Students will be taking PARCC tests for the first time starting in March (Andy Cross, The Denver Post)
Sixteen hours in a single week!
No, 11 hours for the entire year!
Both numbers were cited to score points and bolster arguments last week when for students starting in kindergarten and ending in high school.
The occasion: the Joint Education Committee getting its hands on from an advisory task force that urged reducing the testing burden without forsaking holding schools and districts accountable for student achievement.
Why the yawning gap in the estimated time given over to testing? Are either numbers right? What exactly is being measured?
The high-end figure grew out of a survey the testing task force commissioned from the Denver research firm Augenblick, Palaich and Associates. The online survey — which drew responses from 87 districts, 212 schools and 1,800 teachers — asked about the amount of time spent on preparing and taking state and local assessments for general education students.
Altogether, , with an average of 5.7 days of test-taking per year on the low end (in kindergarten) to about 12 days on the high end (in third and fourth grade).
The responses were all over the map and included the 16 hours in one week answer that was cited — more than once — by Republicans on the committee. Task force chairman Dan Snowberger, superintendent of the Durango School District, cautioned lawmakers that the survey was more a measure of “feeling” than anything else.
One teacher respondent said students were tested more hours than exist in a school week. Quite a feat.
Ultimately, the work done for the task force was little more than a climate survey about tests that no longer exist.
“I hate to say it, but this is coming from educators who by and large feel overburdened and are going to overestimate the number of hours,” Tony Lewis of the Donnell-Kay Foundation, who represented the Charter School Institute on the task force, told me. “It is all so soft.”
State Sen. Michael Johnston, D-Denver, worries about possible cuts to high school testing (Denver Post file).
Sen. Michael Johnston, the Denver Democrat most responsible for championing the state’s education reforms, seized upon a different statistic. Last spring, he said, the Colorado Department of Education found state- and federally-mandated tests took 11 hours a year.
To unpack that a bit: CDE looked at the maximum amount of time students in grades three through 12 have to complete state-mandated tests for the 2014-2015 school year. The results varied by grade level. Seventh- and eighth-graders are expected to be tested the most (a bit less than 15 hours) and high school seniors the least (7 hours).
If you average all grades, it equates to about 11 hours a year, as Johnston said. The approximate percent of the school year devoted to state testing is estimated to range from a low of 0.6 percent (12th grade) to a high of 1.4 percent (4th, 5th, 7th and 8th grades).
Some caveats: Those figures do not include exceptions for students who need extra time due to disability or English learner status. Nor do they include time just before and after testing needed for directions and signing into the computer system.
Those factors can make quite a difference depending on the district and school. Lisa Escarcega, chief accountability and research officer for Aurora Public Schools, said about half of Aurora and Denver public school students are English learners or have special needs and are thus eligible to take more time, which could increase testing time by 50 percent.
CDE also found that PARCC tests — the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers tests that will debut next month — will take more time for the average student to complete than its predecessor, TCAP.
The biggest increase comes in third grade: 490 estimated total minutes for PARCC, up from 370 minutes for TCAP. The differences are slighter in other grades, but PARCC is anticipated to take more time. We are talking 25 minutes to 45 minutes more than TCAP.
Another important note: The vast majority of these tests are federally required under No Child Left Behind. Under the George W. Bush-era education law, every student in grades three through eight must be tested annually in math and English. The task force report recommended continued compliance, lest federal dollars be put at risk.
Fourth-grader Penelope Cardenas works on a math problem at Ashley Elementary School in Denver (Craig F. Walker / The Denver Post).
There are other factors at work on the time question. Adele Bravo teaches first grade at Kohl Elementary in Broomfield, part of the Boulder Valley School District. She also was one of the teacher representatives on the assessment task force.
Bravo just finished administering a round of READ Act tests, a state-required assessment given to measure K-3 literacy. The law has been on the books since 2012, and the state holds districts accountable for student progress.
The computer-based test is designed as such that children who do well keep going answering more questions. Those making mistakes are cut off and stop after a certain margin of error. One of Bravo’s students was done in 20 minutes. One of her most advanced students kept going and going – for two hours.
Because Bravo had to stay with the entire class in the lab, that meant time away from the classroom. The other students were given things to work on while waiting, but Bravo said it’s not the same.
“This is what we mean when we talk about loss of instructional time,” Bravo told me. “When you talk about time, you can’t say it’s going to take this long for this grade or this student because it just varies.”
The survey work done for the task force found that local assessments — those given by school and districts — take substantially more time than state-required tests. But local tests are a lot more popular with educators, in large part because the results are available almost immediately and can be used to identify where students need help.
This, the argument goes, is where assessments’ greatest value lies. Expect to hear more of this theme from lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats sympathetic to teachers unions. It resonates with parents who are worried about their own children’s needs, and for whom statewide results and accountability seems abstract.
Under the previous generations of state assessments given in the spring, CSAP and TCAP, results were not available until the following August. PARCC promises a quicker turnaround – eventually – but in year one there will be another months-long wait.
Testing critics say it’s not just the testing or the logistics around setting them up and tearing them down that disrupts classroom time, but all the other preparation involved. But how to define “preparation?” The lines here get blurrier than in in the time-to-do-tests discussion.
Because PARCC tests are online, some schools are spending time teaching keyboarding to 3rd graders. To some, that’s an age-inappropriate diversion. To others (), it’s something schools need to do anyway because technology competence is built into the state academic standards.
One of the common knocks on high-stakes standardized testing is the practice of “teaching to the test,” the suggestion that beating the system trumps teaching kids what they ought to know. On the other hand, if PARCC assessments fulfill their promise of being truly aligned to Colorado’s state academic standards, that doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
“You could claim you spend 100 percent of your time preparing for tests or none of it,” said Lewis, of Donnell-Kay. “I don’t think that any district or school could tell you with any clarity” how much time goes to test preparation.
Empirical data is lacking on time spent on both test preparation and local assessments.
Task force member Dane Stickney, who teaches at the data-driven STRIVE charter school network’s Sunnyside middle school campus in northwest Denver, said state tests take 16 hours a year and local assessments take up 36 at his school.
Following a school board directive, Jefferson County Public Schools analyzed time spent on local and state assessments. The district produced .
Other districts, including Denver Public Schools and the Cherry Creek School District, could not provide estimates on the amount of time that goes into preparation or local assessments.
So what’s next? Leaders in both the Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic-controlled House say testing legislation is still weeks away. The Senate is expected to take the lead, which will be an interesting test for new Education Committee Chairman Owen Hill, a Colorado Springs Republican who has a stacked lineup of firebrand GOP conservatives sitting next to him.
Students at Boulder’s Fairview High School protest social studies tests las fall (Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
Social studies tests seem doomed . With widespread agreement state tests need to be reined in, expect the Colorado-specific 4th, 7th and 12th social studies tests to go the way of the Trapper Keeper. (Strike that — ).
The battle to watch is over state 9th grade tests. There is no federal mandate for them. But scrapping English and math tests for high school freshmen would take a hammer to the Colorado Growth Model, which compares cohorts of students’ scores from year to year, a measure of progress that districts with low proficiency scores, in particular, like to focus on.
“If we take out ninth grade, then you lose the entire high school accountability system,” Sen. Johnston told me. “You turn off the scoreboard in the fourth quarter. You suddenly lose all the data when it is most important to be tracking kids in the last couple of years to make sure they are college and career ready.”
Others believe there are viable alternatives to the current 9th grade tests. Testing task force member Syna Morgan, chief academic officer for Jefferson County Public Schools, questioned whether students making progress under the Colorado Growth Model by ninth and 10th grade are succeeding in post-secondary education. She said by high school, student progress should be tracked with college and career readiness indicators — and she argues better measures of that exist.
Morgan cited the Aspire suite of tests aligned with the ACT and the College and Work Readiness Assessment. The latter is available starting in middle school and tests problem solving, critical reading and writing, decision-making and discernment of essential facts. Those changes would require one administration a year, she said, versus two windows for PARCC covering English and math.
“I am a big fan of flexibility,” said Morgan, who left the Douglas County School District to join Jeffco last year. “Districts and schools really know the needs of their community. In Jeffco, with seven different cities, five different regions, we would really prefer to have some flexibility — similar to the READ Act, where you get a list of assessments that have been vetted, and you would be able to choose from that list.”
So is there one neat, clean number that tells the whole story of the time devoted to testing Colorado students? No.
But whatever number you hear will say something about where the person citing it stands on the great testing debate.
