Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Salvaging Accountability

This from Thomas Toch & Douglas N. Harris in Ed Week:

George W. Bush rode to the White House pledging high standards for all students. He’ll leave Washington with the nation’s public education system focused on teaching basic skills to disadvantaged student populations, with the United States lagging in international comparisons of educational attainment, and with his signature education law plagued by so many problems and mired in so much controversy that it has put at serious risk two decades of work to improve public schooling by making educators accountable for their students’ success.

The most important thing Barack Obama or John McCain could do quickly to salvage the accountability movement is change the way that the federal No Child Left Behind Act judges schools. Not by abandoning NCLB’s focus on students’ meeting standards, a move that would be unwise on both policy and political grounds, but by making the law a more legitimate report card of school performance, one that provides a fair and accurate gauge of educators’ contribution to their students’ achievement. Since its inception, NCLB has instead held schools responsible for factors they can’t control and perversely encouraged states to set standards low....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree. Educators should be judged on what they add to students. The way to do that is called value-added, or longitudinal assessment. It is already working – elsewhere – and the US Department of Education is running pilots – elsewhere – to make this the prime model of assessment for NCLB, as well.

The law that created CATS in 1998 actually requires Kentucky to go to a longitudinal assessment, as well. It has been ignored for a decade by the department of education because the CATS is totally unsuitable for longitudinal assessment. The reasons: CATS uses a matrixed question approach and it uses generally less reliable open-response questions.

According to Dr. William Sanders, the creator of the country’s best-known and longest running value-added assessment (Tennessee’s TVAAS), you need more questions in each student’s test booklet than CATS contains to get minimally required levels of reliability. He won’t even consider applying his highly respected value-added process to a matrixed test, either. I asked.

To get rid of matrixing and increase the number of questions in CATS just about mandates getting rid of open-response questions. Open-response questions just take up too much testing time. The KDE isn’t inclined to drop open-response questions, meaning matrixing must stay, as well.

So, forget about a valid and reliable longitudinal assessment in Kentucky. So long as we cling to our 20-year old testing model it’s not going to happen, at least not with anything that will be valid. That’s not just my informed opinion. Go ask the national expert – William Sanders.