Common Core: Should States Slow Down on Implementing New Assessments?
EWA is holding a one-day seminar
for journalists today at George Washington University on the new
Common Core State Standards, and I look forward to sharing
content from the event with you in the coming weeks. In the
meantime, the rollout of the assessments tied to the new
standards was the focus of one of the panel discussions at EWA’s
66th National Seminar held in May at Stanford. We asked John
Fensterwald of EdSource Today to contribute a guest post from
that session.
The call by American Federation of
Teachers President Randi Weingarten for a moratorium on using
Common Core test results to evaluate teachers and judge schools
resonated with two of the three speakers in the EWA discussion on
the assessments at the organization’s National Seminar at
Stanford University.
“I have reluctance to see assessments used for lots of
high-stakes purposes,” said James Pellegrino, a professor of
cognitive psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and
a member of an advisory committee for two groups developing the
new tests. “There is a great deal of caution by technical
advisory groups on how the results will be used and at what level
they will be able to be used for growth measures” – like
evaluating teachers based on a projected growth on student test
scores.
Joan Herman, co-director emeritus of the National Center for
Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA, said, “The
assessments should go on schedule, but I am sympathetic with a
moratorium on high-stakes uses, for consequences for teachers and
schools.” Herman is an adviser for the Smarter Balanced
Assessment Consortium, one of the two states-led organizations
creating the tests with $360 million in federal funding.
But Chris Minnich, executive director of CCSSO (Council of Chief
State School Officers), which led the effort to create the Common
Ccore standards, observed that “states have not been sympathetic
to Randi’s call” for a delay in implementing the assessments.
There will always be those who argue states aren’t ready for the
scheduled rollout in the spring of 2015. What’s important, he
said, is “to draw a firm line on school and district
accountability” and to report the results of the assessments at
the school site level.
Both Smarter Balanced and the Partnership for Assessment of
Readiness for College and Career (PARCC), the other consortium,
are promising a new generation of computer-based tests capable of
measuring the critical thinking skills that the common core
standards stress. They intend to do this through sophisticated
and lengthy questions that require students to solve problems and
synthesize information. Both consortia will offer non-high-stakes
examples of these questions during the year, Pellegrino said, “to
signal in important ways the skills and knowledge that kids need
to have.”
Herman said these “performance assessments,” which will require
students to explain their thinking or make arguments, will pose
“enormous challenges”: expense and time to score, particular
difficulties for English language learners, and technical issues
dealing with the types of questions asked and the previous
knowledge they assume students possess.
Technical meltdowns in states giving online tests recently raise
doubts about whether most states will have systems in place for
Common Core assessments – even though both consortia will have
pencil-and-paper options for the first three years. Minnich
acknowledged that capacity problems are real. “As a country, we
have not invested in schools as well as we should have,” he said.
“States must invest in technology, but the feds need to help as
well.”
Among other challenges, Herman said, is the need to provide
teachers with time, curricula and instructional materials to
understand what Common Core standards look like in practice. Some
states and organizations like Student Achievement Partners, she
said, are offering model lessons, while others simply point to
resources. Pellegrino warned that publishers are rebranding
existing materials as PARCC and Smarter Balanced ready, “and a
lot of that is absolute BS.”
Herman and Pellegrino said that states must prepare parents and
temper expectations. “The first time out of the box, kids will
not perform well” on the new assessments, Pellegrino said.
But that’s to be expected from more rigorous standards and tests,
Herman said. “If kids do not do poorly on them, what is the point
of going to a new assessment? It is important for the public to
understand that this is the starting point from which to move
up.”
Pellegrino cautioned that the new assessments themselves are in
their infancy. “By the time PARCC and Smarter Balanced will be
done with their funding, they will have moved us from the 10 to
maybe the 40 yard line in terms of the kinds of assessments we
need to support teaching and learning,” he said. “There will be
more work to do.”
With some parents calling for opting out of standardized tests,
some teachers calling for a moratorium and some legislatures
reconsidering Common Core, resistance is growing, though hard to
measure. Minnich downplayed it. Six years ago, CCSSO never
expected that 45 states and Washington, D.C., would adopt the
standards.
“We knew there would be pushback to change standards across the
country, but there aren’t a lot of cracks there,” he said. “Most
states are saying Common Core is the right thing for kids.”
Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.