What Do You Emphasize Then?

We believe that it is our job to inspire and empower students to make a contribution to the world. We believe that engaged students are ones that can think critically, are creative, collaborative, communicative, self-confident and self-directed citizens. In Olmsted Falls, “different on purpose” means that our emphasis is on providing our kids with a comprehensive experience through academics, the arts and athletics. When we asked our families what matters most to them, they described the benefits they seek from the school district.  Those benefits fall into 7 broad categories and include: Student Learning; Student Readiness for the Future; Engaged and Well-Rounded Students; Safety & Well-Being and Connections to the Community; Effective Systems and Effective Adults. It’s not that test score performance doesn’t matter. It’s simply not enough and we believe that our community deserves a more holistic report on the value that their school district provides to our most precious resource–our kids. 

References

Eisner, E.W. (2001). What does it mean to say a school is doing well? Phi Delta Kappan, Jan., 2001. https://kappanonline.org/school-doing-well-eisner/

Koretz, D. (2017). The Testing Charade. Pretending to Make Schools Better. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 

So why don’t we chase test scores? 

I think the question is really why should we chase them? The entire foundation of basing school quality on test scores is a lie.

1. Test scores were never designed to rank schools and weigh in on school quality. 
   
2. Test scores are influenced by too many outside factors and primarily driven by parent education and family income.
   
3. Test scores predict other test scores and do not predict how a student will be successful later in life. Shouldn’t time be spent on developing something that would predict this? 
   
4. It is possible to “beat the test” and falsely raise test scores. We used to do this by teaching to the test and what it did was shrink the curriculum. Rather than teaching critical thinking and problem solving skills, we taught students to solve test-like problems–there’s a big difference there.   
   
5. Chasing test scores does not inspire and empower students or teachers. It lowers school climate and promotes practicing problems to chase a number and leads to score inflation. 

As a school district we’ve made a conscious choice to stop chasing scores and seeking to beat the test. District rankings do not provide us with any tangible reward. You don’t “win” anything for a ranking and quite honestly we believe that chasing test scores creates  demoralized educators and students that don’t feel a sense of purpose for what they’re doing. 

Standardized Test Scores Fall Short When Measuring School Quality

Standardized test scores don’t really tell us what skills students know or what they can do; rather they give us a score that serves as a proxy (a representation) for what the test is trying to measure (e.g. where does the student rank compared to other students who took the same test in reading, math, etc.). Sure, tests can be useful when planning intervention for individual students, however elected officials use them for purposes they were not designed for (i.e. ranking school districts), and most elected officials do not understand the harm that they are doing by using these assessments for a purpose they weren’t designed for.  While a school and individual teacher have an impact on student achievement, extensive research has demonstrated that factors that are outside of the school’s control have a more significant influence on test scores. Median household income and parental educational levels are two such influences that have a profound impact on how students score. 

For instance, consider Ohio’s top 20 highest family median income communities. They had an average achievement test pass rate of 86.04%. The highest median family income in this group was $234,423 and the lowest was $122,078. Conversely, Ohio’s lowest 20 family median income communities had an average achievement pass rate of 37.49%. The highest median family income in this group was $42,257 and the lowest was $35,191. The passage rates essentially transform into Ohio giving a rating to which school district is better than the other. Are they measuring school quality or something else? The communities that have higher wealth score high. Those that don’t, score low. Those districts that are relying on their high test scores to tell them how good they are may not be as great as they think they are because the score influencing factors external to the school may be weighing heavily on student test performance–more so than the educators inside their school buildings. As a result, a school district that relies exclusively on these kinds of scores to boast about school quality may be overlooking key components of school quality. In short, high test scores may not be attributable to the quality of the school or the instruction within it. They may merely be a function of how much money parents make and the opportunities that those parents provide to their children.  In addition, schools that have had lower test scores when compared to those districts with wealth and opportunity may be deemed “bad schools,” when in fact they are making significant impacts that aren’t detected by standardized test scores.  They in turn could be abandoning promising practices because those practices may not be immediately impacting the standardized test scores they’re looking at. 

Criterion-Referenced/Competency-Based Tests Serve The Purpose

There are assessments that are designed to assess student skill along a continuum. They’re called criterion referenced or competency-based assessments. State tests are not criterion referenced or competency-based.  What are these kinds of assessments? They are assessments that evaluate students against a pre-specified criteria without referencing how the student compares to others. Does the student know all 26 letters of the alphabet? Can the student identify all shapes and colors? Does the student know how to blend sounds? Assessments like these tell us what kids know, not how they compare to others.

If you want to know whether or not kids are literate, use a skills-based assessment that makes this determination, not one that simply ranks kids on how high or low they scored.

Assessments developed by teachers are also criterion referenced or competency-based. Can the student perform 2 by 2 subtraction problems? Can the student explain how a cell divides? Teachers want their students to be successful because it shows that the teaching worked and the students learned. The hope with any classroom assessment is that all of the students in class will demonstrate mastery.  This is NOT how standardized achievement tests work. Standardized tests aren’t meant to determine mastery of a skill. They are meant to rank students and the government uses them to rate school districts. If you want to know whether or not kids are literate, use a skills-based assessment that makes this determination, not one that simply ranks kids on how high or low they scored!

You may have seen that Ohio has released its  School District Report Cards recently and articles on the local news have appeared. The district’s position is in opposition to using this method to rate the quality of schools and school districts. Realtors and newspapers like this kind of system because it allows them to neatly talk about which districts are “good” and which are not. While we aren’t opposed to assessments that provide us with information on how students are performing in academic areas (yes…tests can be useful), using tests to rank schools and make judgments on their quality  is inappropriate, unethical and counter-productive.  

The Nation Wasn’t At Risk

The creation of the testing movement began after a report that was commissioned by the Federal Government was released that painted a very negative picture of public education. That report,  called A Nation At Risk, was published in 1983 and, plainly, it lied. It had a profound impact on many important things that occurred in public education beginning in the 80s through present day. I recently had the opportunity to hear first hand from the person that facilitated the group of individuals that took part in the meetings (Jim Harvey) and wrote the final report. He relayed the discourse of the meetings to a group of superintendents and said that the information the commission used to write the report was gathered and used in such a way to support the group’s preconceived beliefs. In short, they wrote a predetermined outcome and then pulled together evidence to support it.

In order to answer the question of, why don’t we emphasize test score performances, one needs to think about why these types of assessments exist in the first place. While the state assessments do give individual student performance results to parents, one of the primary purposes of the assessments is to rank school districts and this kind of assessment approach was never designed to rank or weigh in on school quality. That’s a concept that elected officials made up.   In addition, because the assessments are  standardized, it means they are designed to distribute themselves to create a bell shaped curve. For every high achievement score, there must be a low achievement score and because the growth measure (a.k.a. value-added) is directly related to the achievement test, that method of measurement is also flawed because it too is standardized so It is statistically impossible for everyone to have a chance at success in this kind of model. What transpires is again a bell shaped curve that is used to say, “this school is a quality one and this one is not; these groups of students are literate and these are not.” The problem with this approach is that inaccurate conclusions are reached.