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School testing

Focus on accountability, pragmatics when refining state requirements

In order to ensure that K-12 public schools are effectively educating children to master skills and concepts critical for college and career readiness, there must be a means of measuring that mastery. Before that, though, there must be some agreed-upon standards that students must be expected to meet. Then, there must be mechanisms for monitoring student progress and adjusting instruction to maximize each child’s learning. That measuring and monitoring comes in the form of assessments, and those standards come in several packages. Both are critical to ensuring that our public-education systems locally, in Colorado and across the nation, are effective, relevant and accountable. In a field of constant change, this requires constant dialogue, monitoring and fine-tuning.

There are many cooks in the standards kitchen and many critics at the table. The federal government requires that states adopt standards – and then test to show proficiency in whatever those standards are – for English language arts, math and science. For 44 states – including Colorado – this means Common Core State Standards for math and language arts; it does not cover science. The Common Core resulted from a collaborative process involving state education commissioners, governors and teachers from 48 states who worked together to identify the things students must know in order to be ready for careers and college after their K-12 years. The federal government requires states to test on whatever their adopted standards, Common Core or otherwise, but allows states to choose their testing mechanism. Colorado has standards beyond those required by the federal government and tests on them as well – namely social studies, school readiness and early-childhood reading.

To measure students’ grasp on these benchmarks – and, by extension, schools’ effectiveness at educating their students – Colorado submits its youngsters to a battery of tests beginning in kindergarten and not stopping until late in high school. Individual school districts, 9-R included, often administer an additional testing regimen all their own, geared more toward informing instruction to improve student outcomes. Taken together, this assessment suite has provoked criticism from those who say there is too much testing and not enough learning.

The state Legislature is wrestling over whether state-mandated testing can or ought to be reduced and is considering which, if any, assessments can be discarded, whether to allow parents to opt their children out of the tests and whether to ignore the federal-testing requirements altogether. As with all such matters, an extreme response will not serve the state or its students at all well.

Critics of Colorado’s assessment landscape are not offering such nuanced solutions but, instead, advocating for a wholesale dismissal of the tests. “We will not live with the cumbersome, opaque, one-size-fits-all, data-mining, unvalidated, curriculum-driving product,” said Bethany Drosendahl, who served on a task force charged with making recommendations to change the state’s assessment requirements.

That approach does not answer the critical question of how to ensure that Colorado’s students are learning what they need to be successful beyond high school and how to help identify schools that need help in turning out well-educated students. Accountability is a critical component of education, and without some measure by which to gauge it, the notion is wholly subjective. The Legislature must limit its action on school assessments to fine-tuning, so that there are consistent opportunities to gauge whether students grasp critical language arts, math, science and social studies concepts. That could mean fewer tests over the course of 13 school years; it must not mean a wholesale suspension of accountability.



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