Without question, the statewide assessments remain as contentious as they are ubiquitous. Also not in dispute, the tests will continue to be used into the foreseeable future. Test scores will power significant decisions.
The most important of those decisions surely have to do with students' futures. Realistically, these decisions are and will be made on the basis of single scores derived from the test. Evidence is mounting, moreover, that decisions made on single scores are harmful to large numbers of cultural and linguistic minority students. The tyranny of this single score need not persist.
To be sure, reliance on only the score from the statewide assessment may continue. Use of that test surely will continue. Still, a responsible alternative to the use of that single score is possible: use of multiple assessments rather than the present single assessment.
In the tortured context of the moment, the prospect of additional assessments reasonably may spark nightmarish visions to educators and others as well as to politicians and the supporters of the recent accountability mandates. No one appears ready to deal with a proposal for more assessments. The politics of the accountability movement have been brutal and harsh; sensitivities and pride have been bent if not crushed. Surely partisans who favored the testing and accountability systems as well as those who opposed these enactments appear to have little reserve of trust to expend in another encounter about assessments.
Politicians, for example, properly worry about revenue short-falls, gaps in the social fabric, and needed cuts in expenditures to achieve a balanced budget. Predictably, they will say that no additional assessments are warranted in the accountability system that has only begun to operate. Moreover, funds for more assessment instruments, even if such assessments might be merited, are unavailable. Educators, parents, and others who seek improved and more appropriate decisions for children in school must be wary of yet another test or set of tests atop the major one recently mandated. They understandably will cry “foul” and wonder how opponents of the motivations and machinery of the accountability movement could entertain, even propose, additional assessments. Consideration of centrally basic ideas is helpful.
First, sound teaching always has emphasized solid assessment of student achievement. Regular tests and periodic examinations are features of how schooling is known. Much opposition to any test and testing system, particularly those that are integral to “school accountability” schemes, has rested on awareness of the political targets and some of the intended victims of the uses of these statewide assessments. That most teachers and administrators oppose tests is nonsense, is to deny obvious reality. The proposal for multiple assessments actually builds on the long-standing professional commitment to the desirability of appropriate evidence to make warranted decisions about students' work and progress.
Second, assessment does not equate to students' facing test booklets, number-two pencils in hand, and marking a series of tics in one of several boxes alongside each item. The very term assessment has been diminished, even grotesquely distorted, by profound, wide-ranging, and utter misunderstanding. Assessment has to do with the gathering of evidence. Properly, it includes tests as means of gathering evidence; it also includes all manner of possible other procedures of gathering appropriate and relevant evidence. Thus, more assessments do not nor need not mean more tests and more scores.
Moreover, the proposal for more assessments is based on a transparent premise. More assessments will provide more evidence of different kinds, which teachers and administrators can use to make increasingly appropriate decisions about individual students. In this situation, the state-mandated test would be one of the assessments, and its single score would be one important part of the accumulated evidence for necessary and important decisions about students' futures.
The desirability of multiple assessments for important decisions is real, absolute, and personal to me. Several years ago, as part of my annual physical examination, my physician suspected that I suffered from a cancer. He did not trust a single test and its resultant single score. He wanted more tests including special blood tests, a bone scan, and tissue examinations. I also wanted more tests and had all of them. With all the different types of evidence available, my physician confirmed the existence of the cancer, but he also knew much more. He knew at least its type, its size, its position in the organ, and where the cancer did not yet exist. This evidence enabled him to draw upon his professional knowledge to make predictions, to analyze and appraise options for treatment. When I chose surgery, he continued to seek multiple measures; I had the same blood test done by three different laboratories. For me, especially, but also for him, multiple assessments were crucial in what was a life-and-death situation.
This anecdote dramatizes but is not directly relevant to the proposal for multiple assessments of educational progress. More and substantial argument must be linked to many realistic and recognizable educational cases in order to craft an intellectual legitimacy for the case for multiple assessments. Still, the general utility of more evidence available from multiple assessments rather than a single score from one test appears all but self-evident.
What kinds of assessments might be added to the statewide achievement test to provide the additional evidence important for major decisions about students' futures? What “more” evidence than the present single test score and its accompanying mute, state-level criterion might or should be available to professionally responsible/accountable teachers and administrators to decide the matter of a student's passing or failing a course? Promotion or retention at grade level? Or graduation or nongraduation from high school?
A readily known and altogether reasonable additional assessment is a portfolio. To be sure, this portfolio must not be file folders stuffed with random homework, quizzes, maps, and drawings. The nature and dimensions of a robust portfolio that reliably and responsibly contributes to an important decision for students surely must be more thoughtfully conceived and competently understood. A portfolio can possess these attributes. Also, different types of portfolios seem reasonable developments for different critically important decisions for students.
Other assessments, again specific and relevant to publicly significant issues—like promotion and retention—can be identified and developed. Educators' personal professional knowledge will be important to these tasks. So will be research findings. So, also, will be imagination, invention, and try-out experience.
Absolutely, this imminently practical question about what other assessments are appropriate is one that must not be decided in some back room of the legislature or of the state education agency, nor in a conference room at districts' central administration offices. Realistically, the question should be deliberated mainly by teachers and administrators in particular schools, those persons who daily deal with individual students who have faces and names and bring to school their extant knowledge and present interests and dreams of the future. Consultants and researchers and evaluators also have roles in this venture. So do parents and other nonprofessionals. The decisions from perhaps thousands of these deliberations can point toward more and improved assessments. Most important, these additional assessments can contribute to improved decisions about students' educational progress and the quality of public schools.
Realism, however, requires that we estimate two possibilities. What is the prospect that state legislatures will amend current accountability laws to make possible the use of multiple assessments by local schools? The easy response is that some may and some likely will not enact such provisions. Most legislators are pressured by various and important concerns at this time, most of them related to the budget. On the other hand, Nebraska's new school accountability plan permits local input to the required testing. Arguing in the state that these provisions enhance local control and flexibility, the U.S. Secretary of Education ruled that these provisions also are consistent with the federal requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation. If one state can develop an accountability scheme that does not emphasize off-the-shelf single test score plans, surely other state legislatures can enact different acceptable procedures, ones that include the use of multiple assessments.
Legislatures, however, may be slow to act. Additionally, law-makers surely need solid information, not just the pleas of lobbyists. Local school districts and individual schools need not wait for legislative action to begin to gain experience with multiple assessments. Most state accountability plans do not prohibit multiple assessments even as they insist on the use of one statewide test. Consequently, the door seems to be open for educators in local situations to embark on the development of additional assessments that they can find useful in making more informed local decisions on behalf of local students. They must use the mandated accountability test, and it can be one of the major arrows in the assessment quiver of local teachers and leaders. Also, without doubt, this type of local effort will require the assistance of a variety of specialists, including researchers. In some reasonable period of time, such local initiatives can and should yield substantial, robust, evidence-driven accounts that local parents and citizens can applaud and support. Subsequently, legislators and other citizens can recognize the merits of these practical trials in the use of multiple assessments.
American public educators need not become deskilled and dispirited by the tyranny of the current state-mandated accountability tests. These tests' single scores need not rule the important educational decisions about students' engagements with the curriculum and their futures. Multiple assessments, to be sure, are not the solutions to all the vexing problems that face public schools. However, multiple assessments do offer the prospect of significantly contributing to one gritty problem, the accumulation and use of more appropriate and relevant evidence to make important decisions about students' futures. That vision, as an old commentary goes, is no small potatoes.