Massachusetts Goes to a Value-Added Assessment

Mitchell Chester continues to innovate in Massachusetts. This week he introduced a type of value-added assessment system - the kind Kentucky should now be considering.

Oh by the way... he's the guy the Kentucky Board of Education should have hired instead of flirting with Barbara Erwin.

This from the Boston Globe:

Mass plans to track students' progress, not just scores

MALDEN—Each fall when the state releases MCAS scores, principals often blame a dip in scores on the students, tactfully arguing that the class in question was perhaps not as superb a group of mathematicians or voracious readers as their predecessors.

State education leaders plan to inject a reality check this fall into the "good class
vs bad class" debate by tracking the performance of individual students as they advance from one grade to the next. The new measurement could shed light on who is falling short -- teacher or pupil -- and lead to fundamental changes in the way students are taught.

Mitchell D. Chester, the state commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said yesterday that the new analysis will make it harder for local school leaders to be dismissive of poor test scores.

"It takes away a lot of the excuse-making," Chester said at yesterday's meeting of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education where the new system was unveiled.

Under the current system, the state judges a school's success by comparing its MCAS scores at each particular grade level to the scores posted by that grade the year before. The English and math MCAS tests are given in grades 3 through 8 and in grade 10.

Many teachers and adminstrators have chastized the approach as an apples-and-oranges comparison because the variation could simply reflect a class of particularly gifted or challenged students. The problem can be especially acute at small schools, where there are only a few dozen students at each grade level and the performance of a handful of students can create dramatic shifts.

Using the new tool, the state will augment that analysis by examining the performance of individual students or classes of students over the period of several years, starting in the third-grade.

The examination of current and past scores will allow them to predict students' likelihood for improvement in the future and assess whether they are on track to meet expectations. If a number of a students at a particular school are exceeding the statistical predictions, that could indicate that the administrators and teachers there have identified promising teaching methods. If a number of students are falling short of predictions, that would indicate there could be a problem...