From the editor

Relying on standardized tests alone to evaluate a student, a teacher, a school or a system is foolhardy. But doing away with the most methodologically rigorous form of assessment is just as short-sighted. Dodging accountability by going soft and mushy is at least as damaging to our students as is testing them to the point of exhaustion. Let’s find a middle ground.

--Alan Gottlieb

Keep the CSAP high school writing assessment

The 2008 legislature began to explore the merits of the Colorado Student Assessment Program. In debating and passing Senate Bill 212 (CAP4K), and in considering HB-1357, which would have scrapped high school CSAPs (the bill died in Senate committee), some comments made by legislators struck me as inaccurate, or puzzling.

What made no sense to me was the idea of dropping the writing assessment, in particular for grades 9 and 10.  Having taught 7th and 8th graders reading and writing in a Colorado public (charter) school for five years (2001-2006), having monitored the CSAP tests for my students, and having studied what the results told me about my teaching, my students, our curriculum, and our school, I see many reasons to keep the CSAP writing assessment through 10th grade.

SB 212 “seeks input from local education providers” on the writing assessments used in our school, as it proceeds to “modify the system of assessments” in Colorado.  I am not a local education provider, just a teacher.  There has been enough criticism of the CSAPs that policymakers might need to hear why some educators see the writing assessments we offer as ONE OF OUR STRENGTHS as a state (few other states require a performance assessment of this kind).

While no defender of the status quo, this teacher wants to be sure we don’t sacrifice what is a useful check on the writing progress of our students.  Devoting much time and effort on “new assessments” seems a diversion from more critical changes we can make to improve achievement—in particular the writing skills of our students.
 

1.    I come not to bury the CSAPs, but to praise them.

Well, not exactly. But I do write to encourage those re-examining our commitment to the CSAPs to pause before casting aside the writing assessment.  We might be blaming the test when the causes of our upset lie elsewhere. As a state we have made mistakes in our use of CSAPs, but that is no reason we can’t ask students to spend roughly three hours a year to demonstrate whether their writing skills seem to be at grade level.

Did the value of CSAPs suffer because the results were misused by a political agenda?  Possibly.  Did a one-year snapshot fail to capture progress from one grade to the next, and changing student populations?  Of course.  Was the Colorado Department of Education too acquiescent in allowing legislative decisions to determine how the CSAP would be misused as a blunt instrument to judge progress and to demand improvement from low-performing schools?  Yes.  Have many educators begun to dread the late July front page story in the Post and the News, causing heartburn for many, a frustrating reminder of little progress—based on this one test? 

OK, but to blame the tests themselves is unfair.  We are making real progress in learning how to use CSAP results to get at the key issue of academic growth. (If the new Colorado Growth Model had been in place ten years ago, I imagine there would be more support for CSAPs today.)  Even without it there has been real value in what it tells us. Legislators like Sen. Suzanne Williams dismiss the writing test by saying teachers only see numerical scores, adding that, “There's no connection with what you're doing in the classroom" (The Colorado Springs Gazette, May 6, 2008).  I wish I could show her the analysis our school did—thanks to a parent’s remarkable work—comparing performance to the standards, for each student, on all of the writing "subcontent areas": paragraph writing, extended writing, grammar and usage, and mechanics. And to say there was no connection to what I was doing in the classroom is simply absurd: all year we work with our students on clear sentences, well-developed paragraphs, supporting points with key details, etc.—and the CSAP does an adequate job of measuring such skills. 

2.    We are “overcomplying” with NCLB?  But CSAPs have nothing to do with compliance.

   
HB-1357 hoped to end the CSAP writing test for all students. The bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Judy Solano (D-Brighton), “said the state is currently over-complying with federal assessment standards, and she wanted to take some money saved by eliminating the writing tests to let districts develop their own tests” (Denver Post, May 6, 2008).  She said: “… we require more testing than No Child Left Behind does!” (http://cohousedems.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/05/rep-solano-pass.html).

Well, the writing CSAP had nothing to do with complying with NCLB and federal assessment standards.  CSAPs were started under Gov. Roy Romer as the second part of his three-step reform:
1. Standards. 2. Assessments. 3. Accountability.  Yes, many states developed assessments that were limited to reading and math, and yes, if compliance is all we’re about, we can remove what is perhaps the most expensive CSAP test to grade—the writing assessment.  But our goal in the 1990’s—or so many of us thought—was to create state assessments on the six major content standards: reading, writing, math, science, history, and geography.  Tests on the latter two were never developed.  Science has been added slowly.  But at least we began to assess three key areas in 1997. It was never about compliance with the feds; it had to do with alignment with our standards.  How ironic if today’s definition of “alignment with standards” means eliminating one of the key tests that does exactly that.

Yes, Gov. Bill Owens expanded the CSAP program to all the grades 3-10, but his work, again, preceded the presidency of George W. Bush.  Let’s not blame compliance for something Colorado created of its own volition.  We might even pat ourselves on the back for having an assessment of writing skills more authentic than most states.
 

3.    Is the goal here to shoot the messenger?  Are we trying to deny our own Inconvenient Truth?

The CSAP results on writing present us with our own Inconvenient Truth, and some might wish we could shoot the messenger—these tests.  But this writing teacher believes the message is important; we should face the truth they give us every year at least until we begin to head in the right direction. Below one sees the decline in writing proficiency as tracked by the state assessment.  Discouraging, yes. After 11 years of CSAP results, and a lack of progress, some might wish these hard facts could go away: solution – toss out the writing assessment! 

But I believe these offer a useful marker to get the state, districts, and schools thinking much harder about what we are NOT doing to improve student writing during these three or four years, and to make important changes.  I’ll name just three:
   
    1) professional development in writing for middle school teachers – for English teachers AND those in other disciplines, so that we are all teaching good writing skills (Rep. Solano’s bill, to its credit, did aim to divert testing funds for this purpose);

    2) the teacher-student load and class size for English teachers; some states put a cap on how many students English teachers can have, knowing the extra burden of grading writing.  The fact that our charter school capped the teacher-student load at 88—four classes of 22—played a big role in the amount of writing I could ask students to do, and to my mind was a key factor in our strong results: during my final years there over 90% of the seventh and eighth grade students I taught were achieving proficiency in writing; they scored 20% points or more above the average for students in Douglas County schools, and nearly 40% points above the state average;

    3) tutoring or small group support for those not at the proficient level.  Perhaps we lack the will or imagination to make changes in these and other areas. And yet I trust we all agree that we must be accountable for our failure to improve the writing skills of our students.

A review of the CSAP writing scores, from middle school on into10th grade, reveals a disconcerting pattern: the percentage of students achieving at a proficient level DECLINES between 6th grade and 10th grade. Writing skills for Colorado students have improved between 3rd and 6th grade over the last five years, but just the opposite is happening once students reach middle school. Figures below show the percentage of students scoring at the proficient or advanced level on the writing portion of CSAP.

 
    6th gr.    7th gr.    8th gr.    9th gr.    10th gr.    Change over 4 years      
2002    50    50    50    49    50    -      
2003    54    53    49    50    52    -2      
2004    56    52    49    53    50    -4      
2005    59    56    51    52    50    -9      
2006    59    56    51    52    50    -9      
2007    60    60    51    49    51    -9     

Of course those declines above are not a look at the same class. It is more meaningful to follow one class through several years—roughly the same students in a grade.  There too you see some of the same pattern.  Notice especially the constant drop between 7th and 8th grade.  Again, the figures below reveal the percentage of Colorado students scoring proficient or advanced in writing.

 
2003    2004    2005    2006    2007    Change over 3-5 years      
7th gr. - 53    8th gr. - 49    9th gr. - 52    10th gr. - 50        -3      
6th  gr. - 54    7th gr. - 52    8th gr. - 51    9th gr. - 52    10th gr. - 51    -3      
     6th gr. - 56    7th gr. - 56    8th gr. - 51    9th gr. - 49    -6      
        6th gr. - 59    7th gr. - 56    8th gr. - 51    -8     

4.    Get serious. 

A state goal has been to see all students are proficient in the standards by tenth grade.  And yet by March of tenth grade, half of our students are not demonstrating proficient skills as writers.  Anyone serious about reform would want to look closely at what is done with the teaching of writing between sixth and tenth grade.

But we aren’t serious.  SB 212 (CAP4K) will have us “revise tests and align standards from preschool to college,” and this will do exactly WHAT to improve what we TEACH and what students LEARN in classrooms between 6th grade and 10th grade?  Shift to assessments that, as SB-212 puts it, are “relevant to college admission determinations,” tests like PLAN and the ACT, which do not require anything close to the paragraph and extended writing expected of 9th and 10th graders taking the CSAP? 

It sounds better: high school students taking “college entrance exams.” But why play this game?  Of course the writing tasks on the CSAP—two or three separate paragraphs and one extended writing task—can’t cover all of the writing standards (narrative, descriptive, persuasive, expository). But they do ask students to write. And for the most part I thought my students’ scores fairly reflected their strengths and weaknesses.

5.      Commissioner Jones: “Realign resources … have tough conversations.”

CSAP results last summer showed that between grades 3 and 5 students who were rated unsatisfactory in reading in 3rd grade continued to perform below the partially proficient level two years later. In response to this, Commissioner of Education Dwight Jones was quoted as saying: “We have got to realign resources, and we need to have tough conversations based on the data” (Denver Post, August 20, 2007.)  Can’t we make that exact statement again in noting the lack of progress in writing between grades 7 and 10? Won’t realigning resources mean some of the key changes referred to in #3 above?  Wouldn’t it also mean smaller writing classes for 9th-11th graders who are not yet proficient?  Wouldn’t that be a better use of $5 million the legislature just committed to add 70 more guidance counselors? Wouldn’t that indicate we were truly serious about improving the skills and knowledge of our students?
 

6.   Fast food, or do we sit down for a good meal?  On “getting results back in a timely manner.”

 
SB-212 (CAP4K) wants results of assessments in a timely manner, due, no doubt, to complaints that the CSAP scores come in after the school year, and often after our students have left fifth grade or eighth grade and have moved on to a new school.  But one reason it takes several months to score the March CSAP tests is because of the time involved in scoring the writing component.

So we have some choices. 1) If getting scores back “in a timely manner” means during the same school year we teach these students, then of course given the amount of time needed to grade a performance assessment—actual writing—the tests must be given earlier in the school year. As the needed lead time appears to be four months, we could give the tests in early January.  This would allow teachers to get the results back in by May in order to have some meaningful conversations with students and their families regarding the scores.  Testing mid-way through the school year, however, would grade a student’s progress on what was learned in the second half of the previous grade and the first half of the current school year.  Is that an improvement?

2) We could scrap the performance assessment in writing and revert to all multiple choice questions—much as Iowa tests do.  (This year I taught in a private school. The winter ITBS results were back “in a timely manner,” by the end of the year. And yet my students did not have to write a single sentence for their so-called “Language” assessment.  For this reason, I thought it was a far inferior test to CSAP.)

3)  We keep the current tests, and the March test dates, and we use the more sophisticated analysis from the new Colorado Growth Model to provide teachers, students, and families with clear, understandable explanations of progress, of performance compared to the standards and compared to the students’ peers, and of writing skills to work on during the year ahead.   I vote #3.

There is plenty we can do to improve our schools.  Tossing out the state writing test is not one of them. 

Peter Huidekoper is a veteran educator. Currently, he teaches at Ave Maria Catholic School.

EdNews highlights

“Role model” memorialized at Manual

By Barry Bortnick

The Colorado education community lost a giant when Marsha Gentry Pointer died last month, allegedly at the hands of her estranged husband.

Pointer, 57, was an old school educator, the type of teacher who lived her profession 24-7. She treated the students she met like her own kids. She did not engage in high-level policy debates about ways to improve the educational system. Instead, she took a hands-on approach and bettered the world one kid at a time.

Budget woes ax longer days in Springs

By Rebecca Jones

Budget problems are forcing Colorado Springs School District 11  officials to curtail an experiment in extending the school day, even before they know whether the plan worked or not.

Last year, students at five low-performing, high-poverty elementary schools in the district – Adams, Hunt, Rogers, Twain and Wilson -- saw their school day lengthened by a full 60 minutes. The extra time gave teachers the chance to do more one-on-one instruction, plan more small group time, and generally ensure that educational objectives were given sufficient classroom time.

Blog highlights 

Preschool not serving those who need it most

Monday, July 7, 2008
Written by: Captain Haddock

An interesting Rand study finds that the kids who are need preschool the most are not enrolled.  From EdWeek:

Low income and minority children could benefit most from quality preschool, but a new report finds that they’re least likely to be enrolled in good early development programs.

In a report released Wednesday by the RAND California Preschool Study, researchers estimate that only 15 percent of those who could benefit most are in high-quality programs that prepare them for success in K-12. …

Researchers surveyed 2,000 California parents of 3- and 4-year-olds, interviewed more than 700 state providers, and observed 250 child care and preschool centers.  They found that just under half of 3- and 4-year-olds in economically disadvantaged families are in preschool programs of any quality, compared to 70 percent of children whose families are better off.

The results suggest that lots of money is not enough.  It ought to be targeted to those kids who need it most, namely economically disadvantaged kids.  Moreover, the results suggest that one of the main barriers to preschool access is not just money, but information.   Parents who are poor might not understand what kinds of preschool services are available, and there may be social and cultural factors at work that may inhibit parents from sending their kids to preschool.

Getting preschool to those kids who need it most is worth the effort.  An equal starting line is one of the best ways to assure that kids have an equal chance to make it to the finish line, and, dollar for dollar, preschool is one of the best ways to accomplish that goal.

Good news: candidates shun NEA Panderpalooza

Thursday, July 3, 2008
Written by: Uncle Charley

While the rest of us are planning for a long weekend in honor of our nation’s 232nd birthday – including many roped into staying close to home by high gas prices – the National Education Association is sweltering at its annual convention in Washington, D.C.

What’s that, you say? You hadn’t noticed? Good. Sounds like the sign of a relatively normal, healthy life.

Of course, no one has better coverage of these increasingly less relevant meetings than the witty and insightful Mike Antonucci, who has to work harder and harder each year just to keep it interesting. Why is it becoming less relevant, you say? Four years ago, the NEA Convention was snubbed by Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry. And this year, Barack Obama has indicated he has better things to do.

The frustration is boiling over among delegates like this one from Ohio:

I’m quite upset. NEA withheld [sic] its endorsement of any Presidential Candidate (we’ll be voting to officially nominate Barak [sic] in a few days) so that the two candidates could have time to do their thing and win; it also afforded us the luxury of not splitting our membership into one camp or the other and damaging our collective ability to support whoever the nominee [sic]. Yet despite this, Obama will be addressing us by video feed, not in person. When we were told about this, a murmur of disappointment spread across the room– to be sure, teachers in my delegation are taking this as an affront—it’s all Hillary supporting teachers need to not vote for him…just one more reason.

Besides the disturbing spelling and syntax errors from someone representing many of our nation’s teachers, I find this somewhat humorous. Look, if you follow this blog, you know I’m not a fan of Barack (yes, there is a c in his name) Obama. But it’s a healthy sign to see neither major presidential candidate falling all over themselves to participate in “Panderpalooza.”

It does take a rank sort of arrogance, though, to presume a major presidential candidate should come speak to your group after it waited until the last possible moment to give him an “oh, by the way” endorsement. It’s healthy for the Republic that Barack Obama (and John McCain, too) doesn’t owe the NEA any homage in the upcoming election campaign.

Funny, though, that the angry Ohio delegate also exhibited another form of arrogance (or is it just ignorance?):

I’ve also learned that Obama won’t be showing up in person to any union conventions– perhaps this is part of his recent centrist move. If so, he needs to rethink his strategy. Membership in a union almost guarantees that a member will vote Democratic. [emphasis added]

Whoops … looks like someone has been drinking the Big Labor Solidarity Kool-Aid. While it’s safe to say that union members tend to vote Democratic more than the general population, it’s been shown that about 40 percent of union members vote Republican in national elections. (Figures aren’t much different among NEA members in particular. We’ve already seen how out of touch the national political machine is with the rank-and-file.)

Oh, well. Only question left is whether our own local DCTA Prez will be upset that Obama is a no-show. Happy Fourth, everyone!

2 Responses to “Good news: candidates shun NEA Panderpalooza”

1.    Alan Gottlieb Says:
Well, as it turns out, Obama is addressing the NEA via satellite on Saturday…

2.    Uncle Charley Says:

Yes, I should have clarified that in the post. Quite the reception Obama received:
http://www.eiaonline.com/2008/07/obamas-reference-to-performance-pay.html
Nothing yet has made me feel so favorable to Obama. Probably nothing else will.

Poll finds ambivalence about U.S. schools

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Written by: Captain Haddock

Americans aren’t too thrilled about their public schools.  But fixing them up isn’t their top priority, either, according to a recent AP poll.  MSNBC reports:

Half of Americans say U.S. schools are doing only a fair to poor job preparing kids for college and the work force. Even more feel that way about the skills kids need to survive as adults, an Associated Press poll released Friday finds. …

The views of the general population echo concerns from business and college leaders, who say they have to spend a lot of time and money on remedial education for people who completed high school but don’t have the skills to succeed at work or in higher education.

Education ranks behind the economy and gas prices as a top issue for Americans, the survey said. However, nearly all those polled said the quality of a country’s education system has a big impact on a country’s overall economic prosperity.

Education was generally viewed to be as important as health care and slightly ahead of the Iraq war. Among minority parents, education is just as important an issue as the economy.

This poll, unlike the annual how-good-is-your-kid’s-school poll put out by Kappan Magazine, did not ask participants about their local schools.  The Kappan poll typically finds that though Americans have a vague feeling of disenchantment with the country’s schools in general, they usually think their own schools are doing a good job. 

It’s also interesting to note that, according to this latest AP poll, paying a little more for a tank of gas is more important to Americans than making sure our public education system is running smoothly.  But, interestingly, education ranks ahead of the defining policy issue of these times, the Iraq war.

 It’s hard to know whether these results are the result of an accurate perception of our schools’ problems, or whether it’s the result of years of school-bashing and lack of attention to the larger social and economic context in which schools operate. 

My guess is that it’s a little of both.  Folks like to complain about schools, but when it comes right down to it, they’ll stand by their own teachers and principals.  At the same time, it’s good to see that we recognize that much needs to be done, even if we’re not willing to marshal the resources to do it.

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