Date sent: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 00:27:11 -0800
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: Teaching to the test - Tucker 3

>Subject: teaching to the test 3
>
>So far, the project has:
>
>Adopted mathematics standards closely modeled on the N.C.T.M.'s;
>
>Developed and field-tested pilot examinations in math and language arts;
>
>Begun developing guidelines and handbooks for the collection and scoring of
>portfolios of student work in both those subjects;
>
>Made plans to administer its first official reference examination this fall,
>the results of
>which will serve as a national benchmark standard in mathematics; and
>
>Launched similar efforts in science and applied learning.
>The National Center on Education and the Economy also upped the ante for the
>New
>Standards Project this year by introducing a plan for a "certificate of
>initial mastery''
>that could one day supersede the high school diploma as the basic educational
>credential sought by employers and colleges. To earn it, students at about
>the age of
>16 would have to demonstrate they had met the academic standards set by
>members of
>the New Standards Project. (See Education Week, April 20, 1994.)
>The partner states would not be required to use the certificate, but five of
>them already
>have in place policies that could eventually require students to earn it.
>"As we begin to provide visible standards and we provide visible tools, it
>will not be
>ignorable,'' Resnick predicts. "It will be the case that every state that
>doesn't want to be
>part of this will have to explain to their citizens why.''
>Phil Daro is the director of assessment development for the New Standards
>Project. He
>tells a story about his own two daughters' experiences with schooling that
>reveals
>much about the philosophical underpinnings of this effort.
>It goes like this: One daughter is sociable but is doing C work in a high
>school
>language-arts course. The other takes the same course and does A work. But
>she
>challenges the teacher in class and her personality grates on him.
>Both daughters receive the same grade in the course: a B.
>"There is fundamentally a conflict of interest to have the person who teaches
>you
>grade you,'' Daro says. With portfolio-based assessments, teachers and
>students are
>suddenly on the same side.
>"I have to face my colleagues through your work,'' he says, putting himself
>in a
>teacher's place. "Teachers do not go back and treat students the same as
>before.''
>The anecdote is revealing for several reasons. First, it says something about
>how the
>New Standards Project is evolving. It is moving from talk of a national
>system of
>assessments to talk of standardizing the grading practices of teachers.
>"All kinds of decisions are made now on the basis of unaudited evaluations of
>student
>work,'' Resnick says. "We are trying to improve on that.''
>It is also instructive because it says something about the role that teachers
>play in New
>Standards. The project, in a sense, begins and ends with them.
>Ideas for performance-task items come from teachers. Teachers decide on
>scoring
>guidelines for those items and for portfolios. And teachers eventually score
>them.
>In the case of portfolios, the scoring will one day be carried out by groups
>of trained
>teachers working within their own states.
>And, in the final analysis, it is teachers who will have to teach to the new
>standards.
>A total of 150 teachers attended the Albuquerque conference at which Brianna
>Stump's
>portfolio was reviewed. Brianna's portfolio was one of more than 1,600 they
>examined
>during the four-day meeting.
>Their tasks were to look over real portfolios of student work, develop
>guidelines for
>scoring them, and choose those that best represent what they mean by a 1, 2,
>3, 4, or 4+
>for student work in the subject areas they teach. The products of their
>efforts will be
>used during a second conference this summer to train a wider group of
>teachers in
>preparation for a full-scale pilot-test of portfolio assessments during the
>coming school
>year.
>Teachers at these sessions work from early in the morning until late at night
>with
>breaks for box lunches and snacks. And the work they are doing can be
>contentious,
>messy, and frustrating at times.
>"It was easy to unanimously decide what is a good portfolio,'' says Andrea
>Jankovich,
>a San Diego teacher. "What was hard was deciding exactly what was it we were
>describing: What makes it good? What do we want students to do?''
>"Everybody was trying to incorporate their states' philosophy,'' she adds.
>"We locked
>horns but we came to a nice consensus and finally everybody seemed to be
>pleased
>when all was said and done.''
>Moreover, the guidelines and standards continue to evolve as teachers pored
>over the
>portfolios.
>"You open up a portfolio that's really rich and suddenly there's a standard
>you didn't
>have a word for before,'' says Miles Myers, the executive director of the
>National
>Council of Teachers of English, which is developing standards in that subject
>for the
>project along with the International Reading Association and the Center for
>the Study
>of Reading at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
>These educators say they have not come here for the pay. There is none. Nor
>have
>they come for the travel opportunities. They spend most of their time holed
>up in hotel
>ballrooms.
>"The reason I use portfolios is because I think this directly impacts on my
>teaching in a
>dramatic way,'' says Penny Bishop, a middle school language-arts teacher from
>Vermont. "Because I've been using portfolios and using rubrics that explain
>or
>communicate what good writing is, I've been forced to make those things
>clearer for my
>students.''
>Moreover, these teachers say, portfolios and performance assessments tell
>them more
>about what their students know than traditional tests ever could. What's
>more, they
>allow students who didn't do well on those tests to shine in new ways.
>Yet even these teachers don't all use portfolios in the classroom or plan to
>abandon
>more traditional testing and teaching methods. That mix of tradition-minded
>versus
>reform-minded teaching styles is typical right now of what New Standards
>looks like at
>the grassroots level.
>"There's a lot of variation in what's happening in the classroom with New
>Standards,''
>says Donald SchÃon, a professor emeritus in the department of urban studies
>and
>planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been evaluating the
>New
>Standards Project along with Harvard's Elmore.
>Whether teachers in the project are using portfolios and open-ended tasks as
>part of
>their regular instructional programs has a lot to do with the degree of
>support they get
>back home. Some teachers are the only educators in their schools
>participating in the
>project; others are part of schoolwide or districtwide efforts.
>"It isn't obvious to me that if they learn to administer exams well they are
>going to learn
>to teach well,'' SchÃon says.
>Moreover, even though these kinds of assessments are designed to seamlessly
>blend
>in with the instruction already offered in classrooms, teachers themselves
>say using
>portfolios in the classroom can be time-consuming and difficult.
>"Are your kids starting out at an 8th-grade or a 2nd-grade level?'' says
>Bobbie Sipes, a
>6th-grade math teacher from San Francisco. "How many many drafts do they have
>to
>do before their work is acceptable enough to get out of the classroom?''
>"What about absences on days when projects are done?'' she continues. "That's
>stuff
>nobody talks about.''
>But Daro says it would be unrealistic to expect that New Standards will
>enable every
>teacher in every classroom to become a model teacher.
>"If my kids had a good teacher every other year, I would be thrilled,'' he
>says. "Don't
>imagine the worst teacher you ever saw and think, 'How are they going to
>change?'
>Imagine the average teacher you had and assume good will and hard work.''
>Switch scenes for a moment to a videotape in which a serious and well-spoken
>woman
>is addressing a group of parents and reporters last November in Stratford,
>Conn. The
>woman is Kay Wall, a parent from the affluent suburb of Greenwich, and she is
>speaking against a proposal for reforming Connecticut's schools.
>The plan, which was the product of 18 months of work by a 43-member
>commission,
>calls on the state to set high standards for student achievement and to
>develop a
>performance-based testing system aligned with those standards, among other
>measures. Wall, dressed in a high-necked blouse and dark suit, is calling the
>proposal
>"outcomes-based education'' in disguise--a reference to a parallel reform
>movement that
>has engendered opposition from some parents and conservative Christian groups
>in
>other states.
>Wall charges that school-reform plans like Connecticut's are part of a
>"national front''
>for outcomes-based education that has the University of Pittsburgh's Learning
>Research and Development Center, the New Standards Project, and other
>national
>education organizations at its forefront.
>This is, of course, not entirely true. The aim of New Standards is to set
>academic
>standards and not to dictate values for students, which is what
>outcomes-based
>education has been accused of doing.
>But, in the current political climate, critics like Wall pose an obvious
>threat to the
>project. Opposition from Wall's parents' group and from others caused
>Connecticut
>legislators to scuttle that state's school-reform plan. But the state, at
>least for now,
>remains a partner in New Standards.
>However, opposition to similar kinds of reform efforts in Virginia led in
>part to that
>state's withdrawal from the New Standards Project this year.
>"This is partly coming from a relatively small group of people who may or may
>not have
>education as their primary agenda,'' Resnick says. "But they are getting
>resonance from
>a broad band of the American public who feel the rug is being pulled out from
>under
>them.''
>The efforts to link New Standards to outcomes-based education, which have
>been
>gathering only in recent months, have not caught the project unawares. More
>than a
>year ago, the group, with the help of the Public Agenda Foundation in New
>York City,
>convened 24 focus groups comprising a diverse range of students, teachers,
>parents,
>and members of the general public.
>The survey found that although people generally liked the idea of high
>standards,
>portfolios, and open-ended test questions, they had concerns as well. They
>worried
>that some children would be left behind by the standards movement, and they
>resisted
>the notion that all children could meet rigorous standards. They also
>recoiled at the
>idea of comparing American students with those of other industrialized
>nations,
>suggesting such comparisons would be useless.
>Since then, the project has been working with its partners to refine its
>message.
>"I think it's incumbent upon us to reach the middle-of-the-road and convince
>them of
>the need for change,'' says Andrew Plattner, the communications director for
>New
>Standards. "Educators shouldn't, couldn't, and will never have the resources
>to engage
>the public at all these sites.''
>Despite the project's proactive efforts, however, the amount of time Plattner
>devotes to
>questions of public engagement has increased "by a factor of two,'' he says.
>SchÃon of M.I.T. points out that critics like Wall--who also calls for
>privatizing schools
>and enacting school-choice plans--and more conservative Christian groups are
>"the
>easy ones'' for New Standards.
>"They are easy in the sense that it is easy to be against them,'' he says. He
>worries
>more about critics such as Linda Darling-Hammond, Theodore R. Sizer, and
>Elliot
>Eisner--educators whose thoughtful research and observations have earned them
>a
>longstanding reputation in the field.
>Some of these critics oppose the concept of national standards and a national
>testing
>system on principle.
>"The idea that a country that has 44 million students, 2.5 million teachers,
>and 16,000
>school districts ought to have a common set of standards for subject matter
>is
>mistaken,'' says Eisner, a professor of art and education at Stanford
>University. "There
>is no single acceptable version of teaching any subject matter.''
>Sizer, the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a nationwide reform
>network,
>says standards are useful but must be set by local communities.
>And Darling-Hammond of the National Center for Restructuring Schools,
>Education,
>and Teaching says the success of New Standards points out that students need
>to
>have some choice in the way they are assessed.
>"We need some measures that would allow students to pursue their own
>strengths,
>interests, and ways of demonstrating knowledge,'' she says.
>Field-tests show that students are already having a tough time with the
>specific
>performance tasks designed by New Standards. Only small percentages of them
>are
>meeting passing standards for the specific test items that have been piloted
>so far. In
>the 1993 pilot, about 36 percent of the 4th graders who were given the
>checkers
>problem, for example, scored a 4--the passing standard.
>But the project has for now decided to stick by its standards.
>Darling-Hammond has other criticisms as well. She notes that the project has
>been
>conducted in isolation from many of the school-reform efforts that were under
>way
>when it began.
>"It's like a whole, big train going down the track and New Standards is like
>a bluebird
>flying around,'' she says. "It's lovely but it doesn't have much to do with
>what's going
>on.''
>Some technical questions remain unresolved as well. There is, for example,
>the matter of
>"rater reliability.'' In other words, how much of the time are individual
>scorers coming to
>agreement on specific test items? In field-tests so far, scorers agreed with
>one another
>roughly three-quarters of the time--a rate slightly higher than that found in
>trials in
>states moving to newer forms of assessment.
>But it is not yet high enough, testing experts say, for states to use the
>scores as a basis
>for making decisions about individual students.
>It may be, however, that, depending on how the scores will be used, rater
>reliability will
>not need to be as high for these kinds of assessments.
>"We're getting huge benefits from these forms of assessments,'' says Ramsay
>Selden,
>the director of the Council of Chief State School Officers' state
>education-assessment
>center. "They're much more valid and sensitive to the kinds of classroom
>priorities
>we're emphasizing, and we may need to re-examine our criteria for judging
>these things.''
>Despite the criticisms and challenges, New Standards partners and proponents
>are
>undaunted.
>"It's not like the present system is neutral,'' Marc Tucker says. "My sense
>is that
>states felt the risks of staying with the system they had were greater than
>the risks of
>going with this one.''
>One person whom New Standards proponents will not have to convince of the
>value of
>these newer assessment alternatives is Brianna Stump. The 9-year-old has
>experience
>with both standardized multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank tests and
>portfolios and
>open-ended test questions in her Kentucky elementary schools. She prefers the
>latter.
>"You got to think of things to write, and it's not like people are asking you
>questions
>on a test,'' she says. "You got to think harder.''
>"It shows what you can do,'' she says.
>Brianna also says she takes more pride in this kind of work, rewriting some
>of the
>pieces in her portfolio "over and over and over again.'' It was even more
>gratifying to
>her that her teacher took her portfolio to the Albuquerque meeting.
>"She'll come in and talk about something she did and tell me it's going in
>her portfolio,''
>adds Brianna's mother, Vicky Stump. And sometimes, she says, the quality of
>her
>daughter's work moves her to the point of tears. In particular, she recalls
>an essay
>Brianna wrote about a quiet place she goes to think.
>"It just blew me away,'' Vicky Stump says. "It was just so eloquent.''
>A lot of the teachers participating in New Standards and using portfolios and
>projects
>in their own classrooms say they hear those kinds of comments from parents
>all the
>time.
>
>Further information on this topic is available from:
>Carter, L.F. (1984). The sustaining effects study of compensatory and
>elementary
>education. Educational Researcher, 13, 4-13.
>Entwistle, D.R. & Alexander, K.L. (1992). Summer setback: Race, poverty,
>school
>composition, and mathematics achievement in the first two years of school.
>American
>Sociological Review, 57, 72-84.
>Heyns, B. (1978). Summer learning and the effects of schooling. N.Y.:
>Academic Press.
>Heyns, B. (1987). Schooling and cognitive development: Is there a season for
>learning?
>Child Development, 58(5), 1151-1160.
>Jamar, I. (1994). Fall testing: Are some students differentially
>disadvantaged?
>Unpublished manuscript. Learning Research and Development Center, University
>of
>Pittsburgh.
>Karweit, N.L. (1994). Summer achievement growth and the effectiveness of
>summer
>school. Unpublished manuscript. Center for Research on Effective Schooling
>for
>Disadvantaged Students, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.