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January 15, 2002
Accountability: Meeting The Challenge With Technology (con'td)
Accountability Discussion
Below you will find an edited version of an online discussion involving Technology & Learning staff and an invited group of education leaders.
What are you seeing?
Posted by: Judy Salpeter
Institution: Technology & Learning Network
Everybody's talking about school accountability and high-stakes testing, but we want to know what it's looking like in the communities with which you are most directly involved. Is the focus almost exclusively on test scores, and if so, what are the stakes? (Are students being held back? Teachers facing consequences or rewards? Moneys being redirected?) Is there other non-test-related information that schools you work with are gathering and disseminating as part of the new emphasis on accountability?
Posted by: Sherry King
Institution: Mamaroneck Public Schools
We're trying to build a multifaceted assessment system that provides information from standardized tests, from performance assessments as well as longitudinal information. Some of the data is state-determined "high-stakes" testing, others, like the literacy assessments in grade one we have developed. This year we're focusing on two assessment goals: district-wide data at grades one, six, and nine, and each school providing a mid-year report card on student achievement including at least one more affective area that the school values.
Posted by: David Warlick
Institution: The Landmark Project
In my state, all students in grades three through eight take "End of Grade" (EOG) tests in math and reading comprehension. In high school, students take "End of Course" (EOC) tests in English I; Algebra I; Economic, Legal & Political Systems; Physical Science; Geometry; Biology; English II; Algebra II; U.S. History; Chemistry; and Physics. All tests are based on the state standard course of study. Students in grades three, five, and eight must score a III or IV on the EOG and meet local requirements to be promoted to the next grade. Students in grades five and eight must also score at least 2.5 on the state writing test. In addition, students in grade eight take a computer skills test, which is part multiple choice, part performance. They must pass this test before graduating from high school. In high school, they must pass the EOC to pass the course. For further incentive, schools that achieve expected or exemplary gains each year can receive bonuses, depending on continued funding by the legislature. The state will send assistance teams into schools that are low-performing, and principals of those schools can be suspended.
To be fair, I know that this program has resulted in students across the state receiving instructional attention that they were not receiving before. Schools are measured as a school, and therefore, must bring a vast majority of the student population up to a certain level of performance. My concern is in the style of teaching and learning that results from this type of comprehensive testing. Imagine a child who up until seventh grade has made excellent grades, especially on achievement tests. Suddenly, he is bringing home failing grades in English. Upon investigation, his parents learn that the class is interpreting short stories. The child, when asked to talk about his work, actually makes quite compelling arguments for his answers, a valuable endeavor. However, the focus seems not to be on exploring ideas, drawing logical conclusions, and defending those conclusions. The emphasis now is on knowing the right answer. I am convinced that what could be a valuable higher-order activity has become corrupted by an emphasis on multiple-choice-style accountability.
I was involved in developing the computer skills curriculum upon which this state's computer skills test is based. We identified core technology skills and aligned many of them to other subject areas so that developing these skills could easily be integrated into social studies, math, science, language arts, and other disciplines. As a result of the mandated computer test, middle schools across the state collected classroom computers into labs and hired computer teachers to prepare their students for the test. As I have observed many of these lab sessions, I see teachers explaining that the students must learn this because it will be on the test - and the question will be worded likeý. The context for learning has become the test. The real context of developing computer skills because they are essential to your occupational and personal prosperity has been lost. Our students deserve better than this.
Posted by: John Flores
Institution: City of East Chicago
Baseline data is essential to establish the margins for improvement. However, it goes without saying that as the gathering of data is complete, there needs to be accountability assigned to each respective component of the school improvement process. Systems thinking must be employed to sustain all school improvement efforts, and these efforts can easily be facilitated through the employment of technology. After the specific strategies have been developed to arrive at the desired outcomes, the student's progress, the respective instructor of the student, the essential skills taught, the standards taught, and his/her performance needs to be tracked via technology. Statistics in any area can be formulated, and the accountability component is clear and directly linked to the instructor, curriculum, standards etc. Futuring is also facilitated.
How do you feel about it?
Posted by: Amy Poftak
Institution: Technology & Learning
I've been thinking how charged--and personal--the topic of accountability is. As educators and leaders, I'm wondering what your personal feelings are about the high-stakes testing movement? Danger? Opportunity? And if you feel negatively about it, or at the very least have mixed feelings, how do you reconcile this with the job you have to do? How do you approach talking to staff and parents about this issue in the context of your own personal beliefs?
Posted by: David Warlick
Institution: The Landmark Project
I have to preface what I'm about to say by stating that accountability is absolutely essential in order to assure the quality of education that is necessary to sustain a dynamic, prosperous, and democratic society. The marketplace provides for this accountability in most of our endeavors. However, education is so vital to our society that it cannot be trusted to the marketplace. But that's another discussion.
I also believe that we must assure mastery of some basic skills, which serve as foundations to future learning and growth, and that standardized testing may be the best way to do this. I would prefer to call these "foundation skills," because it implies further, deeper, and application-based learning.
That having been said, I think that test scores and the statistics that pull them together are only numbers, and numbers only suggest the picture of a school - and what the public wants to see is the picture colored in. We live in a time where the business of schooling has a new storefront called the World Wide Web. We have the opportunity to showcase what is actually happening in our classrooms, to paint a full color picture with rich color and texture. Parents don't want to think that all their students are doing is learning to score well on tests. They want more than that, and they need to be able to see that more than that is happening.
When I think of this country's emphasis on comprehensive, high-stakes testing, I think about a job that I held after graduating from high school. I was a quality control engineer in a local factory. I used high-precision instruments to make sure that every part that left the machine shop plant was within design specifications - that every part was exactly the same. I feel that this is what comprehensive, high-stakes testing is doing to our children. It is making sure that every student is exactly alike, knows the same things, has the same skills, is within curriculum specifications. In the industrial age, this was a desirable condition. However, in our students' future, it will not be how they are alike that brings value to their endeavors; it will be what they know that is different, how they think differently, the skills that they can add, even what they believe that is different.
I believe that comprehensive, high-stakes testing is an industrial-age solution to an information-age problem.
As far as my own job is concerned, I have the luxury of not being attached to any school, district, university, or state agency. This makes me a visionary. A visionary is not necessarily someone with great and inspiring vision, it is someone who isn't responsible for his or her vision. I do not have a plan for how we will get to next year or the year after that. We have brilliant leaders like Janice and John who do that, who are firmly seated in today's education. I have a deeply held belief that the classroom that best prepares students for the future will be dramatically different from the ones that prepared me for my future, and if that classroom is a reality 10 years from now, it will be because people started talking about it today. It is my job to start those conversations.
Posted by: Janice Jackson
Institution: Boston College
We live in interesting times. There are many events happening in 2001 that call each of us to reexamine and recommit to our beliefs. Such a recommitment requires us to give our beliefs legs. I strongly believe that accountability for children's learning is imperative. However, many individuals cloaked in the language of accountability are more interested in sifting, sorting, and shaming than they are in raising our children up. We have much work to do to ensure that our children will be ready to meet the demands of their present and their future.
High-stakes testing, the current accountability measure of choice, tells us little about what children really know deeply and what they can draw on to answer the small and large questions arising from life when things are uncertain. Technology offers opportunities to level the playing field and, and I underscore AND, uncover deep learning and areas where deeper learning can occur. I hope that we will not run from the opportunity to look more deeply at our children's lives. It will be easy to succumb to the cry for numbers even though we know we must ask and answer deeper questions about knowledge and learning. Technology could be a vehicle to learn what our children really know and how they use their knowledge.
Posted by: Ian Jukes
Institution: The InfoSavvy Group
Management guru Tom Peters tells us that what gets measured gets done. What is clearly getting measured these days is student ability to regurgitate contents (informational bulimia) through performance on (in many cases) high-stakes tests. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same things you always have, but expecting, wanting, or needing completely different results I have nothing against traditional values and traditional assessment tools. The problem is that education has long used a "direction du jour" approach - we implement something new (fill in the blanks - open classroom, outcome-based education, whole language, and now, standards and high-stakes testing) and then we change direction before we have a chance to adequately implement or train our staffs, let alone assess what has taken place.
How would you do it?
Posted by: Kristen Kennedy
Institution: Technology & Learning
I have two questions: 1. Can technology play a role in expanding traditional high-stakes assessment to include affective or qualitative data, and if so, how? Technology certainly offers an easy way of scoring all those multiple-choice tests, but if we want to see a variety of assessments used to evaluate student readiness and skill sets, in what ways might technology help the cause? 2. In a perfect world--and one that still needed some measurement (but you decide how and what) of student achievement--you get to determine how to bring accountability into schools, how would you do it and what would it look like?
Posted by: Alan November
Institution: Renaissance Learning
Every district should do everything it can to build portals for every teacher to help manage assessment. All tests, quizzes, and sample final exams, with instant feedback, should be available to all students all of the time. We need to emerge form the one-size-fits-all exam where students put their books away and take a test. Students should be empowered to take sample tests continuously that scan the entire curriculum. My own daughter claims she does not have to study for any exams and she is pulling down A's...She is bored and soon she will not be earning A's due to boredom...I know that she would be more curious about the world and more excited about learning if her school would provide her with lots of opportunity for challenges and feedback.
Posted by: Sherry King
Institution: Mamaroneck Public Schools
I think we have to think about the components of an assessment system to consider what is included - is it only high stakes? That will say a lot about the values of the school community. If the system values other information (systematically and systemically gathered), technology becomes a vehicle for information other than test scores. One of our schools, for example, has very rich digital portfolios of youngest children's emerging literacy. The hard question, whether digitized or not, is what to do with all the "stuff." How do we pass it on? Which part of the information is important/helpful to the next teacher? Is that the only audience?
Posted by: David Warlick
Institution: The Landmark Project
There is a question that I have been asking myself since this conversation began. "How do we make assessment part of the teaching and learning process? How do we avoid yanking the carrot out of the ground to see how much it has grown?"
To prepare students for a real world within a context that is meaningful to those students requires authentic learning experiences and authentic assessment. I am leaning toward portfolio assessments, which, with carefully constructed evaluation rubrics, can deliver both quantitative and qualitative analysis of student performance. I would suggest that the rubric and the student's evolving electronic portfolio become part of the teaching and learning process. As the student submits the work, the teacher evaluates it via the rubric, and the students responds by making adjustment in their work, improving the product and increasing the student's learning. The resulting accountability results would not merely be numbers, but actually samples of student work, painting pictures of what is happening in the classroom.
If portfolio assessment is viewed as an add-on, then it will likely not work. However, if it becomes part of the teaching and learning process and it addresses the interests of all concerned, not just those of accountability, then it stands a better chance. This is an issue that was discussed recently on a mailing list managed by Barbara Bray for technology staff development providers across the country. The conclusion of the discussion was a Web site created and maintained for and by every student, starting in kindergarten.
The Web site would have three parts. First, there would be the portfolio where students would post specific work, some as directed by the teacher and some as a choice of the student. Works would be accompanied by a scored rubric, and students would be free to continue work on their products in response to their rubric assessments in order to improve their scores. This portfolio would be available to the public (those who ultimately hold us accountable).
The second part of the site would be a personal Web page, or a vanity page for the student. It would be a place where they could express a personal image for themselves that evolves through the years and reflects their growing knowledge, sophistication, and values. This site, of course, would have constraints, and a system of oversight would need to be designed and implemented.
The third part would be a personal learning resource page. This is a page that students would populate with tools and links to information resources that help them study and learn. For instance, it may have links to the student's favorite search engines. It would likely link to study guides, homework assignments, and class notes from their teachers. It might also include links to specific Web sites that the student finds valuable as a study resource. In a sense, it would be the old notebooks that we were required to keep with notes and other work. However, we kept these notebooks so that they could be scored by the teacher for a grade. We would ask our students to keep this Web page as a tool that they design for their own use.
Students have an interest in maintaining this site because of an intrinsic need to express themselves to a wider audience. It would be in the teacher's interest because students are developing their own learning support resources within the context of what the teacher is teaching. Accountability interests would gain because there is authentic documentation of the student performance. In addition, the public would gain because they are receiving more colorful and textured evidence of what is happening in their schools.
Posted by: Ian Jukes
Institution: The InfoSavvy Group
I advocate a balance between traditional and progressive. Yes I want kids to do well on tests, but that includes the most important test of all: life. For that reason I think that we need to continue to reinforce traditional values as well as place a greater emphasis on the new basics -- critical thinking, problem solving, useful failure, information fluency. You see, I don't want a pilot who just did well on the written test (the traditional measure). I want a pilot who also did well in APPLYING what was learned to wind shear, electrical failure, or mechanical failure. As such, I strongly recommend you folks take a look at the assessment model developed by Ted McCain with his 4 Ds approach to learning (you can download a copy of New Visions for Teaching and Learning from the handouts section) or you can e-mail Lisa Holmes to hear how she is evaluating student work in a non-traditional manner.
Posted by: Alan November
Institution: Renaissance Learning
One of the most intriguing ideas I have recently seen was a New York math teacher who asked all of his students to take the regent's exam before class started in September. He used his Web site to organize the work. He found a sample exam from the Board of Regent's Web site. My sense is that the Web can provide many of our teachers with a wonderful opportunity to diagnose where students begin a course.
Posted by: Sherry King
Institution: Mamaroneck Public Schools
In one of our elementary schools, we have been assessing every student in the school every month for their guided reading levels. On a quarterly basis we present a report card to the community. Using the assessment data and our technology, we present a graphic demonstration of growth during the course of the year. The kind of public accountability has had a major impact on classroom practice. Seeing each student displayed as part of the school's report has helped parents see the larger picture and teachers see where their students are relative to everyone else in the grade. Year one was very successful.
Posted by: David Warlick
Institution: The Landmark Project
For education leaders who are responsible for implementing testing policy, my advice is: do all you can do to avoid making the "test" the context. Again, technology is very good at applying authentic context to learning. But helping teachers to discover, invent, and implement these learning experiences is part of our decades-old struggle in instructional technology. It requires:
Staff development - teachers need meaningful staff development, tied to established learning standards, that opens them to new ideas about teaching and learning in the 21st century, and extends beyond the date and place of the workshop by giving them techniques, tools, and continuing conversations that go with them back into the classroom.
Continuing Conversations - Teachers learn best from each other. The best staff development is that which springs from quality face-to-face sessions, is self-sustaining, and avails teachers with the opportunities to share ideas, techniques, and tools with each other. Net-based communities can facilitate this in a way that does not impact significantly on the general daily operation of the school.
A Digital Library of Resources - Teachers need a virtual place where they can share techniques, resources, and instructional products that are effectively wrapped around the established standards, such that a teacher can select the objectives to be taught and be presented with a number of practitioner-developed resources to help that teacher accomplish the goals. This library must:
- be standards-based,
- be designed with time constraints in mind,
- facilitate continued collaboration,
- result in products that can be taken directly into the classroom.
Last words
Posted by: David Warlick
Institution: The Landmark Project
As I have thought through these issues, it has become clearer to me that curriculum, assessment, and accountability are all bound up together in some very interesting ways. At the same time, they are different. Curriculum is what you teach and how you teach it. Assessment consists of techniques for testing for what has been learned in order to refine teaching methods for more success. Accountability is assurance to the community that schools, classrooms, teachers, and students are doing their jobs in preparing tomorrow's citizens.
There was a piece of software that was offered for free over the Internet last year called "Kenjin!" This program would read the text of the active window on your desktop, looking for content themes within the text. When it identified a theme, it immediately searched the Net for related Web pages, which would appear as links at the bottom of your desktop. It could even be configured to read the text of all documents on your hard drive in order to build a profile of the user, which it could use to better locate relevant information on the Internet.
The software has been sold to another company and is no longer available. But while I used Kenjin, I became convinced that this is where the Network is going, that information will practically present itself to us based on our needs. What this tells me as an educator is that, for our students, knowing the answer to a question will not be a challenge in their future. The answers will simply appear. Their challenge will be, "How do I use the answer? How do I analyze and add value to this information? How can I use this information to add value to the experiences of other people?" If all we are doing is teaching students to answer questions, then we are not preparing them for their future.
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