Nationwide Assessment, My Way

I read online that TFA is hiring a national assessment director, thus implying the creation of a nationwide assessment. I would love to work on this, but I'm not leaving the classroom mid-year for anything short of World War III. But I sent them my thoughts on what I would do if I could...

Executive Summary

Instead of sporadic summative assessments, duplicating work already being done and over-testing our students, TFA should offer very frequent, highly focused, and nationally uniform assessments. They should be given, scored and logged online, in a common database. These could replace existing classroom assessments, lightening student and corps member test load while vastly improving opportunities for tracking students, collaboration among teachers and partnering with students and families.

By breaking the assessment mold, this is a tremendous opportunity for TFA to radically reform the landscape of high-stakes accountability, as well as improving corps member effectiveness. Based on the size of its organization and the skills of its members, TFA could implement a technology-driven, modern assessment program that fits our organizational needs, boosts student achievement and serves as a model for the entire educational community.

Why does TFA need to revolutionize the high-stakes assessment field?

The achievement gap does not occur two weeks in May. It is built across every week of the school year. We need an assessment program that reflects the urgency of each day of instruction. All stakeholders in a child’s education should know on a highly regular basis his/her progress towards achievement.

Likewise we have an urgent need to identify and remediate the teaching gap. End-of-the-year tests serve only as a post-mortem. For the students in that class, the year has already been lost. We should be able to identify successful and unsuccessful teachers immediately, utilizing their abilities or addressing their deficiencies within weeks, not years. As an organization bringing thousands of intern teachers into the classroom each and every year, it is a necessity that TFA excel in this domain.

Why can TFA do it better?

The educational technology industry has the capability to offer district-, state-, or even nation-wide assessment that could be completed and scored on a weekly basis. The testing industry and state departments of education will take generations of students through the same old yearly benchmark process before ever considering such a change.

TFA can and must model the alternative. It is too powerful a change to ignore.

Teach For America has the focus on and understanding of data required to value such an undertaking and a broad, national student base to demonstrate such a program’s scalability. The obvious commercial benefits to developing such a system, paired both with Teach For America’s flexibility for piloting and its media-cachet for future marketing, make a partnership ideal for any educational technology/testing company.

What would it look like?

Every week, corps members across the country give reading, math, science or social studies tests. Simply put: they should be giving the same tests and they should be logging the results into a common database.

Won't this just take teaching to the test to the nth degree?

Teaching to the test happens when the test doesn't reflect what otherwise should be taught. If teaching to the test becomes teaching students to pass a vital, standards-based, focused assessment each week, isn't that just teaching with a test?

Why is this worth it?

The benefits of such a system are myriad. The uniformity of these assessments would enable regional collaboration among corps members and program staff at a tremendously higher level. The immediacy of the feedback gives students real ownership over their success on the assessment, improving engagement. Reporting options could easily be focused to give parents frequent updates on their child’s progress, offering a degree of home-school partnership impossible with the quarterly report card. Redundancy in assessment and grading could be minimized, freeing more time for instruction.

How does this work with different standards and curricula?

Focus the test ---one specific objective, five careful questions. A sufficiently discrete objective cuts across the barrier of differing state standards. A long division test is a long division test, whether administered to a 3rd grader or a 5th grader. Discerning fact and opinion in a seventh grade passage is the same skill in Mississippi or Hawaii. While state and local history offer obvious issues, the vast majority of fifth graders or algebra students across the country are learning much the same things, on an objective by objective basis.

Similarly, such focused assessment forestalls issues with varying pacing or curricula. Teachers queue their assessments as part of long term planning, and whether they assess multiplying mixed numbers in December or March, they can use the same test. Common curricula will assure simultaneity within regions, facilitating collaboration, common assessments will assure comparability with other regions, furthering collaboration at the program level.

How does this work, technologically?

Corps members with access to sufficient number of computers could conduct the entire process online. Corps members without such resources could print the tests from online and administer them on pencil and paper. The paper tests could be collected weekly and scanned on computer-connected machines placed in alignment with corps member clusters. All of this technology is available right now, it just needs to be aligned and distributed.

How does this work, programmatically?

This winter, program directors, second-year corps members and alumni from each region would examine their state standards and develop weekly objective lists for each course CMs will be teaching in the fall. Over the spring and summer, TFA, nationally, merges the objective lists and develops or licenses an assessment bank for all the objectives. At the beginning of the year, CMs correlate these objective lists with their district pacing guides and mandated curricula, essentially the same process as creating a long term plan. These plans are calendared online. Each week, in advance of their instruction, CMs and students can see some exemplar problems of their weekly standards. On Thursday/Friday, the actual test is made available for administration. Even those using scanned pencil and paper tests would have their results by the weekend.

Do our kids really need more tests? Do our teachers really need more work?

This system should simply replace teachers’ on-going classroom assessment, requiring less tests for students and less work for teachers. Even if the district context requires a redundancy in tests, TFA’s should be so short, ten to fifteen questions, as to create little burden. Creating, grading and recording assessments would be done. Teachers could focus on analyzing and responding to the data. Standards-based report cards would be done, with more accuracy than possibly permitted by a summative exam. Rubric-based report cards could be run directly from the tracked information.

More Words! More!

I learned about Matthew Effects in my credential classes and it made perfect sense. The better reader you are, the more you can read, the more vocabulary you learn and the better reader you become. A poor reader struggles to read, acquires fewer new words and falls farther behind. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I never really appreciated how dramatic this is until I looked at the Accelerated Reader “Word Count Report” for my class. Usually, I just focus on the number of books kids are reading, the level of the books and the students’ accuracy on comprehension quizzes, ---all available under a different report. The Word Count Report left me stunned.

A--- has read 10 books and so has G---, both at approximately the same reading level. Yet, A--- has read 40,000 words and G--- has read only 8,000. S--- is a very bright student who doesn’t like to read. She has read 20 books, staying well off my Radar of Concern, but yet now I discover she has read only 9,000 words!

The most shocking aspect to the data is the difference between the "haves" and the "have nots." C--- is the top reader in my class and M--- is the lowest. C---, for the record, has been learning English for only two years long than M---. C--- has read 204,876 words, M--- has read 2,777. That is almost two orders of magnitude less. 100 times fewer words!

Even assuming that C--- learns a new word only once every five hundred, while M--- might learn a new one once every fifty, C--- will have picked up 400 new words, while M--- has gained only 54. By the end of the year, at this rate, C--- will have acquired 2000 and M--- 270 new words.

Yikes!

To me, this reaffirms the idea that student's independent reading, even when as carefully monitored as can be, is insufficient. We have to provide students with exposure to as many words as possible, through teaching the content areas, print-rich environments, and authentic reading opportunities whenever they arise. More Words! More!

Speeding

We asked the kids to write a story about a time when their life changed. C--- tracked, with deeply validating clarity, how his sequence of prior teachers had taught him important elements of math. L--- wrote about how, with frightening clarity, how he had failed to learn math until he came into my class last year and finally mastered multiplication. G---, an emerging brilliant newcomer, wrote about coming to the United States from Mexico. A---- wrote about how she fooled around and got in trouble last year, but now that the girls who were distracting her had left and now that she was in fifth grade, she was going to be serious and work hard. I was impressed.

But I was also swamped. It was the week of conferences, of Halloween, and of an endless series of tests. I had just finished moving apartments and had lost so many evening hours and weekend days that I would usually have dedicated to staying on top of my job. I hadn’t spent much time on writing in the first unit and I wasn’t expecting much from these assessments. I was “speeding,” grading at the educational equivalent of 100 miles per hour, as I tried to make up time.

I could make four more paragraphs of excuses, but it won’t excuse how close I came.

G--- wrote a mediocre essay about how getting a Gamecube changed his life. Dull in content and confusing in composition, I struggled to get through it. I was disappointed because I had watched as G--- took the time to re-write the essay, despite my insistence that a second draft wasn’t needed. By the time my eyes had hit “The End,” my hand was already moving the paper to the done pile and my pen was noting a grade. Then I noticed that he had written on the back. At first I assumed it was a first draft. I moved on to the next essay, only then I noticed that the paper in front of me was his first draft. I looked at the backside again. My eyes caught on “crying and crying and crying.” It was the story of when his life had truly changed, the recent day that a gang came to his house and killed his father. The paragraph spurred me to talk to his mother, and in doing so find out of his deep depression and anger at hoe.

I had been a glance away from never reading the paragraph. As it was, it had been a week since G--- had written the piece. He hadn’t changed, hadn’t seemed to linger in expectation that I would have something to talk to him about. He was a smiley kid and had been since the day he arrived. He probably would never have mentioned it. I never would have had cause to look back at the page and would have simply consigned it to his portfolio.

It’s horrifying, really: Every day, I assign a piece of quick-writing. I read them sporadically. Every day, I take in over two hundred pieces of paper. Often they are moved directly from inbox to trash-can. How many similarly critical notes have I missed?