The US Department of Education might allow certain states to postpone the requirement of linking standardized test scores and educator personnel decisions, such as those made in teacher evaluations, until the 2016-17 school year, Education Week and the New York Times report.
Arne Duncan, January 2013
The slight change isn’t a moratorium on the development or implementation of new standards in the Common Core, but it will give states a little breathing room if they’re already making good progress in implementing those standards, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan suggested to reporters in a conference call Tuesday.
The new rules apply only to states* whose original NCLB waivers were approved before 2012. The list includes Maryland but not Illinois. In addition, Mr Duncan said he didn’t expect all states would apply for the extension.
Maryland’s direction is uncertain, and given the reluctance of two Maryland counties to move forward this year with new teacher evaluation plans and the need for students in all districts to avoid too much testing during the transition to the Common Core tests coming from the PARCC consortium, the extension, if Maryland gets it, may help in a few ways:
- Schools won’t use both the MSA and the PARCC tests for accountability purposes in the same year.
- The state could measure and report student progress more accurately during the transition.
The Council of Chief State School Officers, which is meeting this week at the National Harbor in Maryland, called on the US Department of Education in May to make requirements just a little more flexible over the next two years, as states implement the new curriculum in thoughtful ways focused on high quality, an article in Education Week suggests.
“The questions are, What would a transitional accountability system look like? Are there pathways that could allow us to compare apples to apples in the old and new tests? Can we get the test-makers of the old tests and new tests to sit down and talk about that?” the journal quoted Sandy Kress, an Austin, Texas, lawyer who helped write the No Child Left Behind law, as saying.
“This was the culmination of a long, long conversation,” Education Week quoted Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, as saying. “The common core standards are too important not to do this right.”
Chris Minnich, the president of the Council of Chief State School Officers, particularly liked the change that allows states to avoid double testing, according to Education Week, which added a reaction from CCSSO President Mitchell Chester that the decision “strikes the right balance between flexibility and urgency.”
Not everyone likes the decision
Opposition on the day of the announcement came from two groups: those who think the federal government plays too big a role in education and those who are pushing for teachers to be held just as accountable as students for the quality of schools.
The group Education Trust, which advocates for low-income and minority students, posted a message on its website:
While we applaud the department for trying to avoid double testing, we are concerned about the rest of their accountability plan. … When it comes to educator evaluations, districts would be allowed to delay the consequences based on these evaluations until 2016-2017. This means that evaluation results won’t be used to take action right away when teachers aren’t doing the job students need them to do. In the meantime, the evaluations themselves would have to be based on measures of student growth that combine both old and new tests. This is an unreasonable definition of growth.
And US Sen Lamar Alexander said, “If anyone is looking for further proof that our education system is congested with federal mandates, the education secretary is now granting waivers from waivers.” Mr Alexander is the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee.
* The complete list includes 32 states and the District of Columbia: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
