Renee Foose, in an op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun, here, calls on the Maryland State Department of Education to update its tests to align with material in the Common Core, which is what teachers are teaching in the state’s classrooms, before schools and teachers are held accountable under the state’s new teacher evaluation programs. She writes:
The release of the Maryland School Assessment results — anticipated early next week — will surely send a ripple of shock to parents across the state. Educators are bracing for dips in math performance. At first glance, the scores will appear to indicate that student achievement has fallen, when in fact they reflect a mismatch between what is taught and what is tested.
The scores for the MSA have been released to the schools, but they are under strict embargo until the state board authorizes their release at the July board meeting. However, the disconnect Ms Foose has noticed, probably based on lower math scores in Howard County, where she serves as the superintendent of schools, are likely to be noticed in other districts across the state. The MSA is based entirely on the old State Curriculum, known as the Voluntary State Curriculum prior to 2009, when the state dropped the “voluntary” word from its name.
One example: The SC requires students to learn about circle graphs, but the Common Core doesn’t specify circle graphs per se at any grade level. So, while the state has asked teachers to adapt and become more proficient in the material in the Common Core, some of the material on the state’s standardized tests isn’t in the Common Core. It was in the old State Curriculum, which means it’s on the test, but it’s not in the Common Core, which means teachers might not be teaching it as they adapt their lesson plans to align with the Common Core.
We wish to echo Ms Foose’s call for an updating of the state’s standardized tests to ones that are more closely aligned with the Common Core. We think such an adaptation would be especially urgent given the requirement that at least 20 percent of teachers’ evaluation scores depend on the scores their students receive on those tests.
This is not to ignore the huge push to fix standardized tests in general, making them more reliable and valid and giving some shred of hope that they might be able to measure some small part of a teacher’s overall effectiveness. But it is simply to say, in this one case in Maryland, the tests ought to be updated to foster instruction in the new direction the state has chosen: the Common Core in math and English/language arts, and the Next Generation Science Standards in science.
This is a move that should be made before tests are used as a factor in teacher evaluations, although the long lead times required to change a test, including item and form development, field testing, and so on, as well as the new laws requiring the incorporation of standardized tests into teacher evaluations next year in most Maryland counties, make that a practical impossibility. But we should at least get started.
And we are getting started. As we reported at the end of last month, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) has announced plans to field test math and English/language tests in Maryland schools during the 2013-14 school year. Only a few students at each school will try the new tests, but the new tests, aligned to the Common Core standards, should then be ready for general use during the 2014-15 school year.
