Pennsylvania to pay less attention to standardized test scores
Pennsylvania has unveiled its proposal to track the performance of its more than 1.7 million students, which includes a broader measure of academic success and places less emphasis on how they perform on standardized tests.
“If there’s one thing we heard from every stakeholder, it’s that we spent too much time on our standardized assessments,” said Matthew Stem, deputy secretary for elementary and secondary education at the state Department of Education.
On Wednesday, the
department released a draft of the 133-page proposal under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. Passed with bipartisan support in 2015, ESSA marked the end of No Child Left Behind, the federal education law that critics said focused too much on standardized testing.
The new law requires states to look more comprehensively at student achievement and create a plan, due Sept. 18, on how they will establish and measure performance by the new standards. So far, 17 states have submitted proposals. The full ESSA plan will be implemented in the 2018-19 school year.
Pennsylvania’s proposed policy “provides us a great opportunity to focus on a broader set of academic priorities and initiatives, to move away simply from a focus on English language arts, math and science,” Mr. Stem said. The state sought input from educators, school administrators, advocacy groups, parents and others in crafting the plan.
Like its predecessor, ESSA requires state standardized tests in English, math and science. But starting next year, its Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams will be shorter. The number of English sections will be cut from four to three, and the number of math sections will be cut from three to two.
The Department of Education will unveil the Future Ready PA Index this fall, a school report card “that recognizes that students — and the schools that serve them — are more than just results onstandardized tests.”
It will replace the School Performance Profile scores adopted in 2013, which based grades of school performance largely on standardized tests. The new “dashboard” approach considers other factors like chronic absenteeism, student success after graduation and participation in Advanced Placement courses, and recognizes schools for lowering the percentage of students scoring at the “below basic” level on state tests.
“We want parents and students to know that we expect our schools to provide for them a holistic education that’s going to give them all of the skills necessary to be successful when they graduate,” Mr. Stem said. “We believe this ESSA plan is a big step in that direction.”
Some were critical of certain aspects of the proposal.
“While we are happy to see that PDE included ambitious yet attainable academic goals in the report, we are not confident this plan provides a clear blueprint for how schools will make meaningful progress,” the Pennsylvania Campaign for Achievement Now, a group that advocates for charter schools, said in a statement.
It expressed concern specifically about the dashboard approach, saying it could “be less user-friendly as it does not assign a numerical or gradevalue to schools.”
“In addition, a fairer metric to evaluate schools is only valuable insofar as it leads to better, more tailored interventions to support struggling schools. This plan is scant on any details regarding specific interventions or even a timeline for holding schoolsaccountable.”
James Fogarty, executive director of education advocacy group A+ Schools, said he’ll reserve judgment on the dashboard until it is unveiled. “Often when there is a rating it gets conflated. We don’t want to send the message to children that they’re failing because their school is failing them.”
Under ESSA, the Department of Education is required to provide direct support and monitor progress of schools that fall in the bottom 5 percent of performance statewide, starting in the 2018-19 school year. Oversight of schools with low-performing students — but that don’t fall within that 5 percentcategory — will rest with the home school district, but the state will help in those efforts starting in the 2019-20 school year, Department spokeswoman Casey Smith said. ESSA will not affect statefunding to schools.
Longer-term goals in Pennsylvania’s plan include slashing by half the percentage of students not proficient on PSSAs and Keystone Exams, and increasing the number of students graduating from high school in four years from 84.8 percent to 92.4 percent, both by the 2029-30 school year.
In 2015, 62 percent of students were at or above grade level in English. In the same period, 43 percent were at or above grade level in math. By 2030, the state wants to see those numbers at 81 percent and72 percent, respectively.
Other goals include increasing annual enrollment in career and technical education programs by 5 percent by 2020. The state also wants at least 80 percent of students in third grade to be proficient in English and reading by 2022-23. Pennsylvania also has some of the most significant reading achievement gaps between low-income students and students of color and their white, more affluent peers among states, accordingto the plan.
Ron Cowell, president of the Harrisburg-based Education Policy and Leadership Center, warned that there was a “big caveat” attached tothe ESSA plan generally.
“The Pennsylvania Legislatureis culpable for the worst K-12 funding system in the country, certainly in terms of unequal opportunities for students,” said Mr. Cowell, himself a former legislator. “The likelihood of accomplishing these goals, to some extent, is out of the control of the [Education]department.”
The state plan will be be available for public comment through Sept. 2.