Credit: Steve Cohn

Morgan Polikoff

Credit: Steve Cohn

Morgan Polikoff

Morgan Polikoff / commentary
May 1, 2014

The rollout of the Common Core standards offers California – and most of the nation – an opportunity to address some of the problems that accept plagued instruction reform in the by. Foremost among these issues is the generally poor quality of land assessments of student achievement and a resulting negative result on pedagogy.

Land tests in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era tended to be: a) highly procedural, ignoring the conceptual skills in the standards, b) heavily or exclusively multiple-pick, and c) predictable in their coverage of a narrow piece of content in the standards. These features undoubtedly contributed to the narrowing effects of the NCLB constabulary, leading teachers to spend substantial time in test preparation and focus heavily on English and math at the expense of other subjects.

California's new assessments will come from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two federally funded consortia designed to measure student mastery of the Common Core. While in that location are promising signs about these new assessments, they besides present several challenges. In a recent written report for the Eye for American Progress, I laid out seven of the about of import challenges that must be addressed if the new assessments are to live up to their promise and back up effective standards implementation.

The kickoff challenge is making the case for and standing house on higher definitions of proficiency. I of the goals of Mutual Core is to prepare more accurate definitions of proficiency and then that, for instance, "skillful" students can enroll in college without remediation. Setting a higher target means that more than students volition be labeled as beneath proficient. Equally we have seen in New York, lower rates of educatee proficiency than parents and educators were used to seeing under the former state standards tin sometimes produce political blowback. Making the instance for the new, more rigorous targets, perhaps with public-service announcements, op-eds and targeted mailings to parents and educators, may assist reduce backlash.

The second challenge is meeting the technological needs of new assessments. The consortium has guidelines in terms of the engineering science needed to take new computer-adaptive assessments. These engineering upgrades volition be somewhat costly at first, though perhaps not compared to full One thousand-12 spending. Schools and districts should embrace this requirement by making thoughtful purchases that can be used for other instructional purposes besides assessment.

The third challenge is scoring new examination items that movement across multiple choice to ask students to compose answers to complex or existent-earth problems. The new item types are essential to improving the quality of the assessments, withal scoring them can be hard. Getting reliable scores from human raters is expensive and time-consuming, and the technology has not yet advanced sufficiently to allow for figurer scoring of nuanced writing elements.

The fourth claiming is ensuring the tests truly cover the total range of content in the standards. Equally mentioned to a higher place, this was non the instance with prior tests. To meet this challenge, the consortia volition need to construct quality items for both difficult-to-assess skills and for more advanced levels of cerebral demand (i.eastward., moving beyond memorization and procedures to awarding and generalization). Again, constructed response items that inquire students to clarify or solve complex problems will be essential here.

The fifth challenge is in minimizing the testing time burden. There is conspicuously a growing move against the amount of testing in schools. The new assessments volition take somewhat more time than the quondam ones, largely because they'll measure more than circuitous skills. Educators and policymakers should make the case to the public and to parents for the value of higher-quality tests that provide feedback on a wider range of student skills. Districts have a role to play on testing fourth dimension every bit well – they should evaluate all their testing activities and reduce or eliminate those that are not essential.

The sixth challenge is validating the assessments for new uses for school and instructor accountability. This is less of an effect in California than other states, because California has resisted the federal push for stricter teacher evaluation. Given the many questions nigh new instructor evaluation systems existence rolled out in other states, this appears to have been a prudent move. In the long term, teacher evaluation can clearly exist improved, but there is picayune sense in rushing untested reforms during Common Core rollout. Withal, all decisions made using exam data need clear, appropriate validity arguments.

The seventh challenge is managing the rollout of the new tests alongside other new policies that are happening simultaneously. In California, the two about important 1000-12 policies happening now are Local Command Funding and the Common Core implementation. Given the potential blowback resulting from the new assessments, land policy leaders should err on the side of circumspection when using assessment results to make loftier-stakes decisions almost students, teachers or schools in the early years of new tests. This will allow the new policies to exist implemented and mature more advisedly.

This is far from a comprehensive listing of issues (for case, I did not mention the claiming of all-around students with disabilities and English learners on the new tests), but it should give food for idea to policymakers. More detail on these problems, every bit well as concrete suggestions for policy and practise, can exist establish in the full report.

Regardless of 1's opinion on the Common Core, all tin hold that, if we are going to have stiff common standards, it is essential that we become implementation correct. Focusing on assessment quality and these seven issues is a good place to start.

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Morgan Polikoff is an assistant professor of instruction at the USC Rossier Schoolhouse of Education. He studies standards, assessment and accountability policies.

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