Not Business As Usual

School Administrator, May, 1997

CHRIS YELICH

Executive Director. Association of Educators in Private Practice, Watertown, Wisconsin

I congratulate The School Administrator for taking such bold leadership in the educational community. While most publications are still advocating business as usual, AASA is opening the eyes of many administrators to education as it will exist in the next century.

Not many things in our society reflect the days of pre-World War II, much less the last century. However, our educational system has not changed much since those days of yesteryear, even though society is very different.

The public-private partnerships featured in the January issue are one of the vehicles needed to bring schools into the real world of today. Students must be assured that attending school not only will teach them to read, write, and compute, but do it well. They must become technology literate in the process, so they will possess the skills that the workplace and higher education demands from those who enter.

Schools need to be held accountable for those results. Teachers must be freed to certify learning (as proposed by James Sandfort in his guest column), ending the monopoly held by school buildings as the only place where "credited" learning takes place.

With the advent of charter schools and the growth of teachers who want to be in the business of offering educational services, some school districts are moving toward that future. Your publication certainly provides clear directions.

Better Assessment

MARGARET JORGENSEN

Senior Examiner, Educational Testing Service, Atlanta, Georgia

The cover of the December issue ("Striking a Balance Between Multiple Choice and Performance Assessment") rings a positive chord for me.

In my work with schools across this country, it has become increasingly evident that the information sought about what students think and can do cannot come from one assessment tool. This conclusion stems from the realization that important work within any discipline varies in complexity, breadth of content covered, context, and so forth.

Just as the important work varies, so too must the methods of collecting credible evidence. I tend to conceptualize a matrix format to begin to make decisions about what types of assessment contribute most efficiently and with maximum credibility to describe the range of important work in a discipline.

This approach should sound familiar. It is nothing more than an enhanced test specification. The unique feature of this specification, however, is that the format of the items varies from multiple choice to short answer to longer performance events, etc. Decisions about individual learners or about groups of learners then would depend on the quality of the information collected through multiple measures.

Those of us who work in educational measurement must work hard to build models that yield performance tasks that are construct driven rather than task driven and that yield information that transfers.

How's Your Graduate School Rank?

Superintendents have definite favorites among the nation's graduate schools of education, but they aren't necessarily those favored by US. News and World Report.

The newsweekly surveyed superintendents in districts with at least 5,000 students as part of its annual rankings of the best graduate schools. The 245 responding school leaders were asked to select the 25 graduate education programs offering the highest-quality training.

The superintendents' top five choices, in order, were: 1. Harvard, 2. Teachers College at Columbia and Stanford (tie), 4. Ohio State, and 5. Michigan.

But of greater intrigue were the low rankings given to several education schools that received high marks from the superintendents. University of Virginia, picked seventh by the superintendents, ranked No. 24 on the magazine's list. University of North Carolina, which finished sixth in the minds of the educators, stood at No. 31, while Syracuse University, which was the superintendents' 20th choice, earned only a No. 46 ranking.

On the other hand, University of Oregon, which finished 61st among the superintendents, claimed the No. 20 spot overall, according to the magazine.

The rankings are available on-line at the magazine's web site (www.usnews.com) in the "Beyond College" section of .edu.