Morgan Polikoff
The rollout of the Common Core standards offers California – and most of the nation – an opportunity to address some of the issues that have plagued education reform in the past. Foremost among these issues is the generally poor quality of state assessments of student achievement and a resulting negative effect on instruction.
State 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-choice, and c) predictable in their coverage of a narrow slice of content in the standards. These features undoubtedly contributed to the narrowing effects of the NCLB law, 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 there are promising signs about these new assessments, they also present several challenges. In a recent report for the Center for American Progress, I laid out seven of the most important challenges that must be addressed if the new assessments are to live up to their promise and support effective standards implementation.
The first challenge is making the case for and standing firm on higher definitions of proficiency. One of the goals of Common Core is to set more accurate definitions of proficiency so that, for instance, “proficient” students can enroll in college without remediation. Setting a higher target means that more students will be labeled as below proficient. As we have seen in New York, lower rates of student proficiency than parents and educators were used to seeing under the former state standards can sometimes produce political blowback. Making the case for the new, more rigorous targets, perhaps with public-service announcements, op-eds and targeted mailings to parents and educators, may help reduce backlash.
The second challenge is meeting the technological needs of new assessments. The consortium has guidelines in terms of the technology needed to take new computer-adaptive Seven challenges to getting the Common Core right | EdSource Today: