When Will They Ever Learn?

While popping into LinkedIn earlier this week, I was surprised to come across a post endorsing the ideas in a Boston Globe article headlined:

Massachusetts to overhaul key educator licensing exam, in an effort to better

serve students of color and their families

As a lifelong assessment enthusiast and someone who was adjacent to initial rollout of teacher tests in Massachusetts around the turn of the century, I was intrigued.

I say “adjacent to the initial rollout” because the massive reform efforts underway were pretty well-siloed at the Massachusetts DOE in those days. Those of us toiling to implement the new student assessment program and graduation requirements were not involved in the drafting of the new teacher certification regulations (in retrospect, it would have been nice to include something about assessment literacy in there) and we were only called into the teacher testing effort to react to the novel crowd-sourcing approach to standard setting that their contractor proposed.

The idea of a state-administered educator licensing exam being used to better serve students of color and their families caught my attention.

Of course, a primary motivation for implementing teacher testing back in the day was to ensure that all students, including students of color in urban districts, had the opportunity to be taught by a highly qualified teacher – or to at least increase the probability that students had a teacher who had demonstrated that they could read and write and had some command of the subject matter they were teaching.

As you can imagine, the concept was met with widespread approval, everything went off without a hitch, the teacher testing program was universally embraced, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Not exactly.

There may have been just a bit of controversy surrounding the program. As I recall, the silver lining for those of us in student assessment was that the slings and arrows were being directed at a new target, at least temporarily.

The test referred to in the article is the Communications and Literacy Skills Test, required of all candidates for licensure. To refamiliarize myself the test and to do my journalistic due diligence for this blog post I spent a morning taking the practice tests available online.

The test, comprising separate Reading and Writing subtests, is basically a standardized test that you would be comfortable administering in any high school across the country. The Reading subtest consists of 42 multiple-choice, passage-based items, distributed across seven informational passages that hit at least 10 of the social, cultural, and sociocultural touchpoints that you would expect to see in a 2024 Reading Comprehension test (my score 41/42). The Writing subtest consists of 35 multiple-choice and 7 short-answer revising/editing items and the task of producing a 150-word summary of a passage about some sound educational practices. Learning through testing, right. (I correctly answered all of the multiple-choice items (even those about comma use) and am pretty confident about my responses to the constructed-response items.

As stated in the article, the test is “narrowly focused on measuring reading and writing skills.”

So, how is this overhaul going to improve the educational experience of students of color and their families?

Building a Better Mousetrap

To give you a sense of what’s being considered, rather than trying my hand at producing another summary, here are some excerpts from the article.

• Massachusetts education officials are embarking on the first overhaul of the state’s licensing exam for educators in 15 years, in an effort to ensure they can effectively teach a more diverse student population and communicate with their families.
• [S]tate education officials want to expand it to include whether applicants possess the ability to communicate in ways that are culturally and linguistically in tune with the students and families they serve.
• The state expects it will assess such areas as an educator’s understanding of the importance of communicating clearly with students and families from different cultures, engaging families in decision-making, giving students feedback for improvement, and welcoming families into the classroom and school community.
• For instance, the draft frameworks recommend that when educators share written communication with families, “it is helpful to be concise by providing information clearly and in few words, using bullets, headings, and other strategies for concision and clarity” and
• they should rely on families’ preferred methods of communication, which could include text messages or apps, like WhatsApp.
• “It’s good for educators to have those skills, given that most our students are Black and Latino and most of our educators are white, and we also have more immigrants arriving,” said Soto, who has two daughters enrolled in Boston Public Schools. “There can be a lot of miscommunication that happens because of the cultural differences. For instance, she said, many people think looking someone in the eye when talking is a sign of respect, but in some cultures it is not.

And of course, no test overhaul would be complete unless:

• The changes to the communication and literacy skills tests could also yield another significant benefit, potentially reducing the racial and ethnic disparities in pass rates on the exam, which often keep Black and Latino educators out of public school classrooms.

Yikes!

We can agree that overhaul was a good word choice for the headline – raze and rebuild has alliteration going for it but is a bit wordy for a headline.

The article is describing a whole new test, a whole new construct, and a whole new world of interactions between teachers and families.

It’s telling us that the state is re-interpreting the word “Communications” to mean communicating, a novel idea in large-scale testing.

Speaking of word choice, my decision to go with “Yikes!” as the heading for this section is not because I don’t think that teachers should possess the skills described. All of the best movies and books about teachers are centered around the way that they communicate and engage with students, families, the community, etc. I am a bit wary, however, of the potential for unintended consequences from direct communication via texting, WhatsApp, and similar methods.

“Yikes!” doesn’t refer to the obvious fact that this overhauled “test” cannot be an instrument consisting primarily of multiple-choice items. At a minimum, it will have to be a performance-based assessment consisting of multiple tasks. It probably should be a portfolio assembled over an extended pre-service practicum. (Hmm, where have I heard of a teacher prep/evaluation portfolio?) If we are being completely honest, it would probably be best if this assessment were conducted as part of an extended apprenticeship.

My “Yikes!” isn’t even because we really have no idea how to assess this ill-defined concept of communicating effectively with diverse audiences. Using few words, bullets, and headings is the advice they always gave us for communicating with the Commissioner and politicians. Is it really the same for communicating with families about their kid’s education? I know there has to be more to it than the “looking someone in the eye” example which has been the one go-to trope for cultural awareness since I was a beginning teacher. In my current context, my main concern recently has been avoiding direct eye contact with the possible Northern Hawk Owl I sighted in my neighborhood a couple of times last week.

No, “Yikes!” was my spontaneous reaction to the idea that this new and improved test was going to be the answer to so many problems, the silver bullet that has eluded us for so long.

Having It All

We’ve been down this road so many times with state testing, whether of students or teachers. The test that was going to measure student achievement, school effectiveness, and perhaps teacher quality, while also instantiating the state’s content and achievement standards, serving as a model for what good assessment should look like in the classroom, and providing actionable information to teachers to improve instruction and student learning.

This new licensing test is not only going to improve teacher communication with families, but also “foster a diverse and effective educator workforce,” a key component of the state’s effort to “promote teaching and learning that is antiracist, inclusive, multilingual, and multicultural.” 

Because we are all familiar with the long history of additional test-based requirements leading to more diversity.  Perhaps with the right weighting…  [sarcasm]

I say “additional” test requirements because the article refers to expanding the current test to include these communication skills. I assume that the state is still interested in ensuring that teachers can read and write at least at a high school level.  

According to the article, during the last school year, “only 51 percent of Latino test-takers and only 44 percent of Black test-takers” passed the current Communications and Literacy Test. An expanded test that also measures a new construct is certainly important, but is nowhere near the most important step, and certainly not the first step, in solving the current problem.

And I haven’t even mentioned the content area test in Mathematics – the testing system’s primary gatekeeper to licensing. (There is a separate mathematics test for prospective elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers.) After taking the Reading and Writing practice tests, I spent an hour completing half of the 4-hour Mathematics (Elementary) test – answering 50 items on the 100-item multiple-choice test (the first and last 25). It’s not an easy test. I recognized a couple of reworked items that caused a lot of drama and trauma on the student MCAS test (yeah, I’m looking at you, box-and-whisker plot and rows/columns items). And there were at least three items to which I had Caitlin Clark-like reactions when I read the answer key and rationale.

Go ahead, expand and improve the test, but also do all of the other things that are needed. If not, it won’t be long before we find ourselves asking, “Where have all the teachers gone?”

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay