MO Legislators - Here's The Follow Up You Need to Ask

The following email was sent to all Missouri legislators from DESE. Will any of them ask the follow up questions that need to be asked?


Dear Legislator,

You may have heard about Missouri’s state assessments for English language arts and literacy and mathematics changing in 2014-15 to reflect school districts moving to the Common Core State Standards. We wanted to tell you more about these assessments, and how they will help schools better assess program effectiveness and improve student achievement.

The new assessments are computer-based meaning the computer adjusts the difficulty of questions throughout the assessment in response to student performance. For example, a student who answers a question correctly will receive a more challenging item, while an incorrect answer generates an easier question. By adapting to the student as the assessment is taking place, these assessments present an individually tailored set of questions to each student and can quickly identify which skills students have mastered. This approach represents a significant improvement over traditional paper-and-pencil assessments used in many states today, providing more accurate scores for all students across the full range of the achievement continuum.

Better information for teachers: Optional computer adaptive interim assessments will provide a more detailed picture of where students excel or need additional support, helping teachers to differentiate instruction. The interim assessments will be reported on the same scale as the summative assessment, and schools will have the flexibility to assess small elements of content or the full breadth of the Common Core State Standards at locally-determined times throughout the year. 

More efficient and more secure: Computer adaptive tests are typically shorter than paper-and-pencil assessments because fewer questions are required to accurately determine each student’s achievement level. The assessments draw from a large bank of questions, and since students receive different questions based on their responses, test items are more secure and can be used for a longer period of time. 

More accurate: Computer adaptive tests offer teachers and schools a more accurate way to evaluate student achievement, readiness for college and careers, and to measure growth over time.

Computerized assessments allow teachers, principals, and parents to receive results in weeks, not months. Faster results mean that teachers can use the information from optional interim assessments throughout the school year to differentiate instruction and better meet the unique needs of their students.

If you want to experience the new assessments for yourself, try the practice test here: http://sbac.portal.airast.org/practice-test/

Thank You.

Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Communications | 573.751.34

The questions that need to be asked in response to this email.

Dear DESE,

1. Better information for teachers? This statement is true only if the district decides to use these "optional" formative assessments. Nothing is free, so what can districts expect to pay for these "optional" assessments?  Currently, teachers provide their own formative assessments and districts are investing in curricula that include formative assessments. Where is the need/justification for additional testing?

2. More efficient and more secure? How does having more questions in the databank make those questions more secure? If you are claiming they are secure from cheating by teachers viewing the questions in advance, please provide evidence that this is a widespread systematic problem in Missouri that warrants the investment in this expensive mode of testing. What is the benefit to the student, taxpayer or teacher of "secure" questions?

To be able to claim that a question accurately assesses a student's achievement against a standard requires a significant amount of data on that particular question.  In an adaptive model, the sheer volume of questions means that any single question will have less students responding to it generating data. How then can you state that these tests, which have yet to be given, will be efficient and accurate measures of student achievement? Where is the data? This looks like an attempt to use an emotionally charged word, "secure," to describe something that has no real value.

3. More accurate?  More accurate than what? Where is the study that shows computers are better than other methods? Are we expected to take your word for it?

4. Faster results promised - Granted, the turn around time on student scores may be a little faster than scantron, but we give the summative assessment in April when the end of the school year is mere weeks away. There are months between when the kids take these tests and the next school year so speed of reporting is not really an issue. That data is only useful (marginally so) to the teacher who has those kids the following year since there is a retention loss in those intervening months and a totally new curricula and set of standards. Even if results were quick, the teacher would only have a few weeks to alter her teaching plan to affect the kids taking the test this school year. This is not terribly helpful.  The only way this speed is useful is if the schools uses the "optional" tests you refer to, but again we must ask at what cost? Most teachers grade their formative assessments in a matter of hours to days already. Please demonstrate the savings.

DESE has a tendency to promote new programs, touting their benefits without ever accounting for their costs. Many of these programs start with federal seed money, but the expectation is that the state will take up the lifetime cost of running the program. The SBAConsortium that you have gotten us into appears to be exactly the same. The U.S. Dept. of Education is supplying 100% of the funding now, but that funding will run out in September 2014. You have yet to tell the legislature how much our state's continued participation in the consortia is going to cost us. Your email does not list any of the costs for these assessments, formative or summative, and you do not indicate who is expected to pay for them. We cannot afford education "at any cost" here in Missouri. We need you to lay out the costs and identify the responsible parties for these "wonderful" assessments so we can determine if we can afford them.

Thank you. Missouri Legislator

Troubling MSIP5 Heading to the State Board of Education This Month

The fifth version of Missouri's School Improvement Plan, MSIP5, will soon be before the State Board of Education, but it is unclear whether the plan's authors will be able to address all the feedback given at the various regional public meetings held around the state in this final revision before submitting the plan to the Missouri Register. The plan prescribes broad standards by which individual school districts must set their own achievement objectives. The meetings were ordered after the sheer volume of comments from educators and community members around the state, concerned about the higher standards and volume of testing being proposed, forced the board to table the plan in April to allow more time for review and comment.

Many in the education community are concerned that the increased amount of testing called for in the MSIP rules would result in lost instructional time in those subjects. End of Course exams for high school students, in particular, are expanding to more than a dozen subject areas. And the testing requirements are extremely onerous for small schools.

For example, Andy Turgeon, superintendent of the Knox County R-1 School District said,

"Every student at Knox County High School would have to take EOCs in three science disciplines: biology, chemistry and physics. But as a small school, Knox County doesn't offer enough sections of those classes for every student to take all three. [We] can't cut any classes, so the solution is to add more teachers. That would have an undeniable budgetary impact.

An expanded battery of tests would also narrow students' options for tailoring their education to their gifts and interests. Using the same example, students who don't excel in and don't plan to later study science would be forced to take numerous science classes anyway in order to meet assessment requirements."

Also concerning is MSIP's decreased standards for areas like physical education and the arts which may result in some districts using those disciplines to offset their budget shortfalls. The Plan also prescribes standards for students as much as five years post-graduation. Fits rather nicely into the cradle to work tracking plan the Department of Education has been working on for decades, don't you think?

The term micromanaging is used in the business world to describe someone who takes oversight measures to the extreme. Instead of improving productivity and increasing work quality, the end result is usually frustrated workers and piles of unread paperwork. When considering all the additional reporting being required by DESE, SBOE and USDOE, one can't help but be reminded of the scene from the movie Office Space where various managers waste additional time reprimanding an employee for not including a standard cover memo on his TPS reports. (See a version of this scene here)

DESE REPRESENTATIVE: (in an exaggerated laid back tone) Mr. Superintendent I noticed that you haven’t had all your 10th grade students complete the chemistry assessments from the MSIP.

SUPERINTENDENT: Yes, I know. But we’re working on it.

DESE: Yeah, that’s good, but uh, we’re going to need you to give that assessment ASAP. It’s in the MSIP. You did read The Plan didn’t you?

SUPER: Yes, I read it, but you see our students already have full schedules so we are having to squeeze the chemistry curriculum into their PE time. Our teachers are working on a novel teaching game that uses the periodic table as a sort of basketball matrix so the kids earn more points if they shoot from the noble gases line than they do if they shoot from the metals. But we’re still working some of the bugs out of…

DESE REP: (interrupting) I see, but if you could just go ahead and give that assessment next week that would be great. And I’m going to go ahead and send you another copy of the MSIP and the reporting forms.

SUPER: But I’ve already got all that paperwork. It’s more a matter of time and budget…

DESE Rep walks off. Super sighs.

State Board of Education (SBOE) Rep enters

SBOE Rep: (in cheery voice) Mr. Superintendent, we need to talk about the chemistry assessment.

Super: (in exasperated tone) I know. I know. DESE was just here talking about that.

SBOE Rep: Um yeah, did you read the MSIP?

Super: I did. I neither understand the point of nor agree with the policy, but you put it in place anyway and I’m left figuring out how to make it happen and pay for it. But hey, thanks for stopping by.

There is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to accountability. MSIP5 may have reached that point.

"It seems that we're taking choices away from our students and forcing everybody to be the same," Turgeon said. "That's not what we are."

Perhaps a more accurate statement would be, "That's not who we used to be." Common Core Standards are all about making everyone the same and taking away the potential for individual students to make what someone else has determined is "the wrong choice."

The next State Board of Education meeting is scheduled for Aug. 16. The board will receive DESE's recommendations for MSIP 5 a week before that. That gives DESE about three weeks to work in the revisions each Regional Advisory Committee recommended.

Common Core Tests For Special Needs Students

If you've been worried that your special needs child will be left out of the Common Core Assessments, fear not. Nirvi Shah from EdWeek reported today,

"The two groups tasked with developing the common-core assessments have been thinking about students with disabilities from the time they first won the grants from the U.S. Department of Education to design the tests. That’s a sharp departure from what’s been the norm in standardized testing, which has been to consider accommodations for students with disabilities as an afterthought."

The two consortia are working to minimize or eliminate any school to school inconsistencies that currently exist in giving standardized tests to children with IEP's. Carol André, the special education director at Exeter High School in Exeter, N.H. said,

"In particular, when teachers or proctors are allowed to read portions of a test aloud for students, the way that information is read can vary widely... We had to all but police our own people to be sure they were not giving the kids an unfair advantage or leg up. It was really hard, especially for our younger kids. The adults desperately want them to do well. Suddenly, without even being conscious of it, you may have an adult who’s reading the question and the four answers but they’re doing a little more emphasis on choice C, or the kid is reading the adult’s expression.”

Michael Hock, co-chair of the accessibility and accommodations work group for the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, boasted that the new generation of computerized tests will be able to read words aloud in the same way, in the same voice, from state to state. He added,

“We’re not trying to provide anyone with any kind of advantage—that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Accommodations available on the test include:

• Portions of the test can be magnified right on the screen. No more oversized type on paper tests. Such features also can be turned on and off, so only students for whom they are allowed may access them.
• Individual students will have the ability to highlight or obscure words on the screen (for the science test only)
• Background music or sounds may be played to keep the students calm or focused, (a feature intended for students with attention disorders.)
• Changing the color of the text or allowing students to change the contrast of what they are reading. (for students with visual impairments and some types of reading-based learning disabilities)
• Future tests may be translated into different languages.

“The idea of making tests accessible, it’s a social-justice issue,” Mr. Hock said. “And we want to accurately measure every kid’s skills.”

The consortia are charged with creating exams for 99 percent of students. For the remaining 1 percent of students with significant cognitive disabilities, separate exams are being designed.

If accountability is so great for teachers, why don't we apply it to legislators too?

A couple weeks ago very few people outside of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District knew who John Kuhn, their superintendent, was. His letter to several Texas legislators, now known as The Alamo Letter, has changed that and added another perspective to the debate on what is wrong with today’s education. The letter basically calls on the legislators to stop pandering to big business at the expense of education funding. It also points out that continued accountability (i.e. testing) requirements come at the expense of less money for teachers. The financial situation in Texas is slightly different from that of Missouri although both states are facing declining state income in a struggling economy.

A follow up interview with Mr. Kuhn provided to Anthony Cody of Ed Week provided some additional thoughts that are far more universal. He spoke about the problems with accountability and how it has led TX to focus on just four main areas of study; math, science, social studies, and language arts. Not surprisingly these are the four main areas where standardized tests are available or required. He went on to suggest that if accountability were really so great we would apply it to all public servants. “Why do we not require our legislators to make ‘Adequate Yearly Progress?’ We have the data from their congressional districts, do we not? There is crime data, health care data, poverty figures, and drug use statistics for every state and federal legislative district. Why, exactly, do we not establish annual targets for our legislators to meet?” He says that if fixing all the problems in education were possible simply by applying accountability, then that same accountability applied to government would “eliminate 100% of poverty, crime, drug abuse, and preventable illness by 2014!”

He notes that lack of accountability does not explain the continued success in other areas of education not covered by common assessments.

Therefore, the only saving grace in the arts and foreign languages and vocational classes and athletics is that we have passionate people teaching those subjects who really care about their students and their subjects. And that is the core of my disdain for this ugly baby called accountability--if the test-and-label philosophy really worked, then you would think there would be far worse teaching going on outside the core classes, but there isn't generally. Why? Because good teachers are motivated by passion and a moral sense of mission, not by the threats of absent bureaucrats.

Mr. Kuhn also characterized the narrative of the school reform movement as, “a simple formula: kids are victims, teachers are the villains, and some administrator is the messianic hero. A dynamic personality comes into a bad school and doesn't accept mediocrity. He or she cleans up the discipline and fires all the bad teachers, confronting the wicked teachers' union along the way.” This sounds great and, as he says, sells books, but it also, “relies on the same dangerous logic that tyrants use to justify lording over peasants and restricting their liberties. In this case, the benign dictator is a self-promoting principal or superintendent with all the answers, and the poor clueless peasants in dire need of a paternalistic leader are the teachers.”

It is worth it to read the entirety of the Ed Week interview. Mr. Kuhn notes that other superintendents have contacted him to offer their support and thanks for saying what many of them have been thinking. The simple fixes that legislators and reformers promote, or in some cases force down our throats, are often anything but simple for those who have to carry them out. The real world is less simple and more messy. In the real world, students’ families struggle with poverty, crime, poor health care and addiction. All these societal influences can make it difficult for children to learn and nothing but a superman of a teacher is going to get children from the worst of these situations to a four-year college. For some, a good sustainable life may simply be growing up to raise a family, go to church and hold a local manual labor job. We are heading towards a definition of successful education that would deem such a person a failure and penalize the system for not making them be otherwise.