Last week was a good week, as weeks go these days. Political phone calls and ads have disappeared for a while. There were a couple of frosty nights and cold days which made the 50º days this week feel warm the way that such days are supposed to feel in mid-November. I picked up my reusable red cup at Starbucks – another sign of the season. My blog post about the end of the MCAS graduation requirement quickly became one of my Top 5 posts of all time, and I attended a surprisingly conservative webinar on the future of state standardized testing.
It’s those latter two that are the focus of this post; that is, the ongoing fallout from the MCAS referendum question as it relates to the future of state testing in Massachusetts and elsewhere.
Square Pegs and Round Holes
The almost immediate reaction from the powers-that-be in Massachusetts was that it is of the utmost importance to find something else to ensure that there is a common graduation standard across districts. One proposal that sprang to the top of the list involved making mandatory a state-recommended course of study, MassCore, adopted by the state over a decade ago. As described by the state,
The program of studies includes the successful completion of four units of English, four units of mathematics, three units of a lab-based science, three units of history, two units of the same world language, one unit of the arts, and five additional “core” courses. A computer science course that includes rigorous mathematical or scientific concepts and aligns with the 2016 Digital Literacy and Computer Science Framework can substitute for either a mathematics course or a laboratory science course.
The biggest problem, of many, with requirements like MassCore which were well-intentioned but misguided when they were all the rage in the early 2000s, is that they feel particularly outdated in 2024 when the name of the game in secondary education is personalization, pathways, engagement, and self-actualization. And although terms like personalization and pathways may be current, the fact is that the idea of the comprehensive high school serving students with different needs, proficiencies, and interests, and consequently, producing different outcomes is at least as old as I am.
I included self-actualization in the list above not only because I’ve been a Maslow fan since college, but because whether you accept or reject his hierarchy of needs, the basic definition of self-actualization as the state “where one’s potential is fully realized after more basic needs … have been fulfilled” beautifully captures the essence and purpose of high school. A common graduation standard, if one exists, applies to the fulfilment of a student’s basic educational needs, and those needs must be met early in a student’s high school career, if not sooner. That is the primary conceptual reason why test-based graduation requirements like MCAS that apply to all students should be regarded as an initial hurdle to be surpassed no later than the tenth grade, which in fact, is how the requirement was cast in the Massachusetts Education Reform Act that created it.
The disconnect between state testing and high school, however, is larger than whether a test is used as a graduation requirement. As I argued in my 2020 paper, State Assessment and High School – A square peg for a round hole, “the American concept of the comprehensive high school has been structured around students pursuing a variety of pathways to diverse postsecondary destinations. State assessment has been structured around the concept of all students traveling the same route at the same rate; arriving at a common destination at the same time.” The two concepts simply don’t fit well together. They never have and they never will.
But what about state testing in general. What should the future of state testing look like in grades 3 through 8 where I would argue that there is a common core (lowercase) of knowledge, skills, dispositions, habits, etc. that all students must acquire to be successful? My response to that question is that it is imperative that we think of state assessment differently, very differently, as I will outline in the remainder of this post.
You Can’t Get There From Here
I noted at the top of the post that I found the webinar on state standardized testing to be surprisingly conservative. I say that because the focus throughout remained largely on on-demand, external, state-administered tests, whether those tests were administered once at the end of the year, two or three times per year as part of a through-year assessment program, or even in a more modular fashion throughout the year. Reflecting on that initial reaction, I wonder now whether the participants’ thoughts were limited by the terms “state,” “standardized,” and “test” as they described a future that was somewhat more efficient, but not all that different than the present. I say that because the future that I see for state testing is more about assessment than testing, is not very standardized in the traditional sense of the term, and is one in which the state plays much more of a supporting than lead role.
Perhaps most importantly, as they like to say here in my adopted home state of Maine, you can’t get there from here.
It is a future that cannot be achieved by tweaks or incremental changes to the current system. It is a curriculum-embedded, performance-based, and school-centered future of assessment that requires a different mindset, infrastructure, tools, and sets of supports in place to maintain the desired level of standardization, or more accurately as Andrew Ho noted in the webinar, the desired level of comparability.
And as with the comprehensive high school, the future that I describe is not a new idea, it is simply an idea whose time has come. In the early 1990s, we stood before two assessment roads that diverged in a yellow wood and we took the road less traveled by that I describe above, but we were not prepared for the journey, quickly became tangled in the undergrowth, and so with a sigh returned to the more well-trodden path of standardized testing, and sadly, that has made all the difference. But technological advances have removed virtually all of the logistical, fiscal, and technical barriers that thwarted our efforts to implement performance- based assessment in the 1990s. (and Dan Koretz has retired)
The largest barrier that remains is mindset.
State Testing is Formative, Damn It!!
As was noted in the webinar, a first step in ensuring a brighter future for state testing is being much clearer and more direct about its purpose and use (intentional use of singular here). Over the summer, I tried to do my part by publishing a post titled Reclaiming State Testing’s Formative Roots. Sadly, however, that post failed to crack my Top 35 posts read this year, let alone my Top 5 All-Time. So, here’s another first attempt at reshaping and reclaiming the most important part of the narrative surrounding state testing.
State testing is inherently, innately, and unapologetically formative.
I know that many of you must be wondering whether I have been consuming too much of my state’s newest and most valuable crop, residing as I do on southern Maine’s Marijuana Mile, but hear me out.
I admit that we allowed, even encouraged, the attachment of the label summative to state testing in order protect formative assessment from those whom certain compatriots of mine have referred to as snake oil salesman ready to slap the formative assessment label on everything.
To be clear, state testing is not formative assessment and is probably not instructionally useful (whatever that term means to you), but it most certainly is formative in that its primary role has always been as part of formative evaluation. Evaluative is not necessarily summative.
The formative role of state tests was clear when they were administered only three times to monitor achievement at significant mileposts in the education journey. Mileposts are formative. That formative role should have become even more clear when we began to administer the tests annually to all students at grades 3 through 8; and certainly when we began to “measure” growth from year to year.
I can even make a case that test-based graduation and promotion policies are more formative than summative. Last time I checked, they all lead to more instruction and not to putting kids to work in factories that don’t exist anymore anyway.
But what about federally-mandated, test-based school accountability, you ask. Surely, school accountability is summative. School accountability, too, is most definitely more formative than summative. Yes, the original rhetoric around “failing schools” was unfortunate and the “honesty gap” wasn’t much better, but the purpose of school accountability, as defined by its consequences, is to identify schools in need of targeted assistance or comprehensive support. What could be more formative?
Most importantly, state testing is formative because PK-12 education is formative.
Before we can even think about successfully working in consort with local educators to implement curriculum-embedded and performance-based assessment, we have to shift the mindset surrounding state testing from something done to them to something done with and for them, from summative to formative, from deficit to growth.
Image by Ralf Kunze from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 