Assailing the Wrong Issue - Brief Article

School Administrator, Dec, 2000 by Frank Ambrosie

My neighbor, who occupies a management position with an international company, recently engaged in a discussion with me about performance and promotion in the private sector. He recounted how authentic multiple performance measures were used to gauge employee success within his company.

For him, accountability related to how well employees succeeded in developing and delivering cooperative projects, their ability to communicate in written reports and presentations and their capacity to share knowledge in an interview. When I suggested the evidence he described lacked objective validity and reliability, he laughed. It was his way of saying he and his colleagues trusted the company's system of assessing employee performance.

While today's schools need more standardized test data for decision making, we might take heed of business's example.

Expanded Evidence

As educators engage in a national movement to meet and reach higher academic standards, we need comprehensive and standardized information to make good judgments about student and school progress. When we restructure our schools to prepare for higher hurdles and assign staff in different ways to effectuate greater productivity, our decisions must be well thought out and supported by the evidence that new high-stakes assessments will yield.

The data that emerge from these tests may be just what we need to break some timeworn practices, such as teacher isolation at the grade level and building level. Teachers throughout a school district must be encouraged to talk to one another. Schools must reform their curriculum and question teacher classroom involvement in a systematic way. Too many curriculum documents have gone unchanged for too many years. Good data support positive change and continuous improvement.

One should find little fault with accountability measures that will allow leaders to improve the system. What should concern us, though, is the plan to focus on a single piece of evidence to define performance in meeting state standards. To base student and school success on a one-time assessment is grossly inadequate. But instead of criticizing the standards and new assessments, we should advocate for expanding the definition of educational accountability.

Evidence indicates that student performance is improving as a result of the standards initiatives. A recent New York state publication reports increasing numbers of students passing rigorous Regents exams tied to standards. Many more students are being offered challenging academic instruction and opportunities to learn with success.

However, we also know that no two students learn the same things the same way at the same time. Consequently, we need to extend the definition of accountability within the standards movement. The definition should accommodate successful school and student performances based on multiple assessments and not exclusively on a one-time standardized state-testing event.

We should band together and vigorously insist on an expanded system of accountability that includes a variety of performance assessments. States should work cooperatively with local district educators to define and develop multiple sources of information that are acceptable in support of standards.

A Fall Guy

Concerns about performance-assessment reliability and validity are highly overrated. Few of the current high-stakes standardized testing programs developed by commercial vendors provide statistically significant validity and reliability results. Moreover, local decisions about student promotion are based on teacher-constructed tests, which are void of reliability and validity review. Why can't we use expert opinion and knowledge to develop well-constructed alternative performance indicators, backed by professional training, for educators to use with consistency?

Like my neighbor in business, we need to trust our ability to develop a system of informed performance assessment. But, unlike him, we also must rely on more standard measures of performance.

Why is it that we constantly entrap ourselves in a dichotomous debate in education? We seem to delight in taking sides in an either-or argument when we suspect and ultimately agree that the answer lies somewhere in between. (Consider the debate between phonics and whole language reading.) The answer to the standards movement and high-stakes assessment will not be found in an either-or debate.

High-stakes state testing isn't new. It simply has become more visible and rigorous. New York's high-stakes Regents exams never have been criticized as hampering teacher autonomy and pedagogical creativity. On the contrary, their promotion has benefited the quality of secondary education in the state.

Educators should not cause the standards movement and new statewide high-stakes assessments to become the fall guy in the education reform movement. Those who do are creating a straw man to lament the past, oppose change and support student performance along a standard distribution curve.

Standards and high-stakes assessment has stimulated our thinking, discussion and action to align the components of a sound educational system. Now we need to include multiple performance assessments for the system to truly provoke equitable and quality education for all students.