Fwd: [ndsgroup] Interesting Ed Week story on exhibitions and performance assessments

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

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  From: "Monty Neill" <monty@fairtest.org>

  Date: Wed Jun 18, 2008 2:16:23 PM US/Pacific

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  Subject: [ndsgroup] Interesting Ed Week story on exhibitions and performance
  assessments

  Reply-To: "Monty Neill" <monty@fairtest.org>

  Ed Week story on exhibitions and performance assessments - I deleted the
  photos from this email - full story at
  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/06/18/42assess.h27.html?print=1 -
  Montu

  Published Online: June 16, 2008

  Published in Print: June 18, 2008

  Showing What They Know

  In Rhode Island, performance-based assessments are now required for high
  school graduation.

  By Scott J. Cech

  Providence, R.I.

  When it came time for Rachel Patterson to show what she’d learned during her
  eight-month senior project on sign language, the Barrington High School
  student didn’t just turn in a research paper.

  Before a panel of five judges on a recent afternoon, the poised 17-year-old
  delivered a 10-minute presentation on the use of sign language to communicate
  with babies and people with autism. And in an approach particularly suited to
  her subject matter, Ms. Patterson expressed her thoughts by speaking and
  signing at the same time.

  “It’s a really cool concept to show that you can make your thoughts and
  feelings visual,” she said.

  Having students show their skills in three dimensions, known as
  performance-based assessment, dates back at least to Socrates. And individual
  schools such as Barrington High—located just outside of Providence—have been
  requiring students to actively demonstrate their knowledge for years.

  But this spring, Ms. Patterson and the rest of Rhode Island’s high school
  graduating class became the first in the nation to face performance-based
  assessments as a state-mandated requirement for earning a diploma.

  To be sure, no one is saying that Rhode Island’s trailblazing move means it’s
  time to start writing the obituary for machine-scored standardized exams.
  After all, even Rhode Island still uses them, and most experts agree that
  multiple choice is here to stay.

  But as was underscored at the inaugural New England Symposium on Performance
  Assessment, held here May 28, more state education officials are starting to
  at least consider a type of testing that goes far beyond filling in the
  proverbial bubble, and that may help keep students better focused on their
  studies, both in high school and beyond.

  “It really ramps up the meaning of senior year,” said Kevin Blanchard, an
  English teacher at Barrington High who helped pilot the school’s
  performance-based assessment model. What’s more, he added, requiring students
  to actively engage in a topic tends to better prepare them for college-level
  academics, as well as the work world, where on-the-job performance is
  generally the only gauge of competence.

  An Unusual Mix

  The requirement taking effect in Rhode Island this year stems from a 2003
  policy change by the state board of regents and the guidance of Peter J.
  McWalters, the state’s outgoing commissioner of elementary and secondary
  education.

  In addition to students’ class grades and scores on the New England Common
  Assessment Program, or NECAP—the standardized test Rhode Island shares with
  Vermont and New Hampshire—graduating seniors in the Ocean State must choose
  and pass two of three possible performance-based assessments: a portfolio of
  work selected from their four years of high school, a senior project, and a
  comprehensive course assessment.

  For More Info

  For more stories on this topic see Testing & Accountability and Assessment.

  Students who choose to assemble a portfolio must defend their body of work,
  including a research project that spans all four years, in front of a panel
  of judges.

  Senior projects have included designing and implementing a poetry-writing
  course for adults, and building a snow machine and then using it to open a
  backyard sledding hill.

  At least half of each end-of-course comprehensive course assessment must
  incorporate applied-learning and performance elements, such as presenting the
  results of original research. Students often work with mentors or work as
  interns in disciplines or on issues that interest them, such as architecture
  or the problem of child soldiers, and must build Web pages, PowerPoint
  slides, or other technology to present their findings.

  The state’s unique mix of assessments was the main topic of conversation at
  the recent symposium on performance assessment hosted by the Rhode Island
  Department of Education. The event was co-sponsored by the Coalition of
  Essential Schools, a nonprofit group based in Oakland, Calif., that works to
  create more personalized and intellectually challenging schools, and the
  Portland, Maine-based Great Schools Partnership, an initiative of the Senator
  George J. Mitchell Scholarship Research Institute that works to redesign and
  strengthen education.

  “Rhode Island is showing us the way, and so we’re here to learn from Rhode
  Island,” said Louis Cohen, the coalition’s executive director. He praised
  state education officials’ boldness and innovation, but noted, “The question
  they raise is, can they do this at scale?”

  Officials acknowledge that the system remains a work in progress.

  “There are some districts that haven’t done this to scale, even though it’s
  required,” said Sharon K. Lee, a middle and high school redesign specialist
  in the state’s K-12 education department. She added, though, that only five
  of the state’s 55 high schools were out of compliance.

  Performance assessments “take a lot of time for us teachers to develop, test
  them out. And they take a lot of time in the classroom, because a lot of kids
  have no experience with this,” Theodore R. Sizer, a prominent education
  author and a former dean of Harvard University’s graduate school of
  education, said at the symposium.

  Mr. Sizer, who founded the Coalition of Essential Schools, said a teacher
  trying to squeeze a history curriculum into class time, while juggling
  preparation for both standardized and newly implemented performance-based
  assessments, would likely “barely get to World War I by May.”

  A Window Opening?

  Large-scale performance-based assessment has traveled a rocky road over the
  past two decades. Even before the federal No Child Left Behind Act sent
  states scrambling en masse to roll out more standardized tests, the inherent
  subjectivity of grading student portfolios and dissertation-defense-style
  presentations had sunk some previous attempts to implement an alternative to
  machine-scored testing.

  In 1990, Vermont began piloting what would become the first statewide
  assessment program to measure student achievement in part on the basis of
  portfolios. Officials there started backing away from the exclusive use of
  assessed portfolios, though, after a 1992 report by the Santa Monica,
  Calif.-based RAND Corp. found significant flaws in the way they were graded.

  A decade later, New York state Commissioner of Education Richard P. Mills
  batted down a proposal by a network of nontraditional schools that wanted to
  substitute individually tailored projects for the standardized Regents exams
  in English that the state had began to require for graduation.

  The network of 28 schools—the New York City-based New York Performance
  Standards Consortium—has since received a waiver that keeps its students from
  having to take Regents exams. But the exemption doesn’t cover the English
  exam, and the waiver runs out with the class of 2013.

  But amid the disenchantment with the federal NCLB legislation that has spread
  since it became law in 2002, educators and alternative-assessment supporters
  in Rhode Island and elsewhere see a chance to show not only that
  performance-based assessments are superior, but also that they can be
  implemented on a statewide scale.

  Eight other states have expressed interest in Rhode Island’s unique system,
  according to education officials here.

  “There is a window opening for performance assessment now for the second
  time,” said Raymond L. Pecheone, who designed the nation’s first
  performance-based teacher-licensure system when he was in Connecticut, and is
  now the co-director of the School Redesign Network at Stanford University.
  But, he said, “This time we have to be smarter.”

  “We are in a moment where there is a possibility for great big transformative
  change” around performance-based assessment, agreed Paul K. Leather, who’s in
  charge of high school redesign in New Hampshire, “but it won’t happen if our
  policies aren’t coherent.”

  Coherency—specifically, its lack—helped doom Vermont’s experiment in the
  1990s. The RAND report’s author, Daniel M. Koretz, now a professor of
  education at Harvard, found that Vermont’s “rater reliability’’—the extent to
  which portfolio graders agreed about the quality of individual students’
  work—was very low.

  The state eventually made portfolios optional and reintroduced standardized
  tests, which some experts say is only practical.

  “Some things need to be demonstrated by performance, and that’s a fact,” said
  Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham
  Foundation, citing driving tests and music auditions. “But making those
  things count on a large scale and in a high-stakes environment is fraught
  with difficulties.”

  The relatively recent addition of an essay portion to the SAT
  college-entrance exam, Mr. Finn added, shows that performance-based
  assessments still have their place. Still, he contended, “Vermont and Koretz
  pretty much killed off” the idea of statewide performance-based tests.

  Roy M. Seitsinger Jr., Rhode Island’s director of middle and high school
  reform, begs to differ. “Been there, done that? No way,” he said. “This is
  just beginning of getting the fruit of decades of work.”

  ‘Refer Back to the Rubric’

  Back at Barrington High School, before the afternoon’s set of performance
  assessments, work was the operative word for the 225 educators and community
  members gathered for a 90-minute tutorial on judging students’ presentations
  and portfolios.

  Stoked with school-provided coffee, they lobbed questions from their seats in
  the school auditorium to Judianne P. Point and Stephen A. Lenz, Barrington’s
  senior-project coordinators:

  “What if I know a student?”

  “What if a topic doesn’t seem as hard as another student’s?”

  “What happens if they go over 10 minutes?”

  “In all cases, refer back to the rubric,” Mr. Lenz told them, standing on the
  auditorium’s stage and indicating the double-sided sheet of paper each judge
  would use for the students, grading them on 24 criteria—everything from the
  effectiveness of audiovisual features and the amount of eye contact to
  whether their presentations’ content adequately supported the main ideas.

  Roughly half of each panel of judges is made up of regular citizens, but the
  other half comes from the statewide teaching pool. Ms. Lee and other state
  education officials say the experience of reading the portfolios of their
  colleagues’ students has increased teacher collaboration, and helped improve
  the consistency of scoring across schools.

  Regardless of the students’ topic, said Ms. Lee, “We want them to have their
  own individuality. But we want the outcomes in terms of accountability to be
  the same.”

  Therein lies the rub, some experts say.

  “I don’t see how it’s possible to do the ‘fair and consistent’ aspect of what
  is always a subjective judgment,” said Mr. Finn. “If I sing a song and you
  cook an omelette, we’re each engaging in a performance, but it’s impossible
  to imagine the judges being equally well suited to evaluate both.”

  “We have long encouraged performance assessment,” said Robert Schaeffer, a
  spokesman for the Cambridge, Mass.-based National Center for Fair & Open
  Testing, or FairTest, a watchdog group. But, he added, “Methodologically,
  there are some issues about doing high-stakes assessments with regard to
  performance.”

  Rhode Island officials, however, say they are constantly tweaking the
  process, and are confident in their system.

  In addition to school visits and spot checks by state officials and a cadre
  of teacher leaders and retired administrators, Mr. McWalters said, the
  state’s “collegial system” ensures that should the RAND Corp. want to again
  test the consistency of performance-assessment grading, Rhode Island’s system
  would pass muster.

  Still, it is unclear whether Rhode Island’s performance-assessment system
  will be seen as a model for other states, especially in light of the budget
  constraints afflicting education departments nationwide.

  Kenneth R. DiPietro, the superintendent of Rhode Island’s 5,500-student
  Coventry school district, estimated the cost of implementing the
  performance-based-assessment system at about $2 million just for the
  district’s one high school. Such costs add up to real money in a state facing
  a projected $430 million gap in its $7 billion fiscal 2009 budget.

  Contracts and Caution

  What’s more, schools’ ability to adequately implement the system depends on
  the goodwill and flexibility of teachers’ unions, because it requires extra
  staff planning time not covered in pre-existing teacher contracts.

  “We have to give a little credit to our union,” said Raymond E. Spear, the
  chairman of the Coventry school board. “We made that a major issue in the
  last contract, to build in the flexibilities we felt we need to move forward
  with our reform and reorganization of our high school.”

  That’s one union. But Rhode Island has 36 districts, and not all union locals
  may be receptive. “We have 11 districts that have contracts coming up,” said
  the state education department’s Ms. Lee, “so we’re getting a little
  nervous.”

  It’s perhaps little wonder that other states are taking a wait-and-see
  attitude.

  “I would just want to approach anything like [Rhode Island’s system]
  cautiously,” said Gail Taylor, Vermont’s director of standards and
  assessment. Voicing concerns over “the complexity and what you gain for that,
  given issues of capacity,” she added that “we have no plans at this point to
  mandate ... specific portfolio requirements again as we did in the past.”

  New Hampshire is taking a similar approach, encouraging performance
  assessments in districts, but not mandating them.

  Mr. Sizer called Rhode Island “a vital test ground” for statewide performance
  assessments, but acknowledged the hurdles of running such a program in a
  large state. “It’ll be different in different places,” he said. “I don’t know
  what you’d do in Texas.”

  Rhode Island officials, however, are staying focused on the reason they
  adopted the performance system.

  Driving back to Providence from Barrington High School in Mr. Seitsinger’s
  car, Ms. Lee described how well Rachel Patterson had done on “Unheard Words,”
  her presentation on using sign language.

  Under the scoring procedure, the judges’ highest and lowest grades are
  dropped, and when the other three were averaged, she ended up with a score of
  34.6 out of a possible 40—among the top scores of her group, and well above
  the passing threshold of 27.

  In the defense phase of her presentation, Ms. Lee said, Ms. Patterson told
  judges that learning to sign had opened up a whole new realm of
  communication, especially because she has dyslexia and thus trouble reading
  and spelling written words.

  Mr. Seitsinger beamed, but he also shook his head at Ms. Patterson’s high
  score. Referring to the paper-and-pencil-only standardized test Rhode Island
  students must also take, he said: “That’s the kind of young lady who would
  blow up on NECAP.”

  Coverage of pathways to college and careers is underwritten in part by a
  grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

  Vol. 27, Issue 42, Pages 25-27

  Monty Neill, Ed.D.

  Deputy Director

  FairTest

  342 Broadway

  Cambridge, MA 02139

  617-864-4810 x 101;  fax 617-497-2224

  monty@fairtest.org

  http://www.fairtest.org

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