EVALUATION AND MEASUREMENT

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Principal May/June 2012

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TEST SHEET/VEER

What We Losein
Winning the
Test Score Race
Value-added assessment models
could be a win-win solution.
BY OLAF JORGENSON

To achieve perpetually better test results each year as mandated by the No Child Left
Behind Act (NCLB), teachers in successful schools such as Leroy Anderson Elementary in
San Jos, California, will "try anything" to raise scores, as the school's principal stated in an
interview with The San fos Mercury News. In schools across my state for the past decade, the
same single-minded determination to improve outcomes feeds a relendess focus on teaching to the test that, to the dismay of many teachers, builds low-level skills such as memorizadon and recall at the expense of higher-order apdtudesand at a tremendous cost to our
community and future.
None of this is news to us. We've read the studies demonstradng that success on standardized tests rests heavily on such independent variables as a child's socioeconomic status and
the educadon level of his or her parentsfactors that have nothing to do with the quality
of schools or teachers. As the ever-provocadve Alfie Kohn often tells conference audiences,
the single best predictor of success on a standardized test is a child's ZIP code. Children
of affluent, educated parents are the best test takers. No amount of school improvement
will impact the root societal causes of the "achievement gap," although our public schools
invest incomprehensible amounts of dme, tax revenue, and effort to make a difference.
Most educators and many parents know that authentic learning involves much more
than perpetually improving test results. To argue that one test score can represent a child's
learning is rather like saying a doctor can determine a padent's overall health using only a
tongue depressor.

www.naesp.org

Principal May/June 2012

13

EVALUATION A N D MEASUREMENT
11 I - 21 3I +' 5I 61 7I 81 9! .JI

memorize it. Standardized testing will

Sit, Get, Spit, Forget
be obsolete for the children now subWhat don't standardized test scores
jected
to mastering it.
measure? We know that they don't
Whatever
your opinion about the
measure a child's creative ability. They
efficacy
of
and
rationale for standarddon't require children to research,
ized
testing,
NCLB
remains the law
explain, debate, elaborate, presof
the
land.
The
U.S.
Department of
ent, rebut, or improvise. They don't
Education
recently
granted
waivers to
demand pviblic-speaking skills. They
nearly
a
dozen
states,
with
more
penddon't reflect decades of research
ing,
that
exchange
student
annual
demonstrating that children come
growth targets for the requirement
to school with an array of individvial
that teacher evaluation be tied to
learning styles and perhaps nine or
student test results, representing the
more different types of "intelligence,"
only one or two of which educators can same animal vidth different stripes.
In the NCLB and waiver states, the
measure with a paper-and-pencil test.
call
for improved student achieveFurther, research points to mountment
as the foundation for school
ing evidence that certain qualities
reform
remains fixed in mainstream
schools don't testsuch as perseverculture
and media. As long as public
ance, resiliency, and determination
officials
are compelled to measure
play a role in high academic achieveschools,
teachers, and children by the
ment. Multiple-guess standardized
outcomes
of annual multiple-guess
testing can't reflect character traits
exams,
schools
and teachers and chilthat encourage success in school and
dren
will
continue
to face compariin later life.
sons
and
(labeling)
according to the
How ironic that these standardtest
scores
they
generate.
ized tests, which offer only one
right answer to evei'y problem, can't
The Numbers Game
capture the innovative, pioneering
thought purportedly so valued by busi- The testing phenomenon in America
eclipses NCLB as a mindset, more
ness and industry, particularly where I
than a mandate. Standardized test
live in Silicon Valley. Memorizing and
regurgitating facts for a multiple-guess scores are useful because they're
measurable. We all want schools to
exam"sit-get-spit-forget"certainly
be accountable, and test scores make
doesn't prepare students for creative
accountability easy to quantify. In Calior entrepreneurial leadership. Nor
fornia, the Academic Performance
will it serve a generation of digital
Index (API) is a measurement of
learners for whom sorting, verifyacademic performance that tracks the
ing, and applying information will
progress of individual schools based
transcend the need to acquire or
on annual yearly progress targets.
Although the API does afford passing
attention to attendance and graduation rates in ranking schools, and
in 2011 began considering dropout
rates, the heavy emphasis in API
Access the following web resources by visiting
Principal magazine online: www.naesp.
school comparisons centers on stanorg/MayJun12
dardized test outcomes.
Realtors selling houses in "high API
The University of Pennsylvania's Operation
neighborhoods" relish the scores. PolPublic Education offers a detailed FAQ on
iticians decrying the state of Califorvalue-added assessment.
nia's public schools brandish stagnant
A research paper from the Bill and Melinda
or low API scores as "pt oof ' of the
Gates Foundation, "Learning About
decay of our system. Even improveTeaching: Initial Findings from the
ments in test scores inspire critics to
Measures of Effective Teaching Project,"
rage about the costs of public educaexamines value-added models.

Principal
ONLINE

14

Principal May/June 2012

tion and the anemic return on investment for paltry gains.

For parents and children across the
nation, America's fixation on test scores
obscures what teachers must omit from
their lessons todaynamely exercises in
critical thinking, creative analysis, and
unconventional problem solving.
Alternatives to the NCLB status
quo exist, of course, but they're not
as expedient or convenient as simply comparing test score data from
school to school, year to year. In 2005,
then-Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings allowed two states, Tennessee and North Carolina, to participate
in a U.S. Department of Education
pilot session to test "growth" models
as an alternative to the "status" model
imposed by NCLB.
Growth assessment models vary, but
they all focus on improvement realized
by students rather than against a fixed
(often ai bitrai7) target, acknowledging that not all children start out at the
same academic level at the beginning
of the school year and thus won't all
hit the same target. This is substantially
different from the NCLB status model
that demands a certain percentage
of children in a school, regardless of
ability level and across all subgroups,
achieve proficiency; that this percentage increases annually; and that by
2014, all children in America across
every school setting, subgroup, and
abilify level will be "proficient."
North Carolina implemented a variation on the growth model, a sort of
hybrid program that enables underperforming students to make progress on
a value-added basis for up to four years,
and then holds them accountable to
a fixed proficiency target readily measured under the NCLB status quo. The
Tennessee Department of Education
developed the so-called "value added"
growth model considered for the U.S.
Department of Education pilot, but
Tennessee subsequently deemed it
incompatible with NCLB and submitted a separate growth model for pilot
implementation.
In the value-added assessment model,
schools determine how much students
www.naesp.org

Ultimately, great schools

are measured not by the
accomplishments of their
students, but by the extraordinary
lives led by their graduates."
have progressed in the tested subjects
over the course of one school year; a
gain of at least one year's growdi is satisfactoiy for the child and the teacher.
Less would be problematic, and more
growth calls for commendation. It's a
veiy straightforward premise.
Using the value-added model,
administrators can compare schools
according to the size of the gains their
teachers consistendy generateand
ostensibly, not by an absolute ranking
of aggregate student test scores. The
U.S. Department of Education's Race
to the Top program requires the use of
value-added models to assess student
growth, leading to an increase in state
adoption of these assessment systems.
In California, a value-added system
for K-12 assessment wotild scramble
the tidy API rankings of "better and
worse" schools. We might expect
growth scores to correspond inversely
to the demographics of the school
communides; indeed, an affluent
suburban school serving middle class
and privileged students who start
every year at grade level and prepared
to learn might well show smaller
valtie-added gains than a school that's
effectively serving a more at-risk poptilation. Which is the "better" school in
this scenario?
Complex Questions
Clearly a straight value-added model
would prove more complex than the
current testing paradigm. It would
require more work, more time, and
more funding to administer, process, evaluate, explain, and apply the
results of value-added tests.
The value-added approach effectively undermines standardized test
score comparisons and adherents to
the status quo in other key respects.
Let's face it: NCLB and the now-prolific emphasis on test outcomes have
www.naesp.org

spawned a lucrative cottage industry

that thrives on the anxieties generated by multiple-guess, high-stakes
tests. Erom pricey test-prep services,
programs, and materials to online
and conventional publishers of testing
booklets and study guides to for-profit
organizations and charter schools
that contract to take over "failing"
schoolsan entire network of opportunistic and entrepreneurial capitalists
depend on the NCLB-inspired status
quo, and many an outcomes-based
livelihood could be in jeopardy with a
shift to a value-added model.
What's more, politicians and media
pundits intent on using test scores to
decry the deplorable state of public
education wotild lose their single most
relied-upon weapon. My hunch is that
in many at-risk communities, a surprising number of the children who
remain in a .school for a reasonable
amount of time with consistent attention from a qualified teacher make
substantial growth gains that don't
receive any attention in the published
all-school restilts. And despite what we
hear in political speeches and television news broadcasts, we all know many
qualified, dedicated teachers who
serve at-risk youth. How many "failing
schools" would shine in the light of a
value-added assessment program?
Any complete, candid appraisal
of the value-added model must pose
the question: Would teachers' unions
welcome a test that measures whether
a teacher's impact is more or less than
we should expect, relative to a child's
growth in a year of schooling? An
ineffective teacher can't easily hide
behind assessments that disaggregate
the resultsand focus their aforementioned lightto the level of each
student, before and after the teacher's
annual work is complete.
All the thorns on the value-added

model might help explain why Tennessee deemed it incompatible with

NCLB, why North Carolina blended
its growth model with the uncompromising "all children proficient"
target espoused by the law, and why
some states haven't widely considered
implementation of a value-added
assessment program. The value-added
model offers a bold departure from
NCLB as we know it in terms of providing more meaningful data that can
better serve teachers, children, families, and schools.
A Healthy Catalyst?
At its core, the campaign to bring
more accountability' and competition into America's public schools
is a noble one, to the extent that we
seek to better prepare children to be
productive and responsible citizens,
capable of contributing to society
while finding fulfillment in their chosen paths. Accountability and competition can serve as healthy catalysts in
reforming public education over time
if our assessment system helps us to:
Intervene with children who aren't
making progress, individually as well
as across at-risk subgroups;
Identify and address underperforming (and high-achieving) educators;
and
Genuinely improve (rather than
narrow) teaching and learning.
Pointedly, however, our test score
obsession in California and elsewhere
does little to improve teaching and
learning in our schools. Ultimately,
great schools are measured not by
the accomplishments of their students, but by the extraordinary lives
led by their graduates. With all that
standardized tests subtract from the
learning process, in our determined
march toward high test scores, we fail
to prepare today's students to lead the
extraordinary lives they deserve. Q
Olaf Jorgenson is head of school at
Almadn Country School in San Jos,
California.
Principal May/June 2012

15

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