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Beyond
SOLs
Standards
of Learning represented the first step in holding
public schools accountable. The next step is "value added assessment" that tracks
performance of individual students and teachers.
For
three years, Governor Mark Warner has disappointed
his liberal supporters and confounded conservative
adversaries with his strong support of the state
Standards of Learning, while advocating for more
public charter schools – both creations of his
Republican predecessors.
But
while Virginia
has much to be proud of in its demand for
educational excellence, the time has come for the
Commonwealth to lead the way in taking the next
steps toward educational accountability.
Nothing
better exemplifies this necessity than the recent
teachers’ union report claiming that public
charter school students perform worse than
students in traditional public schools.
Of course, those charter students also started
lower than those in the public schools.
Many had previously been dropouts, drawn
back to education by a charter school that better
met their needs.
What
was missing was any analysis of “gain scores,”
answering the question:
How much did the students' academic
performance improve over time?
It
is a question left unanswered, not only in the
teachers’ union report, but also unmeasured in
the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the state
Standards of Learning program.
In fact, nearly every current effort to
measure student performance relies on a
“snapshot” of that student, and that school,
at one particular moment in time. Our current
system does not take into account where students begin,
or adequately measure gain scores tracking a
student’s performance.
The
problems with that method are several-fold.
First,
student populations at some schools change
dramatically from year to year, particularly where
there is a high military or immigrant population.
In some schools, a mobility rate of 30
percent is not uncommon.
This means that a school’s performance is
based on shifting populations that are not there
from one year to the next.
Different students clearly have different
performance levels.
Secondly,
the reliance on school-wide achievement levels
means that schools will, consciously or
unconsciously, focus on helping those students
most likely to hit the standards.
As others have pointed out, our current
system is “tantamount to measuring a child’s
height with a yardstick but acknowledging growth
only when his or her height exceeds 36 inches.”
Those well above the “cutoff” are less likely
to be challenged because they’ve already hit the
mark; those too far below the “cutoff” are
less likely to be helped because progress without
passing is not measured.
Third,
the current system cannot measure the impact of
education in a single grade.
A 5th grade reading examination doesn’t
just measure what happened in 5th grade – it
measures the cumulative impact of all the good and
bad teachers and curriculum that have affected
that student in grades K-4.
Finally,
state tests cannot measure the quality of
instruction by factoring in a student’s or a
school’s socio-economic status.
The son of two college-educated parents in
a wealthy suburban school with an inferior teacher
is likely to outperform the son of a single mother
on welfare in one of our inner-city schools with
an excellent teacher – but it is the substandard
teacher who will get the credit for doing a good
job.
To
have a true educational accountability system, we
must be able to measure student improvement and
the effects of not only outstanding, but also
second-rate teachers and curricula.
It’s
time for Virginia to move toward a system of
“Value-Added Assessment,” using test score
data collected over a period of time to measure
student performance.
Such a system analyzes individual student
performance, creates individual benchmarks of
expected academic growth by taking into account
environmental factors impacting that student’s
ability to learn, and measures actual
growth in a student’s learning against the expected
growth from year to year.
Moving to this model would allow educators to measure how
much an individual student has learned over a
specific period of time.
It would allow student data to be linked to
specific teachers, thus permitting school systems
to measure the effectiveness of each teacher and
appropriately reward those who do a good job and
sanction those who do not.
And it would help policymakers and
educators to better evaluate the programs they put
in place, eliminating those that do not work while
focusing resources on those that do.
Many of the components -- notably state standards, tests
and curriculum alignments -- are already in place
and Virginia is now in the process of creating
individual identifiers for each student.
The next step is to identify and create a
value-added system meeting the needs of Virginia.
Virginia
led the way in developing nationally recognized
academic standards that became the envy of other
states. But
as the gears shift toward the 2005 state
elections, candidates need to outline the next
steps for educational accountability and
excellence. Supporting
a Value-Added model of assessment is step one.
--
September 7, 2004
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