If a task force is the place where “good intentions come to die,” then the state’s Standards and Assessments Task Force managed to buck the trend — barely. Last week, the task force presented its recommendations, unresolved issues and dissenting views to the Joint Education Committees in the Colorado legislature — signaling Colorado’s version of a national conundrum that pits accountability against the burden of testing on students.
Here’s the “conventional wisdom” on the problem: Too much testing (assessments and tests given at the local and state levels) takes too much time away from instruction, and may not lead to improved academic outcomes for students. Colorado currently has a robust set of assessments given at the local level (schools and districts) and a set of federal and state-mandated assessments (formerly CSAP, then TCAP, and soon-to-be PARCC) that both complement and sometimes overlap each other.
But the real crux of the problem is one of purpose. In Colorado, we’ve conflated assessment with accountability — and they are different. Assessments are usually given at the classroom or school level to ensure that every student is learning what they need and, if not, changing the instructional practice to ensure they will. This should include the growth of a student — not just “proficiency” or status. We need to know that students are growing at a rate to attain proficiency against each state content standard.
Accountability is a state concern — the need for taxpayers to know that their money is being spent wisely and well on every student’s education. I believe that parents want deep assessments of their children — making sure they are learning all they should in every subject. The state, however, needs to have a light touch in accountability and should not “assess” every child, every year, in every subject in an effort to provide instructional data to educators. That is a school’s job, not the state’s.
Where does this leave us — and especially the legislature — in Colorado? First, I’d encourage legislators to act in the short term to implement the task force’s recommendations to improve the state- mandated assessments this session, to seek opportunities for district and school accountability pilot programs, and to begin work on an accountability system 2.0 A new system of state-level accountability doesn’t confuse assessment with accountability; it recognizes that each school needs to ensure the growth and proficiency of each student and that the state needs to ensure that schools are doing exactly that, in a manner that doesn’t over-test nor overburden schools, students and educators. It provides transparency of school results at the federal level and flexibility to show student growth and proficiency at the school and district level.
With the potential changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA — also known in its last form as No Child Left Behind) driven by Sen. Lamar Alexander, Accountability 2.0 could look radically different and greatly improved — and at the federal level would replace “punishments” with “transparency.” Annual testing could be replaced with thoughtful and robust sampling and/or every-other year or three-year testing (to ensure we don’t leave any students hidden by school or district averages). Accountability 2.0 would provide local schools with the flexibility to show the growth of their students with different assessment instruments (tests). It would recognize the difference between Montessori and Waldorf models (as examples) that may not include technology components in their early learners curriculum and skill sets and allow differing models to have some (not all) different measures of success at different ages and grades.
And, eventually, a new 2.0 accountability system would move quickly to a “competency-based” model where each student has demonstrated competency or mastery of each subject and standard — and can document that with a digital portfolio of work products, videos and presentations.
Our current state assessment and accountability system is based on an archaic model with an overburden of state testing requirements. While there are a few improvements to make in the short term, it is incumbent on those in the legislature to support new ways of holding schools accountable for results — with a light touch — while allowing students to thrive in schools with teachers and adults that know their needs through thoughtful and regular assessments.
Tony Lewis is executive director of the Donnell-Kay Foundation. He served on the state task force representing the Colorado Charter School Institute. The views in this piece reflect his own and not those of CSI or the task force.
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