In first, four N.H. school districts shake up testing with Feds' approval
The US Education Department is allowing the New Hampshire school districts to proceed with a pilot project in which locally designed measures of student learning replace some statewide standardized testing.
NASHUA, N.H. — A cluster of public school districts in New Hampshire is radically redefining testing and accountability in a first-of-its-kind pilot project approved Thursday by the US Department of Education.
The pilot, called Performance Assessment for Competency Education (PACE), uses locally designed measures of student learning as a replacement for some statewide standardized testing. These assessments require students to apply what they’ve learned in multiple steps and tasks. Fourth-graders, for instance, might design a new park, calculate the cost of creating it, and write a letter to persuade town leaders to build it.
At a time when cries of “overtesting” from parents and teachers are growing louder across the nation, and when Congress is working to rewrite the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, the experiment will be watched closely.
“It fits into a much bigger conversation about ... how we can create a humane assessment system that’s useful to teachers but also useful to states and the federal government for holding schools accountable,” says Julia Freeland, a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, based In first, four N.H. school districts shake up testing with Feds' approval - CSMonitor.com:
