The Washington Post obtained and published a letter last week approved by 22 of Maryland’s 24 superintendents. The document is behind a pay wall, and I can’t find a copy of it on the website of the Public School Superintendents of Maryland, whose executive director, Carl D Roberts, signed the letter.
To summarize, the letter makes it clear that superintendents don’t feel they’ve been given enough time to implement school reforms fully.
“Parents, elected officials, community leaders, and pundits are reacting sometimes with alarm as local school systems throughout the state deal with the challenges of implementing the many components of education reform,” they write. “New curriculum in math and English language arts, new assessments, new teacher evaluations, and new school accountability measures are being implemented simultaneously in Maryland schools to fulfill commitments associated with federal grant programs.”
And, they want to skip the Maryland School Assessment in math and reading this March. They want to focus on exams from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, which will be field tested this spring in every Maryland public school and become operational in the 2014-15 school year.
Skipping the MSA, they say, would allow schools to focus their “total concentration … on the alignment of revised curricula assessed by new tests (PARCC). Superintendents question the validity of continuing to administer the MSA while training teachers to implement new non-aligned curricula.”
The tone of the letter is cautious, but it expresses a willingness to move forward with reform efforts, such as basing teacher evaluations on standardized test scores and changing the curriculum so that it covers material that will be on the tests from PARCC.
While the intention is good—schools need more time to get reform right—the letter isn’t likely to change anything. It might cause a delay in some aspects of school reform, but even that is unlikely.
The reason I’m pessimistic about this letter is that it stops short of calling for action. I love their last request, though, as they request that, “Decisions regarding the use of student performance data from PARCC assessments, other than for school improvement purposes, be delayed until such time that the results provide valid and reliable data.”
Which begs the question: When will the results from PARCC tests provide valid and reliable data?
Or better: How can a standardized test be valid if many of the learning standards in the Common Core, to which the PARCC tests purport to be aligned, cannot be assessed on a standardized test under the normal school-level administration methods for such tests? The very definition of “validity” implies that the test measures the learning standards to which it purports to align.
Or even better: How can a standardized test be valid if many of the English language arts standards in the early elementary grades are not appropriate for students at those grade levels? (That is, if kids can’t grasp a learning standard because their brains haven’t developed sufficiently, how can a test question measure it validly?)
How about: How can a test ever achieve a high standard of validity if many of the English language arts standards at the high school level have been rejected by subject area experts as being a complete waste of time to teach? (That is, if teachers don’t teach it because they value their students’ time, all the students are going to get questions about it wrong on any test.)
Or here’s one: If a test is actually “reliable,” why do we have to give it to every single student every single year to gauge teacher effectiveness or bring about school improvement? The very definition of “reliable” implies that we could give it to a random selection of students every few years and obtain the same results. If that’s not how it works, then the test will never achieve a sufficient reliability.
