Credit: iStockphoto.com

Credit: iStockphoto.com

For months, California education officials have emphasized one message regarding the part that standardized tests will play in the time to come: Results from the Smarter Balanced tests, which were released last week, should be viewed as but one star, though a bright 1, in a universe of metrics measuring student and school progress.

The state is in the middle of building a new accountability organization to replace the Academic Performance Index, a three-digit number that has been the main measure used to evaluate how well a school or district is doing. Merely that effort is still evolving, and with many primal decisions by the State Board of Education and the Legislature nonetheless to come, officials are clearer about the role that student scores on Smarter Balanced tests won't play in the new accountability system than on how significant a cistron they will play.

Until just two years agone, tests scores on English language arts and math in grades 3 through 8 and class 11, like the new Smarter Counterbalanced tests aligned to the Common Core standards, were the mainstay of the API. With a composite number between 200 and 1,000, the API ranked a school's and a commune'south performance. Pupil subgroups within schools and districts besides received API numbers.

Merely last year, equally a result of adopting new Common Core standards in English language arts and math, the state stopped giving tests aligned to the previous California academic standards. The state board then suspended the API, with plenty of back up from schoolhouse organizations like the California Schoolhouse Boards Association and the land'south teachers unions. Lath members, all of whom are appointed past Gov. Jerry Brown, have indicated they don't intend to recreate the API using the results from Smarter Balanced tests.

Instead, the board wants to create a broad measure of pupil and school success that takes into account many measures of progress, such every bit high school graduation rates and pupil interruption rates, equally indicators of progress in middle and elementary school. In that location may be early on education metrics every bit well.

"The old notion of a single number doesn't make sense anymore," schoolhouse board member Sue Burr said at the state lath meeting earlier this calendar month. "We demand to exist crystal clear about what the new accountability organisation encompasses: More than multiple measures and a organization based on continuous improvement."

"Standardized tests scores' role will be smaller – no longer the only thing" to judge student progress or to be the sole grounds for land intervention in depression-performing schools, Michael Kirst, president of the state board, said in an interview. He and so added quickly, "but they still will be very prominent."

Even with a diminished role in a state accountability organization, test scores on the new standardized tests will accept more than credence, Kirst said,  considering Smarter Balanced tests are tied explicitly to measuring readiness for college and careers – linkages that the API lacked with an arbitrary goal of an 800 score and vague definitions of proficiency, he said.

The scores released concluding week  in iiird- through 8th-grade and grade eleven English language language arts and math will be base scores, the first indicators of how students preformed on online tests and the extent to which districts have succeeded in introducing the Common Cadre standards on which Smarter Balanced tests are based. The public should append judgment about how well or badly schools are doing, Kirst said, and rather guess schools by the growth in exam scores over time.

"We need to be crystal clear about what the new accountability system encompasses: More multiple measures and a system based on continuous improvement," said State Board of Instruction member Sue Burr.

Replacing the API, Kirst and other educational activity leaders say, will be a set of indicators similar to a dashboard in a car, with test scores being just one approximate of schoolhouse success. This would exist consequent with the Local Control Funding Formula, the sweeping police passed in 2022 that, among its provisions, ordered the state board to create a new accountability system based on eight priorities. Those priorities fall into 3 groups, every bit described in the template for the Local Control and Accountability Plans that districts complete annually. They are:

  • Parent and student engagement, as measured past chronic absence, suspension rates, graduation rates and other measures;
  • Conditions of learning, including an equitable distribution of qualified teachers and the implementation of the Mutual Core, and;
  • Student outcomes, including success on Avant-garde Placement courses, rates of reclassifying English language language learners equally adept in English language, and scores on end-of-year standardized tests.

In the 2022 police, the Legislature charged the state board with refining these and other measurements into a smaller fix, chosen evaluation rubrics, that will set statewide performance goals for key metrics like graduation rates and college and career readiness. Those rubrics would exist 1 element of a new accountability system, informing districts of their progress while determining when and whether county offices of education, the superintendent of public instruction or a new state agency, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, should arbitrate in schools and districts that are chronically underperforming.

It'south early yet to say which if whatever Smarter Balanced test scores, such equally 3rd-grade English language arts or eightthursday-grade math scores – identified as key markers of bookish progress – might exist included. The enquiry agency WestEd, through a contract with the country lath, has created several early versions of brightly colored graphics for potential rubrics (see pages xix-22). These could be a prototype for multiple dashboards, prepared for different audiences, such as parents.

John Affeldt, managing partner for Public Advocates, a nonprofit law house and advocacy arrangement, said that the new Smarter Balanced results shined a calorie-free on a big achievement gap. He and the heads of 2 dozen organizations wrote the land board urging it to adopt explicit targets for improvement on fundamental indicators, including standardized tests.

At the land board meeting earlier this month, new board member Feliza Ortiz-Licon, senior managing director of K-16 education at the National Council of La Raza, cautioned that exam results provide hard data that the public has come to rely on to compare schools and measure the achievement gap. There was value in the simplicity of the API, she said. "How can a parent digest a dashboard in a actually clear manner?" she asked.

In a letter to the state board, Pecker Lucia, CEO of EdVoice, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that advocates for low-income children, criticized the de-emphasis on exam scores in WestEd'due south partial draft of the evaluation rubrics. "The ability to master academic English and core content in every course is what parents, college education segments, and employers all look from K-12 public schools. The recommended accountability system ignores nearly all the objective summative information on bones educational outcomes."

Kirst said in an interview it is premature to draw that conclusion.

 Tension over how tests are used

Standardized tests can serve several purposes. One is accountability: They provide valid information for comparing schools on common academic standards, shining a light on disparities, giving parents and the public i indicator of whether kids are learning and schools are meeting expectations. Another is to provide vital information to teachers and parents on how to improve education.

During the past decade under the federal No Kid Left Behind law and the land API, the attention was clearly on holding schools accountable for getting results. For the U.Southward. Department of Education, scores were the primary measure of achievement and the ground for sanctioning low-performing schools. Schools were under pressure to reach NCLB'south escalating proficiency targets and attain an API score of 800 that the land had ready as a target for all schools.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, Kirst, Burr and other land lath members view the detailed data from Smarter Counterbalanced tests of how students performed equally an opportunity to shift the emphasis to improving classroom educational activity. And improvement, not penalization, should be the goal of an accountability organisation, they say.

The state'south previous test plan, known as Standardized Testing and Reporting, or STAR, reported educatee and school scores within five bands of achievement, ranging from "far below basic" through "advanced." Too much attention was focused on reaching a single score designating proficiency, Burr said.

By contrast, school and private student results on Smarter Counterbalanced tests in English linguistic communication arts and math volition be reported every bit single points on a one,000-point scale divided into 4 newly named accomplishment bands, ranging from "standard non met" to "standard exceeded." The focus, Burr and others said, should exist on students and schools showing growth in scores over time, not only from one level to the next only within levels.

Additional Smarter Balanced tests

Forth with end-of-twelvemonth tests, the Smarter Balanced Cess Consortium, the organization of 18 states that developed the tests, too provides interim tests that districts and teachers tin requite and score themselves over the course of the school year to learn how well students are learning cloth aligned with the Common Core. The interim tests are similar in construction to the terminate-of-year tests.

Smarter Counterbalanced was tardily in introducing the interim tests last year, so that many schools did not have an opportunity to use them. But the consortium now has three interim tests ready, along with shorter modules that will measure how students are doing inside specific subject areas. State Deputy Superintendent Keric Ashley said that already this schoolhouse year, districts take administered 25,000 to 30,000 interim tests.

Teachers can further refine their educational activity with "determinative assessments," which are shorter classroom exercises or projects that requite teachers an indication of how well students are doing with specific Mutual Core standards or broader problem-solving skills. Near teachers have admission to them through Smarter Balanced's Digital Library, which went online last year.

As a governing fellow member of the Smarter Balanced consortium, California has pushed hard for the interim and formative assessments. Tony Alpert, the executive director of Smarter Counterbalanced, told the state lath that detailed information from the interim and determinative assessments will be more useful to teachers in diagnosing student progress than the cease-of-yr or "summative" Smarter Balanced tests. "Summative tests are peachy for helping to identify questions similar, 'How big is the accomplishment gap? Have I closed it? If not, why?' It's not great for providing the answers," he said.

But board member Patricia Rucker, a erstwhile teacher who's at present a lobbyist for the California Teachers Association, cautioned that the board will accept its work cut out to change parents' and the public'south perceptions. They're used to seeing one number summarizing how well their school and commune did compared with others. Until the board changes the conversation with growth comparisons and multiple measures, parents will focus on one score, and "it will remain the weight in the room," Rucker said. "It is magical. Information technology is power."

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