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.