Questioning the Test
by Fawn Johnson

It's test-taking time in the Washington, D.C. public schools, an annual ritual that my fifth grader is learning to despise. The DC Comprehensive Assessment System, known as DC CAS, is taken in mid-April for all public school students, beginning in second grade. It is a series of tests that assesses reading, math, science, and writing. "This annual test keeps DC Public Schools accountable for meeting high standards for our students' success," the district says on its Web site.

Here's how my son experiences it. He says his math teacher is "freaking out." He complains that he can't read a book after he's completed his test and must wait silently for his classmates to finish. Two years ago, he brought home a packet of news articles for his reading assignment because his teacher said his class needed practice reading non-fiction. It did not take him long to figure out that his teachers' jobs were on the line and in part depended on his performance.

Educators in the Obama administration--and many outside it--say that standardized assessments are vital to the understanding of students' progress. Assessments can identify gaps among student populations and pockets within a public school system that need review. They are invaluable for identifying under-served and disadvantaged groups of students.

But assessments also have their problems. The Education Department earlier this year released a "best practices" paper on how to prevent, detect, and investigate fraud and cheating during the tests, illustrating the pressure that they might put on school administrators. The report includes a quote from 2011 from Education Secretary Arne Duncan defending the use of the test. "The existence of cheating says nothing about the merits of testing. Instead, cheating reflects a willingness to lie at children's expense to avoid accountability--an approach I reject entirely."

Lisa Darling-Hammond, a Stanford education professor, recently published a book advocating for more equity in education opportunities. She acknowledges that assessments are an important part of school accountability, but they aren't enough to bring the low performers up to speed. Her book, "The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future" delves into hard-to-measure stuff like school restructuring. As Washington Post education writer Valarie Strauss notes in reviewing the book, Darling-Hammond does not offer easy answers. Everything that actually makes a difference in closing the "opportunity gap" costs money, which we all know is in short supply.

What is the best way to fit assessments into the public school system? How much weight should they have in decisions about a school's direction? What benefits do students gain from assessments? What about teachers? Or parents? What are the drawbacks of standardized testing? What changes, unrelated to testing, would make assessments more useful to public schools? What other options are available for evaluating schools and teachers?

Bridge to Addressing Opportunity Gaps
By Kevin Welner

Here’s an experiment. Put a thermometer in your refrigerator. Note the temperature a few hours later. It’ll probably read something like 37 degrees. Now put a different thermometer in there and repeat the process. Again, it’ll probably read something like 37 degrees. Feel free to do this until you exhaust the supply of thermometers in your home, or perhaps head to the store and buy a few more. What have you learned?

You’ve certainly zeroed in on the temperature of your refrigerator. You may also have learned that if you are using the refrigerator during the time measured, the measured temperature increases (hotter air enters). You may also find that if you add resources (turn the dial to make it colder) the temperature drops. But, assuming you find this information valuable, how many measurements do you really need?

In truth, there is indeed a value to measuring, including testing of students. But there are also diminishing returns and there are costs. In the case of the refrigerator, it’s not just the cost of the multiple thermometers, but every time we open the refrigerator we undermine its purpose – we let out some cold air. So you probably don't want to open the door and check the thermometer every 5 minutes. In the case of testing, initial costs are for the tests and their grading, and costs are also found in the lost learning time, as well as the narrowed and test-focused curriculum.

The status quo built around the use of tests to drive school improvement has likely provided some benefits as well as some detriments. But here’s what we should all agree on: we’ve now squeezed as much progress out of test-based accountability reforms as we ever will. For real progress, we need to bridge from our intense focus on measuring the achievement gap to a balanced focus grounded in our understanding of how to address opportunity gaps. If we don’t address capacity, we’re not going to make much of a dent in achievement gaps; we’ll just keep measuring the same, predictable system.

This past week, Oxford Univ. Press released a new book called “Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance,” which I co-edited with Stanford’s Prudence Carter. Please visit the website we’ve built around the book: http://nepc.colorado.edu/book, where we provide resources such as policy recommendations and success stories. The book itself presents accessible, research-based essays from top scholars, who explain how achievement gaps arise out of the cumulative effect of multiple opportunity gaps. As I explained at the book launch event at the National Press Club, this is not about one obstacle, such as the lack of high-quality preschool; a child without those preschool opportunities also faces even greater obstacles:

• if she is also without good health and dental care;

• if her parents have no stable employment;

• if their housing situation is unsure and transient;

• if her school has inexperienced and poorly trained teachers who themselves are unlikely to remain at the school for long;

• if the intervention required for low test scores at her school hinges on “turnaround” approaches that result in even more churn;

• if the school also faces overcrowding and has serious maintenance issues;

• if technology and learning materials are spotty and outdated;

• if she’s shunted into dead-end, low track classes that do, in fact, evidence a soft bigotry of low expectations;

• if educators and others do not understand her family’s cultural or linguistic background and assume that these are deficits that cannot be built upon;

• if her neighborhood is not safe and if it has few enrichment opportunities after school or over the summer; and on and on.

How, I asked, could responsible policy makers avoid the reality that closing the achievement gap means seriously addressing these multiple obstacles?

Fortunately, policymakers and others are now turning their attention to these opportunity gap issues. Just these past couple weeks, we’ve seen the Equity and Excellence Commission’s report, “For Each and Every Child” (http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/eec/equity-excellence-commission-report.pdf), we’ve seen the Broader Bolder report, “Market-Oriented Reforms' Rhetoric Trumps Reality” (http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bba-rhetoric-trumps-reality.pdf), we’ve seen the latest annual report from NIEER about preschool opportunities (http://nieer.org/sites/nieer/files/yearbook2012.pdf), and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform has issued a set of research-based articles about school policies that can close the opportunity gap (http://vue.annenberginstitute.org/sites/default/files/issuePDF/VUE36.pdf).

Ongoing efforts like Schott’s Opportunity to Learn campaign (http://www.otlcampaign.org/) have similarly brought attention to these needs. And the Obama administration’s recent focus on early-childhood education combined with its ongoing promise neighborhood initiative offer at least some hope that policy makers are starting to pay attention.

It’s time for a rethinking of the transformation over the past couple decades, whereby student tests went from a way to measure the learning of the test-takers to a lever to force changes in teaching and schooling. There’s no question that tests can be part of a healthy evaluative feedback loop. But we have zoomed far past that healthy use, and we need to restore a balance.