Brown: Cull the herd of state tests
State of State outlines education themes
Gov. Jerry Brown will call for fewer state standardized tests and attempt to redirect a potentially divisive debate over teacher evaluations in his State of the State address today to the Legislature. Without being specific, he will also call for locally driven school monitoring measures to match his call for shifting authority over spending from Sacramento to school districts, according to State School Board Executive Director Sue Burr, who gave school finance officials a preview Tuesday of education themes Brown will touch on. She elaborated in an interview with me afterward.
After being sidetracked by the budget his first year in office, Brown is pursuing some of the ambitious plans on which he campaigned two years ago. This month he called for the most sweeping change in student funding since the adoption of Proposition 98. He is proposing a $6.9 billion tax initiative that will partially benefit K-12 schools and community colleges.
Brown has criticized the test-driven accountability of the federal No Child Left Behind law and the sheer number of state assessments that students take: 15 hours by high school sophomores alone. The governor will call for reducing the number of tests in order to “restore valuable instructional time,” Burr said at the annual budget analysis by the consulting firm School Services of California.
Brown won’t call for eliminating any specific test today, Burr said, for he understands that the web of state assessments is a complicated issue: “Pull one thread and the rug falls part.” But a possible target is some high school end-of-subject exams. Many students aren’t motivated to take them, since they don’t personally count on their records. CAHSEE, the high school exit exam, may also be integrated into the new Common Core assessments: Students who achieve a minimum score will have satisfied a graduation requirement.
Last fall, in a veto message, Brown criticized SB 547, a bill by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg that would have broadened the Academic Performance Index, the state’s chief accountability metric, by giving additional weight to other subjects and measures, such as the graduation rate and preparation for college or a career. While the bill “attempts to improve the API, it relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of the current system,” Brown wrote.
Brown hasn’t said which qualitative factors he prefers, and he’s not likely to be specific today. He has indicated he is intrigued by the idea of school inspections that examine classroom instruction and student engagement, but he’s aware that the state cannot mandate what it won’t be willing to pay for. Schools are visited as part of accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and Brown doesn’t want to duplicate those efforts, said Burr.
Brown will consider requiring districts to adopt additional accountability factors in order to receive extra money under a weighted student formula, starting in the second year, said Burr, who is a chief adviser to the governor as well as chief executive of the State Board.
Finally, Brown is expected to say that teacher development is his highest priority, Burr said. But he wants to “shift the conversation away from the edges” – the focus on firing the worst teachers and paying the best more money – and instead concentrate on improving teaching for the vast majority in the middle. Brown has nominated Stanford University School of Education professor Linda Darling-Hammond to play a guiding role on the California Commission on Teaching Credentialing and is counting on it to reinvigorate instruction for new teachers. But he is also aware that he will have to become involved with an effort in the Legislature to rewrite the Stull Act, the 40-year-old state law on teacher evaluations.
After the speech in the Capitol, Brown will travel to Los Angeles, where his schedule includes a private meeting with teachers.
13 Comments
Trackbacks
- Brown: Cull the herd of state tests : SCOE News Reader
- Gov. Brown to call for less state testing in schools | The Maddy Institute
"Darn, I wish I had read that over again before I hit send.” Don’t let this be your lament. To promote a civil dialogue, please be considerate, respectful and mindful of your tone. We encourage you to use your real name, but if you must use a nom de plume, stick with it. Anonymous postings will be removed.
 |
Featured Video |
Did You Know?
Just the Facts
Other Sites to Watch
View More >>
SVEF is the education foundation advocating for the needs of school districts across Silicon Valley. SVEF seeks to improve public education through establishing partnerships with the private sector and the education community ..
Interesting. I would suggest that before Governor Brown culls the state testing, he openly requires the CDE to analyze the existing decades of data on student achievement. In so doing, there might be some evidence based platform for moving on to a brave new world of evaluations…
15 hours is not a lot of test time – and that is the outside. Most kids don’t take that much time to test!
And … CAHSEE. I saw a great, and possibly unintended benefit emerging from this test. Many, many students who desperately needed instruction only received it when they failed the test. Interestingly, they were often passing all of their classes, yet when faced with an objective measure of performance, were shown to be clearly well below a defined goal. This was consistent with the test results of students who took either the Community College, or CSU required literacy and math assessments and performed so poorly – after graduating from high school with a gpa sufficient to enter CC or CSU.
I know I keep saying the same thing – but get the data that already exists and surface it!
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
Our local district experimented with a policy of promising high school kids who scored proficient on the STAR tests a bump in their letter grade in that subject last year. There was of course no penalty for doing poorly. I saw a positive morale boost for this, where suddenly the tests weren’t just a waste of class time, and there was more enthusiasm for them from both teachers and students. Students took time to study for them, as a no-risk chance to make up for earlier slackerism or difficulty with the material, and an impressive percentage did improve their grade. Tests don’t have to be bad.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
I entirely agree with Ms. Moore about requiring CDE to unearth testing evidence already gathered before moving on to any new or modified testing system. And her description of the practical positive effect of the California High School Exit Exam is exactly right: CAHSEE is the radical catalyst for getting help to students who need it.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
Submitted on behalf of Doug McRae:
Some HS end-of-course tests may also be eliminated, but we have to be careful here. Statewide tests need to “follow” instruction, that is, measure what we want to be taught. At the HS level, what we want taught is content specific stuff like Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Biology, Chemistry, World History, American History, etc — with parallel variations for career rather than college readiness — and thus it follows that end-of-course tests best measure what we want taught. Trying to fit one-size-fits-all general math or general science tests into what we want taught at the HS level is like trying to fit a square peg through a round hole. We need to get away from the notion of a test AT a particular grade level, and instead use the notion of achievement in a content area BY a given grade level — the latter notion fits the flexibility of course assignments and sequences we have for the secondary grades. What can be culled from our current system is the one-size-fits-all tests AT a given grade level that inevitably lead to lowest-common-denominator tests that then loop back to a lowest-common-denominator approach to instruction.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
I can only say that I wholeheartedly support what Sue Moore and Doug McRae wrote. The CAHSEE can be retained only for those who failed to pass the eqivalent STAR scores by grade 11.
And we should, indeed, make end-of-course assessment count for students. They could serve a role similar to the matriculation examinations in many nations — you pass them, you earn a grade on the corresponding A-G requirement independent of whether your school course was qualified by UC/CSU. And if you score above your course letter grade in a qualified A_G school course, the STAR grade should count for UC/CSU GPA admission purposes rather than the class grade.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
Whoa. There are a lot of students (a subset, and not the students on the wrong side of the achievement gap) who would be overjoyed by @Ze’ev’s concept. One of them, who happened to be raised under my roof, views it as a question of mastering the subject matter vs. doing the “busywork.”
Actually, there is a semi-secret system like that in effect. As I know firsthand, a certain score on an AP test or SAT II (subject test) can compensate for a “missed” A-G requirement (a D or F in a required course) with the CSU and UC system, assuming the overall GPA qualifies.
I’m pretty certain my cherished offspring (now a junior at Oberlin Conservatory and commentary editor of the Oberlin student newspaper) would have done no homework at all in some high school classes under @Ze’ev’s scenario, so there is that issue.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
@Caroline: I must congratulate your offspring on his (her?) clear insight. It is, indeed, the question of mastering the subject matter vs. doing the “busywork.” I do understand, however, that there are still some people who insist that seat time is more important than actual knowledge. After all, California plumbing unions still force our waterless urinals to be fitted with water pipes, lest union jobs will be lost.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
I wouldn’t have seen those situations as analogous, Ze’ev, but we do agree on the education question at hand. My son has that insight due to having lived it, though.
The teachers’ view is that the students who don’t master the subject matter so easily need the step-by-step learning building reinforced regularly by homework and notes, and since I know quite a number of students who agree, I’m not disdaining that either. But when you see me arguing for flexibility for students, especially in secondary school, you can see where it’s coming from.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
Ze’ev, although I know this is a tangent, just to be clear, waterless urinals are not ‘fitted’ with water pipes. Instead, the pipes are capped behind the or at the wall. And while its possible to argue for all sorts of reasons why plumbers might have benefitted from such a code, its likely more due to a combination of cultural lag and uncertainty about the technology. The first cars were fitted with buggy whip holders. Vinyl siding is made to have wood grain. etc etc.
Note that waterless urinals still require a drain and in a public projects, the extra cost of preparing a point in the wall for a future fixture is minuscule in comparison to the cost of all the other plumbing that must happen for such a project. And the cost of the missing flushing mechanism is probably much greater loss from a plumber’s job standpoint, but of course code does not require that fixture to be installed nonetheless. Note also that adding in those pipes after the fact if the decision was ever made to return to standard fixtures would likely be hundreds if not thousands of times the cost of including them up front.
Many homeowners I know, will take advantage of having things open to insert conduit or pipes even if they never use them just because the potential savings down the road so greatly outweigh the costs now. Kind of the same reason we buy insurance. fwiw..
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
Does not work. It has been tried at many schools and if the culture is one of aggressive parents and grade inflation then any test incentive fails.
It is time to fish or cut bait. Either incorporate these tests into student grades, or into promotion qualifications, or have them released to employers or the military,or be factored into college admission along with SAT scores.
If these tests counted from something students would pay attention. Besides, these test do count for something in other countries such as Japan and China and Finland and of all places Mexico.
Either make them count or get rid of them.
BTW, at the back of the CA DOE testing information booklet is a one page warning about inappropriate uses of test data.
Absolutely no longitudinal analysis may be done. That pretty much throws VAM right out the window.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
The value of standardized tests is great in the K-8 levels, and especially in the K-5 levels where a child’s entire future of academic options is formed.
Some believe elementary school mostly is for “fun.” But, if a 5th grader leaves the nest of elementary school unprepared for 6th grade math, that student likely never will catch up - at least not till several terms of remedial “basic skills” coursework at a community college that this state cannot afford to cover. The gateway to Algebra success starts at a very young age and those 2nd and 3rd grade assessments are quite meaningful.
A few days of May testing at the end of an elementary school term provides a snapshot of a school’s overall student proficiency. No major stress for the little ones. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th graders take frequent quizzes already. It’s not like we’re terrorizing Kindergarteners in an SNL skit.
A set of standardized tests enable the public and elected officials to identify local approaches of highly-performing schools and to look to replicate these successful approaches. And when May tests are supplemented with regular NWEA on-site assessments so teachers and principals can adjust to students’ needs during the school year, the current system can work just fine.
I agree with other posters that we should not abandon the current system (at least for the K-8 segments) until we have extracted every item of beneficial data. High school, perhaps. Though I have learned a lot on the CDE site this past week about how poorly high school students perform in 9th grade Algebra 1 if they didn’t get proficient in that subject before leaving middle school.
- Chris Stampolis
Trustee, West Valley/Mission Community College District
State Board Member, California Community College Trustees (CCCT)
parent of a 4th grader and a Kindergartener
408-390-4748 * stampolis@aol.com
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity