To Board of Education: 10 things you can do

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BY STEPHEN SWIDLER AND DAN ALBERTS

Nebraska’s current student testing regime is dead. Last month, the governor signed LB1157, amending the Quality Education Accountability Act.

This law terminates the current School-based, Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System (STARS). Local districts no longer are required to create and validate their own individual tests.

Soon, all Nebraska public schoolchildren will take the same assessments for reading and math in third through eighth grades and once in high school, and for science at least once at the elementary, middle and high school levels (there’s already a writing test for grades four, eight and 11).

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Stephen Swidler

The fight for STARS is over; recriminations are useless. It’s time to move ahead. The state Board of Education still has a constructive role to play. Here is our Top 10 list, in no particular order, of things  the board can do to guide the Nebraska Department of Education in implementing the new law:

1. Set the right tone. Discourage Nebraska Department of Education employees from declaring that they are fighting “FOR children” and “FOR teaching and learning,” implying that those who have disagreed with STARS are unintelligent or do not care.

2. Truth in advertising. If you believe in local control, teachers and local educational authorities should decide on good and appropriate practice. Forbid the state Education Department from using the new common assessments as justification for mandating local school priorities or specifying curriculum content and teaching methods.

3. Protect students. Prohibit local districts from using the new state tests as the sole criteria for deciding any student’s promotion, access to advanced programs and schools and awarding of diplomas. Ensure that alternative modes of assessment are universally available to students or particular groups of students whose education is best served by alternatives to standardized tests.

4. Protect teachers. Prohibit local districts from using test scores as the sole basis for evaluating teachers’ performance. This is especially important for teachers whose students do not perform well on conventional standardized tests, such as the highly talented, special needs and English language learners.

5. Protect parents. Ensure parents’ right to exempt their children from tests and assessments that they consider harmful or inappropriate. Furthermore, prohibit districts from applying punitive consequences to students if parents choose to exercise this right.

6. Protect local schools, especially those that take risks. Resolve that you will not permit the dismantling or restructuring of any school or program based solely on rankings of students’ test scores. Local districts need political and professional support when they “re-think” what they are doing and try innovating.

7. Stop worrying about teaching to the test. Sure, this can be a problem. But it has always happened and is currently happening intensively under STARS (ask any teacher). The best way to take the dread out of the new common assessments is to help teachers improve their practices. Invest resources that would have gone to STARS in local teachers’ capacities to teach in new and ambitious ways.

8. Rank schools. Yes, rank them. This scares local school officials, but we all know it happens anyway. Turn it into an opportunity to inform. Control for rankings based on school quality, not just test scores. Require value-added assessments that give schools credit for making outstanding progress with students (no matter where they started), graduation rates, students’ advancement from grade to grade, enrollments in the un-testable arts and humanities, post-secondary attendance and parent satisfaction.

9. No stupid tests. Make sure the new commissioner comes with some measure of expertise in assessment. She or he will need to lead the development of new common assessments that emphasize analysis and creative thinking, not multiple-choice questions that reward rote memory and information regurgitation.

10. Teach us about the new tests. Require every school district to explain to parents and the public, in plain English, any test’s technical details, such as standard error of measurement, on whom and how the tests are normed or scaled, how cut scores and proficiency levels are determined, and what content, skills, or competencies are being measured and evaluated by the test.

Stephen Swidler is an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a parent. Dan Alberts is the parent of two Lincoln Public Schools graduates and part-time superintendent of Rising City Public Schools.