Ten Los Angeles schools will stop using standardized tests and develop their own measures of students' progress, reports Howard Blume in the Los Angeles Times. The school board 4-3 on the measure, which will apply to "community" schools that get extra funding to pay for health care and social services, and primarily enroll children from low-income families.
Superintendent Alberto Carvalho's strategic plan relies heavily on standardized data to evaluate and guide the work of schools, writes Blume. Carvalho brought in i-Ready tests, so teachers would get information on their students progress during the year, when they can adjust instruction, not just at the end.
Students will still take annual state tests in math and English Language Arts in grades 3 through 8 and grade 11, Blume writes. But the pilot schools won't have to use i-Ready's diagnostic tests or use DIBELS to assess the reading of young students. A customized assessment system will make it difficult to compare their students' progress -- or lack of progress -- to other schools with similar students.
Jackie Goldberg, the board president, says standardized tests take up too much time. "The whole goal of life became not the love of learning, not the enjoyment of education, not the exchange of ideas, but whether or not your school could move up on its test scores."
That aligns with the position of Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, who "is philosophically opposed to all standardized testing," writes Blume.
On the other side, board member Nick Melvoin, who voted "no," said, "You can't manage what you can't measure."
And you can't hold anyone accountable. Remember that the schools in this pilot enroll the most disadvantaged students with the least-educated parents.
"As student scores scrape new lows in the aftermath of the pandemic," educators, legislators and policymakers are lowering testing and graduation requirements, write Katelyn Cordero and Juan Perez Jr. on Politico. They argue that "testing consumes too much classroom time," and doesn't "fully identify what students know."
The pandemic is over, writes Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, on the Hechinger Report. "It's time to raise the bar and stop making excuses for sagging achievement."
California posts "a wealth of data about K-12 public schools — test scores, attendance rates, who’s headed to college and more" on five websites, writes Carolyn Jones on CalMatters. But the information is hard to find, and even harder for parents to understand. according to school data transparency report.
Schools are ranked by colors, she writes. "One school might rank as orange, the second-lowest color, if it’s made progress even though its scores remain very low. Another school might rank as red, the lowest color, if it’s shown little progress but has higher scores."
“It feels like a smokescreen,” said Crystal Trull, a parent of three children in San Diego Unified. “Parents don’t understand what the data means, which makes it difficult to get a sense of a particular school.”
There is no shortage of test score information available on real estate websites such as GreatSchools; the consumers of such information are usually educated parents who care about school quality, which leads to increasing inequality between districts with apparently good schools, like Irvine, and those that score poorly, like Watts.
IMO, if you expect less (or NOTHING) from students, that is exactly what you will receive...
Many kids dream of being the next Simone Biles, Tiger Woods, Lebron James, or Tom Brady
but how many will actually WORK HARD ENOUGH to achieve this goal (my thought is very
few).
One should never ask any question when one really does not care for the answer. Thus, avoid testing because then one does not have to explain the results.