Dr. Scott McLeod, associate professor at the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University, rightly points out that NCLB’s accountability requirements and the goals of D3M are not synonymous. You can read his post here. His thoughts (cross-posted at eduwonkette) elicited this response from the eduwonkette herself.
Dr. McLeod is spot on when he lays out the problem of using your annual state test as a means of improving instruction. By now an old theme, such analyses are little better than what has elsewhere been called a “post-mortem.” That is to say, the analysis comes too late to be of any use. The students have moved on (we hope). Formative testing serves instructional staff as a means of measuring student progress far better than the yearly test. McLeod succinctly makes this point.
In our experience, however, school districts across the nation have yet to adopt some form of local formative testing en masse the way we would hope, despite the presence of fairly reliable test instruments like NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress, Scantron’s Achievement Series or Performance Series, or any number of other instruments. Districts such as Iredell-Statesville (NC) have even created their own predictive formative tests, while others like Mesa County Valley (CO) have adopted MAP. Get thee a predictive benchmark, we say.
eduwonkette gently chides Dr. McLeod over this issue of testing for instruction, suggesting that there is a “dark side” to D3M. “Some schools are using benchmark tests and other newly available data to play the system and up their numbers,” she points out. eduwonkette is absolutely correct. “The practice of focusing on kids who are close to passing has been well-documented by now,” eduwonkette reminds us.
And indeed, we have been in schools in Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina where this practice is the accepted norm. Assigned to raise the achievement levels of an under-performing school, a Texas principal bluntly insisted that while he knew his school must serve to the learning needs of all students, if he knew precisely which 21 students scored just above and just below “the bubble” of acceptable performance, he would focus his teachers on intensive remediation for those 21 kids. If he could raise the performance of those 21 children and it rescued his school from receiving an “unacceptable” rating, he wouldn’t hesitate.
After3 wonders if this truly illustrates a “dark side” of using testing for instruction. If accountability were removed from the equation of education policy, would we not still use assessment as our primary means of identifying specific under-performing students as a way to target them for some form of intervention? It all seems quite pragmatic to us.
But we do issue one caveat: we expect the test results to be used to teach to the standards and for targeted intervention, not to teach simply to the test. To that much we can all agree.
In our experience, a far more fundamental problem plagues school districts: reliable data. Your data analysis means little if your data are not reliable. But more on data reliability some other time.
