Date sent: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 00:24:44 -0800
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: Teaching to the test - Tucker 2


>Subject: Teaching to the test - Tucker 2
>
>Moreover, it added, states should take responsibility for insuring that all
>students meet
>that standard.
>In the last few weeks of the summer of 1990, Resnick and Tucker were figuring
>out how
>to put such a system in place.
>The two brought very different strengths and perspectives to this effort.
>Tucker, who
>has never been a teacher, had made a career as an education reformer. He came
>to the
>field during the 1960's after a brief stint in public television. He began
>his working life
>behind a camera at WGBH-TV in Boston and had gone on to become second in
>command of the public-television station's education division.
>Apparently, however, he was a quick study. He founded and directed regional
>educational laboratories in New England, became an associate director of the
>National
>Institute of Education, and served for three years as the executive director
>of the
>Carnegie Task Force on Education and the Economy, which produced a major 1986
>report calling for an overhaul of the teaching profession.
>Resnick, on the other hand, had built her career as a dispassionate education
>researcher. She had conducted ground-breaking research on how children learn.
>Later,
>with her husband, Daniel Resnick, she had written a number of papers that
>were critical
>of traditional assessment methods.
>"Lauren's work was required reading in graduate school,'' recalls Sue Rigney,
>who now
>directs student-assessment programs in Vermont, a state that has belonged to
>New
>Standards from the outset.
>That work had earned Resnick, who is a co-director of Pittsburgh's Learning
>Research
>and Development Center, numerous awards and other distinctions and had taken
>her
>around the world, from South America to southern China.
>She says she decided to cross the line from objective observer to advocate
>when it
>became apparent that, this time, someone was listening.
>"Dan and I had been asked to do white papers for a number of commissions in
>the
>1980's, and everybody applauded and nothing else happened,'' she says.
>"Suddenly all
>kinds of people started to listen and say, 'What would you do?'''
>"When there's something you've been saying over a decade and people say,
>'Design it,'
>you tend to want to do that,'' she says.
>"It's been a wonderful kind of marriage,'' says Robert B. Schwarz, the
>director of
>education programs for the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia. "Each
>brought a
>distinctive set of skills but, over time, they've come closer together.''
>Pew and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago together
>have
>provided more than half of New Standards' funding.
>What Tucker and Resnick shared from the beginning, however, was a commitment
>to
>educational equity. In fact, New Standards differs from some other proposals
>for
>national assessment systems in its belief that all children can--and
>should--meet high
>educational standards.
>Tucker says his own commitment to that concept has deeply personal roots. He
>grew
>up in foster homes in Newton, Mass., and attended Brown and Yale universities
>on full
>academic scholarships.
>The scholarship to Yale, however, required him to work 16 to 20 hours a week
>for no
>pay. That left him little time to get a job to pay for room and board. He
>subsisted on
>leftover breakfast rolls from a local coffee shop until he collapsed in the
>spring of his
>first year at Yale. He was hospitalized for two months while he recovered
>from the
>effects of malnutrition. He never finished his graduate studies at Yale.
>"When I hear people tell me they are upset about what I have to say about
>schools and
>the economy, I think that's a wonderful attitude for people who never have to
>worry
>where their next meal is coming from,'' he says now.
>"And, on the matter of standards,'' he goes on to say, "the idea that schools
>are going
>to set their own standards is wonderful for schools that are full of teachers
>for whom
>the light has not gone out and who care about kids.''
>"But that's not all schools,'' he says.
>Tucker and Resnick's proposal also came at an opportune time. Already, some
>states
>had begun to move toward creating their own performance-based assessment
>systems.
>Months earlier, President George Bush and the nation's governors had called
>for
>setting "world class'' standards for student achievement. And the National
>Council of
>Teachers of Mathematics had concluded a seven-year effort to set curriculum
>standards for that subject.
>"I think people recognized that the goals-and-standards movement had legs
>politically,
>and it wasn't going to go very far if it didn't have an assessment side to
>it,'' says
>Richard F. Elmore, a Harvard University education professor who is evaluating
>the New
>Standards Project for Pew and MacArthur. "Lauren and Marc happened to be the
>people who put forward the most compelling design for that.''
>Through the National Center on Education and the Economy, Tucker was already
>working with states and school districts that were pioneering their own
>school reforms.
>Most of them also agreed to sign on to New Standards.
>"We had already become involved in portfolio assessment, and I was
>confronting
>every day the obvious fact that a small state couldn't accomplish this
>alone,'' says
>Richard P. Mills, Vermont's commissioner of education. "This was extending an
>opportunity to share resources.''
>>From New Standards, states could one day expect to get technical support,
>advice and
>materials, a steady stream of performance tasks that had already been
>field-tested and
>were drawn from national, agreed-upon standards, and a way to see how their
>students
>measured up against those from other states and other countries. They could
>adopt the
>New Standards reference examinations whole, use a small number of items
>developed
>by the project, or just allow themselves to be "linked'' to the project--to
>be similar
>enough, in other words, so that they could still compare their students with
>those in
>other states.
>Moreover, says Mills, "having so many people working so hard makes it safer
>to
>innovate.''
>Pew and MacArthur agreed almost immediately to provide more than $1 million
>in
>start-up funds.
>And, beginning last year, the states were being asked to contribute to the
>pot as well.
>They now pay between $100,000 and $500,000 annually to belong to New
>Standards.
>"To get that kind of money means that the chief state school officer has to
>go through
>the legislature,'' Tucker says. "And he or she has to be pretty sure that
>major
>expenditure is going to pay off.''
>The project lost a few states, such as Arizona, when it began requiring dues,
>but the
>number of partners over its four-year life span has consistently hovered
>between 16
>and 20. Currently, the partner states are: Arkansas, California, Colorado,
>Connecticut,
>Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York,
>Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, and Washington. In
>addition to
>San Diego and New York City, the school district members are Fort Worth
>Pittsburgh,
>and Rochester and White Plains, N.Y.