The Washington Post brags it’s reporting helped Virginia officials decide to sharply limit the alternative testing program to the No Child Left Behind. This alternative test is called the Virginia Grade Level Alternative (or VGLA).  It is a portfolio assessment.

A portfolio assessment is exactly as it sounds–a collection of work-product done by the student showing mastery of each test question.

The Post claims growing numbers of students are being assessed this alternative way and test scores are noticeably higher as a result.

“The moves stem from concerns raised by parents and news reports, including in The Washington Post, about the rapidly increasing use of the alternative test and the corresponding rise in test scores.”

Really?

You mean a portfolio of proof (much of which would stand up in a court of law, stronger than contemporaneous notes) built over the course of a year, piece by piece, evidence of mastery of each and every Standard of Learning, is LESS valid than a one-day snapshot bubble sheet exam?

Of course, there’s no big company with lobbyists and salesmen standing behind the portfolio tests.  Bubble-sheet standardized tests, on the other hand, are big business.

“When you look at the growing numbers across the state, it appears there really is a problem here,” said Del. John M. O’Bannon III (R-Henrico). He’s talking of the growing numbers of students being assessed using the VGLA.

Special Education students account for nearly a quarter of all students in most Virginia school systems, if one counts every student with an Individual Education Plan (IEP) or 504.

Students who are designated as English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) are also given a portfolio assessment, and their population is growing by leaps and bounds due to an influx of families from abroad. According to the Virginia Department of Education  the population of  students who qualify for ESOL, who can’t speak English,  grows at a rate equaling the population of 10 new elementary schools in Virginia per year. (And they don’t arrive organized for school on the first day of September leave on the last day in June. On the contrary, they arrive throughout the year. Some depart for months and arrive back to class without explanation.)

So sure, there’s a growing number of VGLA tests being given, because the populations eligible for VGLA are ballooning.

Also, since the VGLA was an option, more students with special needs are being given the portfolio test as well.

Perhaps one reason the use of VGLA has increased is teachers are recognizing it as a better assessment of what their students actually know.

What Wasn’t Reported By The Washington Post: There are students who arrive at Virginia schools from outside the country on a regular basis. They are tested using the standard format. In one example, a student arrived from a central American country the week the tests were being given. He didn’t know English, but hadn’t been tested to receive English as a Second Language services. We did not know if he could read or write, even in Spanish. We did not know if he had attended any organize school in his home country. We didn’t know if he had any type of special needs. He hadn’t taken any lessons from this Virginia grade school, because he literally arrived on the Monday of the week the bubble sheet SOL tests were given. He’d never seen a bubble sheet, couldn’t speak English, BUT, under the law, he had to undergo the SOL test and his dismal scores counted against the entire school and school system. It’s the law, and this type of thing happens quite a bit.

There is current research to tabulate standardized test scores in one Title One school only looking at students who remain at the school for the entire six years. That research is due at the end of this school year. Those scores will be telling.

According to the Washington Post article:

“The number of portfolios given in Virginia more than doubled, to 47,000, in the past three years. Recently released state data show that one in five students with disabilities in third through eighth grade was assessed with a portfolio in reading and in math in the 2008-09 school year. Several Northern Virginia school systems exceeded state averages, including Alexandria and Fairfax and Prince William counties. In Manassas Park, 45 percent of students with disabilities were tested with portfolios in reading and about 47 percent in math. The rates were higher in nearly a dozen other school systems.”

So a minority (one in five) of Special Education students are being assessed in this way.

Although teachers and Superintendants are FOR portfolio testing when needed, the chief protagonist against portfolio testing is the state Superintendent of Public Instruction, Patricia I. Wright.

“Portfolios can be valuable assessment tools within classrooms, but they are problematic for a large-scale accountability program, in which cost-effectiveness, consistency and validity are paramount, Wright said. Teachers spend many hours compiling portfolios, and local school systems are responsible for scoring the tests.”

The amount of money spent on standardized tests at the county level is in the millions of tax dollars. Money not reimbursed by the federal government. Portfolio tests are gathered throughout the year from the work the student is doing in class. Building a file of school work, contemporaneously, is not an imposition on many teachers and is not as much of a financial burden on the school districts as the standardized test. Please note Super Intendants are FOR the portfolio tests.

According to the Post, “Wright said she is worried that evidence submitted by teachers is not consistently credible. A state investigation in Buchanan County last summer found that some teachers submitted work samples for portfolios that were not done by students.

A rather small sample of mis-deeds on which to base policy. I’m sure the corporations behind the standardized tests wouldn’t accept such a small sampling as a reliable and valid indicator their standardized tests were inaccurate.  OK, so yes, there are some problems in administering a portfolio assessment, but much less than putting everyone through the meat-grinder of a multiple choice test created by a large corporation.

A single multiple choice test, for somebody who can’t read or write even in their native tongue, doesn’t help anyone understand anything…

Organized Chaos wrote about testing and got me thinking …

Imagine in the corporate world having to do or be the target of work performance reviews each month.

It would be hard to get any work done. In private business, such a mis-step by HR would be easily fixed. One would just go to the CEO, explain this is a distraction to the real business at hand, negatively impacting sales, production and R&D. The CEO would put a stop to it or at least limit it to once a year.

Now imagine a CEO who got his money from the State based on these performance reviews. This means the performance reviews were the business at hand, because let’s face it, money is the mover in organizations, not policy and mission statements.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND: No Child Left Behind uses this type of incentive system in Education.

The current Department of Education received $44 Billion in Stimulus funds, which it tied directly to standardized testing results.  School systems must perform on standardized testing to get funded.

In an average Title One school the following testing schedule is required:

1st Quarter:
DRA2 Word Analysis
Name ID
Writing Sample (scored)
KMRA (3 different tests)

2nd Quarter:
KMRA (5 different tests)

3rd Quarter:
WIDA
KMRA (2 different tests)

4th Quarter:
DRA2 Word Analysis
Sounds/Words Assessment
Naglieri
DRA2 Reading
Writing Sample (scored)

That list if for Kindergarten … (via Kindergarten Chaos and confirmed with our testing coordinator).

A total of 19 tests over a 190 days.

These are not the teaching and assessment as a normal function of the classroom. These are required standardized tests.

On average, in Kindergarten, one “performance review” every ten days.

BACK TO THE PRIVATE INDUSTRY EXAMPLE: Think about it. If you were reviewed once every 10 days, every day you arrived at work is one-in-ten chances to do well on that review. The focus would be on doing well on the review. We all know folks who do well on reviews and are rather worthless at work. They capture every win in hyperbolic writing for their file. They burry any negative information, sometimes allowing problems to fester rather than acknowledging and attacking them head-on. This is a recipe for corporate disaster, or at least for a sick corporation.

TRANSLATING TO EDUCATION: But you say, “Getting students to get good grades in a subject IS the job of teaching.” Think about what you are saying. It’s the equivalent of saying “Getting good performance reviews IS the job.”

Just as one can interview really well and have no interpersonal skills. Just as one can do great on performance reviews from the boss, but would fail miserably in a peer-performance review. Teachers can teach students to do well on tests, while not really teaching their students an understanding of the content.

We’ve all seen this type of thing:

• Students who can spell all the words in the dictionary, but really don’t know what they mean.
• Students who can recite the times tables up to 12 x 12 but can’t make change.
• Students who can pass a french vocabulary quiz, but couldn’t order a meal in Paris.

Teaching students to be cleaver at taking tests, is not the same as teaching them to be wise about what they are learning. Skill-and-drilling students to parrot back the answers to questions they will be asked on the test, teaches them nothing.

The current Federal system is pushing good teachers toward this mis-placed goal with mis-placed incentives. No good teacher or administrator wants to do this or will continue to do it over time. They will leave the profession.  Leaving the profession in the hands of teachers who are willing.

As budgets tighten and more discretionary money is tied to testing, teaching students to learn to think starts to get in the way of “getting the money.”   

Sad, but true.

THE FIX: We need an incentive system which rewards teachers who cause their students to learn thinking skills, because we need the next generation to be able to think. Sure, standardized testing is not inherently a bad thing, but when a farmer spends more money and time weighing their livestock than on grain, they aren’t going to win at the county fair.

And I’m not talking about pay incentives for individual teachers based on how their students test. The book Driver by Daniel Pink dismisses such a notion.

And don’t say Kipp and Charter schools. They get to toss out any students who underperform, ensuring school-wide success.

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020 is a post in Teach Paperless, a blog by Shelly Blake-Plock.  It’s a great blog about teaching.  I love how this guy thinks.

I’m reading this post in teachpaperless and I’m thinking, “Why write about it, just do it.” (I know, to share, to share …)

Here’s the list from Teachpaperless of 21 things that will be obsolete over the next 10 years, and what we (at a Title One elementary school outside Washington, D.C.) are doing about them today.

I’ve put the items teach paperless stated would be obsolete in bold.  I agree with all of them, save two (numbers 8 & 9).

The following is not bragging, I’m just stating the facts about the school at which I’m lucky enough to work:

1. Desks: A 5th grade teacher here removed all desks from her room two years ago.  She did a research project to track data on student performance.  She has not asked for the furniture back.

2. Language Labs: Hah! Forget ESOL, try finding an ETMT student (English as Their Mother Tongue).  This whole school is a language lab, and if the demographers are correct so will be most U.S. schools in the future.  We don’t have a separate language lab as a result.

3. Computers: The majority of our computers are laptops, and going forward we are trying the netbooks and the next step.  School-system finances and classroom real estate both being at a premium, small and mobile is where everything is going, not just computing.

4. Homework: We’re going 24/7 using Blackboard (2 & 3) in the lower grades and wordpress/blogspot & wikispaces in the upper grades (3, 4 & 5).  Students are doing work at home without being asked.  That’s the real power of social media.  A 5th grade teacher is currently doing educational research on best practices for homework, which is NOT the way it used to be done, more along the line of teachpaperless.

5. Standardized Tests: This is a hot topic, the details of which I will cover in an upcoming post.  But we are very much moving toward portfolios as a large percentage of our students (compared with other schools) do a portfolio replacement test for the standardized tests.

6. Differentiated Instruction as Unique: We’re already far beyond this and our teachers differentiate due to language, learning styles and/or special needs.  We have an inclusive model which requires real and meaningful differentiation as a fundamental baseline to everything happening in a classroom or other part of the school, rather than an afterthought or “something the special ed teacher do” (which unfortunately is what many teachers around the world think).

7. Fear of Wikipedia: We use it as a method to teach critical reading skills. And by “critical” we mean “with a discerning eye.”

*8. Paperbacks: Here is the one thing with which I don’t agree.  Radio was to be the end of newspapers, and radio theater the end of paperbacks.  Television was to be the end of Radio, and Computers the end of everything that came before.  People will consume information in a way that is most useful and although the percentage of market share changes we have a ways to go before books go the way of papyrus scrolls.

*9. Attendance Offices: Bio scans are great, but there will still be a frazzled office person handing out tardy slips and calling home to confirm children’s whereabouts.

10. Lockers: Well, didn’t need them anyway.

11. IT Departments: According to TeachPaperless, IT Departments will have more time to innovate as they give up control and budget-line to shared-open solutions.  A lovely sentiment, and clear-headed if one remembers fondly how there didn’t really seem to be anyone in charge of IT on the Star Ship Enterprise.  But the thought of the obsessive, slightly asburger-y engineers (the norm in most IT departments) being “innovative”, well, let’s not be silly now.

12. Centralized Institutions: He’s right on the mark.  He’s talking about school buildings being like a factory where students show up for a shift.  I would also include decentralizing central offices.  “Employees who do not spend at least 10 hours a week with student should be sacked,” is a budget solution suggested by one of the teachers at my school.  All “central office” types should be housed in schools. That way they might accidentally run into a student every now and then.  At our school we house central office types, and it helps them understand the school and students, and helps us by having them more accessible.

13. Organization of Educational Service by Grade: We’re already doing this by necessity, because when one successfully differentiates, it’s done.

14. Education School Classes that Fail to Integrate Social Technology: I agree, but would reword this to say the following will be obsolete in two years, “Education School Classes that Can Successfully Continue to Keep Social Technology Out.” (I mean MiFi kind of screws up all the “firewall technology” on which we are currently spending money.)

15. Paid/Outsourced Professional Development: Our school has a specific model which is co-teaching, coaching and inclusive.  One can walk into any room at any time and nobody bats an eyelash.  The kids and teachers are used to constant traffic.  This raises the bar, because no one can go into their room, shut the door and come out in June.  Professional accountability which includes an AP coming in twice a year is ridiculous.  Constant feedback on everything at all times is what professional development is now and going forward.  Implementing it is the hard part.  We have.  There’s still a place for Paid/Outsourced PD, but the guts of our PD is inhouse PLC, and it works.

16. Current Curricular Norms: We’re doing this, but it is easier in a K-5 environment.  Differentiation demands it.

17. Parent-Teacher Conference Night: More and more classroom blogs are cropping up at my school. These keep the parents in the loop in an ongoing way.  One instance (not at this school) is an individual blog being used for a special needs student instead of a journal they take from home to school and back.  The dialog is deep and meaningful and discrete.  A reality to which I think Blake-Plock is alluding.

18.Typical Cafeteria Food: We’ve made no great inroads here, but one can only hope.

19. Outsourced Graphic Design and Webmastering: Here again is a tension between the creative flow in a school and the need of many DIT departments to assert control claiming “Internet Security” as the cover.  In the future, with social media becoming a utility, and technology becoming ubiquitous, “Internet Security” emanating from within a technology department as a firewall or other technology will not be possible.  “Internet Security” will principally be achieved through behavior management by education of students from Kindergarten forward.  Our 3rd and 4th graders are doing MySpace and Facebook pages at home already.  They are doing google pages, blogspot and wordpress at school.  Given the tools, they could do what Blake-Plock is suggesting next week, but current technology setup of our formal graphic design and webmastering prevents this.

20. High School Algebra I: OK, well, N/A for this K-5 school.

21. Paper: In the last three years, we have moved from a deskjet at every teacher’s desk to a small set of networked centralized printers.  Paper use (and toner) has declined exponentially.

Thanks to Blake-Plock and TeachPaperless.blogspot.com for everything they are doing to support the mission.

Thanks to those folks who sent in suggestions on improving this list. Your comments are welcome.

1) Mozilla Firefox is a “nondenominational” web browser.  Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser pushes users toward Microsoft products.  Apple’s Safari browser is very light on its use of computer resources, but also light on its features.  Mozilla Firefox is superior to both in that it does not push users toward specific products and is so feature rich, Microsoft is starting to fashion it’s browser IE after Firefox.

2) Delicious Social Bookmarking is the best way to manage website links.  This links to a page which explains social bookmarking, How to Social Bookmark.

3) Blogs are Internet resources which are great for publishing and managing student work.  This links to a page which explains blogs, What’s a Blog.

4) Wikis are Internet resources which allow multiple users to edit documents, make lists, and coordinate information.  This links to a page which explains wikis, What’s a Wiki.

5) Twitter is a “micro blogging” site. It is one of the best ways for teaching teams to maintain instant and ongoing communication throughout a busy day.  Twitter has the benefits of instant messaging, while maintaining a record of what is communicated so the information can be read whenever a team member has a free moment.  Here’s a short video explaining twitter.

6) Tagging is the new way of organizing digital items online.  Tagging is a way of putting multiple lables on items such as documents, photos, audio files, etc.  One can then pull similarly tagged items.  The truly interesting thing is in most online environments tags are not centrally organized.  Users choose which labels they place on digital objects.  The distributed nature of this organizing tool creates a more social form of organizing large amounts of data.  This links to a page which explains tagging, Wikipedia on Tagging.

7) Snagit is a product which can be purchased and downloaded to a user’s computer. SnagIt is a screenshot program that operates under the Windows operating system contains most features needed (scrolling page screenshots and automatic ‘trim edges’ function, for example). SnagIt Accessories extends its features. For example, Flickr Output enables the user to upload screen capture onto one’s own Flickr account. The ease of use, comprehensive features makes it one of the best cut and paste software packages available.

8) Flickr.com online photo storage allows photos to be shared and organized with tags.  One can also search thousands of copyright free photos organized by tags.  Here’s a link to a page that explains social photosharing.   Here’s a link to the flickr site for the National Zoo, www.flickr.com/nationalzoo. Two other important source of photos are Wikimedia Commons and the Morguefile.

9) Audacity is a free program that allows anyone to easily make digital audio recordings.  Digital recordings can be rendered in MP3 files (like what are used on iPods).  Any digital recording can be called a “podcast” even if it is only stored on a computer or website.  Here’s a short video explaining podcasting.

10) PhotoStory3 is a free program that allows anyone to easily make a presentation out of digital photographs.  PhotoStory3 allows users to add titles, narration, background music and different focusing and other effects on the photos and transitions between the photos.  Digital photo stories can be rendered as windows media video.  A wmv digital video file can be posted on a website, inserted in a blog, wiki and/or PowerPoint.

11) Photos can be edited with any number of photo editors.  There are rudimentary photo editors within free resources such as Flickr.com, PhotoStory3 and commercial software packages for photo editing such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements and even in some children’s educational software such as Imageblender.  There are also some free online options including Picnik (http://www.picnik.com) and Photoshop Express (http://www.photoshop.com/).

12) Windows Movie Maker is a video creating/editing software included in Microsoft Windows. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie.

13) Discovery Education Streaming is a subscription service which has a)full videos, b)video segments, c)high quality still photos, d)audio clips and other media elements organized by key word and grade level.

14) Gcast.com is a free Internet site for creating and posting podcasts.  Podcasts posted on Gcast can be linked to from any web resources (blog, wiki, etc.) and reviewed multiple times from any computer or handheld device with an internet connection.

15) Youtube.com has many useful and educational video resources.  They are searchable via keyword.

16) Teachertube.com is an educational resource of videos modeled on youtube but subject specific to education.

17) iTunes is a free product which one can download onto their desktop.  It allows digital audio files to be organized and shared with others.  Audio files stored on Gcast.com can be lists on iTunes for any iTunes subscriber to download and play on their computers, iPods and/or telephones.  iTunes begins to cost users money when they purchase items from the iTunes store.

18) RSS feeds can be found on almost all websites, blogs, wikis, photo sites, and other resources on the web.  Users can subscribe to the RSS feeds for Internet resources they wish to regularly track.  Updates to those internet resources are sent to the subscribers via the RSS feeds and organized in what are called RSS Readers.

19) Google.com has many features besides gmail and the search engine.  Three specific elements are Google Sites, Google Reader and Google Earth.  Google Pages allows anyone to create multiple websites as easily as constructing a PowerPoint.  Google Reader allows anyone to follow any number of websites, blogs, wikis and other resources on the web by subscribing to their RSS feeds.  Information from those RSS feeds are then gathered into the user’s Google Reader page and displayed like email. Google Earth is one of the best mapping tools for education available.

20) Internet safety focuses on four main concerns: 1) Internet bullying, 2) Internet predators, 3) Internet identity theft and 4) Internet negative identity profiles impacting college entry and career opportunities.  All four of these aspects of Internet safety can be covered with two safety principles.  The first is to keep one’s personal information secret.  This includes name, contact information, work and school information, family information and the names of associates.  The second is to never meet anyone in real life, who one has only met on the Internet.  With these two principles, students (and teachers) can protect themselves from the major Internet safety concerns.

21) Publishing on the Internet can be done professionally while maintaining the safety of students and colleagues by following APA publishing guidelines.  By combining the APA ethical guidelines (no student identifiers, no school identifiers) with the Internet safety principles of keeping the author’s identity secret, a great deal of professional practice can be shared in an online professional learning community without fear of breaching our professional ethics.  You can review APA Ethic’s Code here.  Clairvoy is dedicated to teachers publishing strategy.  See more here.

22) Students with different learning styles (visual learners, audio learners, etc.) can better explore Blooms Taxonomy of cognitive objectives by working with the curriculum using the different media available to them in a digital environment.

23) Copyright is important and must be respected at all times.  The copyright laws regarding special education do allow for materials being used in class (which have been purchased) to be adapted to meet the needs of student IEPs.  This can call for teachers to use all the digital tools at their disposal to adapt standard text, photographic and multimedia resources to meet the needs of student IEPs.  Anyone can do this adaptation for the teacher’s needs, including students inside and outside the classroom.  Here are a number of online resources on use of copyright in the classroom.

24) Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

25) Google Earth is a tremendous tool. Hardware such as Flip video cameras (under $100), student digital still cameras, color scanners, document cameras, transferring video from camcorders to computers (Firewire pcmcia card cost around $20  / some analogue to digital video converters cost less than $50), SMARTBoards and iPods are all things with which teachers should familiarize themselves and use in their teaching.

Graphic of Google forms for data collection

This is a way to use Google Docs and an iPhone or any hand-held device that can hit the web to track student data.

Remember in Educational Research, APA ethical guidelines require no information be used which could be employed to identify the student.

1)In Google docs, open a new Spreadsheet.

2)Name columns with the items you are tracking; Disrupting Teacher; Disrupting Students; Absence of Bad Behavior for 30 minutes, for example.  This will be determined by the student’s Behavior Intervention Plan or whatever research question you are tracking.  Each entry you make will automatically be stamped with the time and date, so you don’t have to worry about that column.

3)On the “Form” menu of the same spreadsheet click on “Create form.”  Name the form something you can remember, but not the name of the student.  Then on the Form menu choose “Go to live form” which opens your form as a webpage.  Along the bottom of that window is the “You can view the published form here: url” which is the web address of your live form.  Make a shortcut to the live form and put that on your iPhone or whatever you want to use to enter data.

From that point on, everything you enter into the live form and save, will be entered into your spreadsheet as a row and saved for your later analysis.

On the way out, remember to Save your form, and choose File and Save your spreadsheet.Too Easy!

For extra credit, on the forms creation page, you can edit the questions and make them multiple choice or check boxes to make data entry even easier!