There's been a lot of chatter lately about whether Congress will decide to significantly overhaul, or even dismantle, the testing regime at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act
through a pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, with the goal of giving control over testing back to the
states.
But lawmakers are hearing pushback on that idea from a key advocacy group: state education chiefs themselves.
The Council of Chief State School Officers is urging congressional education leaders
to pass a rewrite of the law that would keep the NCLB testing schedule
intact, meaning that states would still be required to test students
using statewide assessments in reading and math annually in grades 3-8
and once in high school.
At the same time, the CCSSO's proposal, which you can read in full here
would move away from many of the No Child Left Behind law's mandates on
school improvement and accountability, and would give states more
flexibility over their federal funding. (See more below.)
But the group's testing recommendation is the clear headline.
"It is just imperative to us, to each and every one of us, that we
have a check on our students and their academic performance every year,"
said Lillian Lowery, the state superintendent in Maryland.
Plus, annual testing data can provide really helpful information for
parents who are trying to take advantage of school choice options, said
John White, the state chief in Louisiana, home to a robust choice
program.
Couldn't states just decide to keep giving annual assessments, even
if the feds don't require it? That may be the case, Lowery said, but
continuing with the requirement is what's ultimately best when it comes
to a national policy aimed at getting all students ready for higher
education and the workforce.
"We don't want to have 50 different answers to the same question,"
Lowery said. "That's not the most competitive way to go about this."
White added that getting rid of the federal requirement would likely
throw a monkey wrench into state conversations on K-12 accountability.
(He didn't say this, but the dialogue is pretty fraught already as
states transition to the Common Core State Standards and aligned
assessments.)
"To throw away 12 years of progress, really at this moment in time,
is not helpful," White said. "It will change the national dialogue, and
it will put [progress] on hold while the chaos sorts itself out for
years."
The CCSSO's plan to keep the testing schedule in place comes with an
asterisk that opens the door for some state experimentation. The group
wants the new version of the ESEA to include language explicitly
allowing states to ask the U.S. Department of Education for permission
to develop pilot projects trying out new approaches to assessment that
might deviate from the traditional No Child Left Behind schedule.
That would give states the opportunity to seek flexibility along the lines of what New Hampshire has asked the Education Department for. (The department hasn't given the Granite State the green light yet, but it hasn't said no, either.)
And, particularly if Congress decides to take another dozen-plus
years to reauthorize whatever the new version of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act turns out to be, successful pilots could expand
and eventually form the basis of new assesment systems, said Chris
Minnich, the executive director of the CCSSO. He said he doesn't expect
testing to look the same way in a decade as it does today.
And importantly, states wouldn't have to use one summative test if
they didn't want to. They could combine the results of a bunch of
smaller, formative tests for accountability purposes. (That general
principle is pretty similar to a language in a Senate Democratic ESEA reauthorization bill from 2013, which never passed.)
So what else are the state chiefs proposing? They seem to be
borrowing from the NCLB waivers the Obama administration has granted,
and from ESEA reauthorization bills introduced in recent years by both
Democrats and Republicans. Here's a summary:
- Accountability. When it comes to accountability,
states would have a lot more say about what their systems look like than
they do under NCLB Classic, or even the administration's waivers. But
states would still need to rate schools annually, and expect
"accelerated progress" for student subgroups that have traditionally
been overlooked, including poor and minority students. States would also
need to continue to report assessment and graduation-rate data, broken
out by subgroups.
- School improvement. States would still have to
identify their lowest-performing (and highest-performing) schools and
target them for serious interventions (or rewards), just as they do
under the Obama administration's waivers. But states wouldn't have to
use any sort of federal prescriptions for turning the low-performing
schools around (a la the School Improvement Grants).
- Student achievement. Another key difference from
the waivers: To have accountability systems and measure progress, states
would clearly need to set some sort of student-achievement goals. But
states could come up with those goals on their own, without needing a
stamp of approval from the federal department.
- Teacher evaluation. Under the proposal, the feds
would be out of the business of requiring states to evaluate teachers.
But if states want to create evaluation systems (and the CCSSO is all
for that), they should be able to use federal teacher-quality money to
make that happen, the chiefs say. (That's pretty similar to language that was in a reauthorization bill introduced in the last Congress by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., now the chairman of the Senate education committee.)
- Flexible funds. The plan seeks to make it a lot
easier for states to move money from one federal pot to another, with
the goal of providing more comprehensive support systems for at-risk
kids. (That general idea was the basis of a bill introduced a few years back by Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House education committee, which the CCSSO supported.)
It's worth noting, of course, that the CCSSO is the group that, with
the National Governors Association, helped birth the Common Core State
Standards. The chiefs' proposal would seem to give states that have
adopted the standards, or are moving toward other college- and
career-ready expectations, room to continue with that work.
While Minnich said the proposal represents a consensus of a majority
of state chiefs (it can't be easy to get all 50 on board), there are
some states that may like to see Congress go further and craft a bill
that actually cuts down the number of federally mandated tests. Vermont,
for instance, included grade-span state testing in its initial waiver application, but was rebuffed by the federal Education Department.
Meanwhile, Richard Zeiger, the chief deputy
superintendent in California, said the prospect of more control over
testing is intriguing, particularly as his state seeks to transition to
an assessment system that he says will more fully capture students'
higher-level thinking skills.
"If we want this richer way of doing
assessments, we need to clear some room," he said. "If we could get away
from [testing] every student, every year, in these two subjects, that
helps create possibilities for us."
So what's the reaction?
The overall proposal got a thumbs-up from Kati
Haycock, the president of the Education Trust, an advocacy organization
that hasn't always seen eye to eye with the CCSSO on these issues.
The highlight, she said, is that states say they
want to hold their schools accountable for results for low-income and
minority students.
"For us, that's a very big step for the chiefs
to say to the federal government, 'Make us do this,' " she said. "Same
with testing. For them to be embracing both is a big deal."
And Michael Cohen, a former Clinton
administration official who is now the president of the group Achieve,
also gave the proposal a positive review. He's especially a fan of the
idea of pilot projects. "We don't want to be stuck with the same old
tests," he said. "Once reauthorized, ESEA tends to stay around for a
while."
A Senate GOP aide was a bit more muted. "It is
important to have the conversation about the appropriate amount of
tests, who requires them, and what we do with them," the aide said.
"State chiefs have an important voice in this debate, but they should be
encouraged to clearly articulate what they do with all of these tests
and whether any additional state or local tests have added to the
cascade of tests that parents, students, and teachers are concerned
about."
Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
(and an almunus of the George W. Bush administration), who counts
himself a fan of the CCSSO proposal, sees a lot in it that could appeal
to Democrats and Republicans, and maybe even form the basis of a final
agreement on ESEA reauthorization down the line.
"I think my sense is that they are picking their fights carefully,"
he said of the state chiefs. States, he believes, are saying, "We are
ready to be in the driver's seat again on education, and that's the
right position."
1 comment:
School chiefs have a point but it is one based in 19th and early 20th century thinking and conditions. Technology is moving much of our functional existence away from centralized and standardized existence. Folks are getting college degrees in content we never new existed from places most of us have never heard about.
Yes School chiefs want to maintain testing because it empowers them with state $ to spend on private vendors. It empowers them with a mechanism for controlling educators and school districts. Darn it, if we get rid of all those tests we won't be able to see if we are doing better than the kids in Maryland or Shanghai. For heaven's sake we will have to trust teachers to teach students based upon professional judgement and for teachers to know if their individual students have learned. Obviously that just can't be according to these chiefs.
As a sidebar, We hear a lot about accreditation and regulation being the centralized mechanisms for ensuring common high standards, but I believe they actually are just growing buracracies (often creating contradictory regs) that decrease individual institutional creativity and impose practices and performance level which some places may not be able to sustain beyond the year of review. I know the conditions of my household and what is in the best interest of my family as well as how best to use those resources to our benefit. I don't need the national excellence in family standards coming in tell me how to run my household based upon their culturally homogenized ideas which take none of the complexities of my finance, community, occupation, resource into account. Why in the world would we think similar educational oversight groups can do the same for all the different schools across this nation?
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