We’ve reached an unseemly place in education when it becomes routine for our schools to dangle an array of iPods, cash and video games before students as incentives for taking the Colorado Student Assessment Program.
It’s not just the outright bribery that bothers us, but the immense pressure that schools are putting on small shoulders. We’re not CSAP haters. The standardized test has its place in the educational assessment tool box.
But the importance of this test, which is but a snapshot of student knowledge, should be tempered with other evaluations and a model that charts each student’s individual growth.
Unfortunately, all too often it seems the sum of a school’s worth is tied up in this measure. And frequently, educators’ pay is linked to CSAP performance.
No wonder they’re drilling students with practice questions, holding pep rallies and encouraging parents to make sure their children eat breakfast and get to bed early in order to be in tip-top condition for the tests. The Colorado Parent Information and Resource Center even has a workshop for parents who want to “de-stress” their kids before the test.
One of the bits of advice for parents is to “Remind your child that tests do not determine the outcome of their future.”
We should hope not.
Over-reliance on CSAP as a school quality measure stems from a desire for accountability, which is a good thing. Public schools, just as other institutions relying on taxpayer funding, need to show they are doing a good job.
The trick is to look at results in a more refined way. That’s what we hope to see next year when Colorado begins using a growth model to evaluate CSAP scores.
So, instead of merely taking a snapshot of the knowledge of the kids in a school at a moment in time — and keep in mind that student populations can change dramatically from year to year — the growth model would chart individual progress.
That way, we can see which schools and teachers do the best job advancing students, regardless of where they start out. Then, schools will be evaluated on progress. That should help take the pressure off schools, particularly those at the bottom of the CSAP heap.
And if CSAP isn’t the end-all, be-all measure of a school’s worth, perhaps you won’t have parents boycotting the test, as some are in Commerce City in an effort to get leverage on another issue.
The test is an important marker, and one that should be taken seriously. But so, too, is school attendance, turning in homework, and getting good grades.
We understand why schools would offer CSAP incentives, but we hope to see Colorado’s education evaluation system evolve to a broader set of measurements that doesn’t overemphasize one standardized test.
