So, here we stand at the edge of a cliff facing uncharted waters below. The next step that we take will be a doozy. The outcome is uncertain, and I have four popular images playing on a loop in my head when I think about how this might play out:
- The first – any version of the lemmings on a cliff cartoon.
- Similar to the first, but more dramatic, the ending of Thelma and Louise.
- Strangely appropriate in this context if only for its inappropriateness, Queen Isabella watching the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria set off for the New World.
- Finally, the most positive of the four, Butch and Sundance making their leap of faith.
The fall will probably kill us, but those of us interested in using state assessment to support improved instruction and student learning have to take this one giant leap.
As I see it, our soft landing, or safe passage, depends on how well we can build our own three ships a sailing.
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (the Niña)
The first, smallest, and easiest task to complete should be restoring some distance, a healthy separation if you will, between assessment and accountability. Assessment (i.e., state testing) and accountability have long been connected, but NCLB created a false equivalence between the two: a conjoined, thing with two heads(another strangely appropriate, inappropriate reference) worthy of any monster Dr. Frankenstein or Elon Musk could build.
There are so many inputs and outcomes in addition to state test scores that could, and should, be part of a multi-tiered school and district accountability system. Just check the archives from the late 1990s and early 2000s for examples.
Yes, I said multi-tiered.
To those who advocate for keeping accountability simple: few things could be simpler than percent proficient with a target of 100% proficient within 12 years.
It’s All Right There in the Data (the Pinta)
Next up is figuring out how to make the best use of all of the data about student performance and school effectiveness that is (are) readily available – including state test scores. The fastest part of this task should be connecting with those data folks – you know the ones I mean. The ones who can search for patterns and use complex statistics to connect dots in data with the best of conspiracy theorists. They may eschew theory to a degree that makes us uncomfortable and be far ahead of us in realizing that educational assessment is not measurement, but deep down we are cut from the same cloth.
We can continue to regard these quants critically, but we have a lot to learn from them about collecting, modeling, interpreting, and organizing data in order to uncover and convey valuable information.
Where you lead, I will follow (the Santa Maria)
That brings us to the biggest, most challenging, and most important task of all: We have to learn how best to fit state assessment into schools. We have to understand how state-supported performance tasks, portfolios, group projects, interim assessments, etc. can be successfully integrated into the daily life of school administrators, teachers, and students. That task will be much more daunting than any technical challenges associated with designing and implementing those assessment tools.
To accomplish this task, we will have to not only collaborate with educators, but we will also have to commit to following their lead. Yes, I know that it is way outside of our comfort zone to interact with these touchy-feely, squishy, people persons covered in chalk dust (I know that there’s no chalk dust anymore, work with me here). But this is their realm. We are the visitors here. I hear that many of them love the Gilmore Girls, so we might as well memorize the theme song:
Where you lead, I will follow
Anywhere that you tell me to
If you need, you need me to be with you
I will follow where you lead…
Every step you take
Finally, we must do all of this knowing full well that every step we take, every move we make, they’ll be watching us (and you know who they are), waiting to pounce on each and every misstep.
And there will be missteps, because pretty much everything is up in the air right now; what to teach, how to teach it, when to teach it, how to evaluate its quality – the kind of decisions that you would like to have nailed down before designing a state assessment system.
But where’s the fun in that.
We’re all in this together this time around.
The stakes are high, the water’s rough, but this task we love is ours.
Sink, swim, or crash onto the rocks…
All we can do is put our best foot forward and jump.
If not us …. You know the rest.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 