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

Indiana Legislation Opposing Common Core Gets a Hearing

On Wednesday the Indiana Senate Education Committee heard testimony on SB 193, sponsored by Senator Scott Schneider, which calls for Indiana to withdraw from the Common Core Standards.

A crowd of close to 300 people showed up to the rally before the hearing to voice their strong support for this legislation. Among those speaking at the rally were former Secretary of Education Bill Evers and former TX State Superintendent Robert Scott, in addition to Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle, the two moms who started digging in to Common Core when they noticed their children's math education had changed, and not for the better.

Tuttle recounted for the audience her frustrating search for someone accountable for how math was being taught in her child's school. This fuzzy math was confusing for both child and parent. It did not contain the standard algorithms most of us grew up with. More disconcerting than just the poor choice of teaching methods was the way responsibility for the math program was kicked down the road from teacher, to principle, to superintendent, to their state department of elementary education and finally to PARCC, the government funded assessment consortia that their state had signed on to with their No Child Left Behind Waiver application.  While Tuttle was able, with increasing difficulty, to get meetings with each successively higher office to find out why her child's school was using fuzzy math, she could not get a meeting with anyone at PARCC.

That's because PARCC is not accountable to the parents who ultimately have to deal with their children's experience with Common Core Standards. PARCC and SMARTER Balanced Consortia are private corporations, who are selling trademarked assessments to their forty five member states.  They are accountable to their governing states only in the aggregate. If any one state has an issue with the assessments they produce, neither consortia is obligated to do anything about it.  There are various rules for what form of majority is necessary for change to take place in each consortia, but that is not the point.  The point is that Indiana, and also Missouri are no longer in charge of their own state education standards. They must now negotiate them with a number of other states. If you as a parent or a school district want something different in your schools you cannot have it.

This is the core issue (if you'll pardon the pun) that we have with Common Core State Standards.  There is zero local control. Teachers may not deviate from or alter the standards in any way. They are trademarked. There is no path for correction, even for obvious mistakes like a simple math error that was identified early on in the draft phases, but was still not corrected three drafts later. There is no path identified for this because the roll out of these standards has been so fast there has been no time to consider everything that is needed for them to operate. That means that an error on the assessment will be repeated in 45 states and count against teachers in those states whose performance reviews now take into account how their students score on these assessments. 

Contrast that to the way MO DESE has handled our GLE's in the past. Yearly, teachers and districts were able to submit complaints or suggestions to DESE for ways to add clarity to our standards or identify errors that needed to be fixed. DESE had been reasonably responsive to this input and made most changes in a timely manner. That process will be completely gone by 2014 when Common Core is supposed to be fully implemented.

The one thing each district, and ultimately tax payer, will be accountable for is the cost of implementing the Common Core standards and assessments. No one really know what this cost is going to be for a number of reasons.  Missouri's DESE was not required to estimate this cost to each district, nor inform them that such costs were coming. If you ask your local shcool board or superintendent what their cost will be to implement Common Core, most of them will not know. More shocking will be the number of them who do not even know what Common Core is or that it is coming. 

Opponents of the legislation in Indiana said most implementation costs would be replacement cost for things already in each district's budget like professional development or materials. Proponents disagree, noting that teacher training will be far more extensive than traditionally done, possibly including out of town sessions in regional training centers. There is currently only one approved vendor for textbooks, Pearson. One teacher has looked into buying a replacement ELA book for the new CCSS in her fourth grade class and found the new book to be two and half times as expensive as the one she had been using for the last several years.  Districts will have little control over these costs, because they have virtually no control over the standards or assessments.

The assessments are an even larger portion of these costs as they are supposed to be done on line, which not only requires input devices like comptuers or tablets, but also sufficient broadband to accommodate all the students taking them at once. Once you add technology, you must also add a host of support staff to maintain and troubleshoot that technology, adding further cost to a district. In Missouri, we have no room in our state budget for these extra costs. That means local districts will have to find the money because the foundation formula is not going to give it to them.

Representative Kurt Bahr will be introducing legislation again this year to get Missouri out of Common Core. If Indiana's experience this week was any indication, he ought to find tremendous support for his bill here in Missouri, not only from public school families, but also from private school and homeschool families. Common Core is reaching in to all these education venues. As the realities of Common Core, which is being rolled out in various districts right now, come to light, our representatives in Jefferson City should start hearing a lot more from their constituents who want us out of this federally pushed national standards program.