New testing looks different and familiar

With all that has changed, not so much has changed. Last week, a relative trickle of students across Wisconsin began taking a set of standardized tests called the Wisconsin Forward Exam.

By the May 20 deadline, an estimated 370,000 students in third through eighth grade will have taken the tests — and their schools will have undergone major disruptions in their daily schedules to accommodate the testing.

Eleventh-graders in large numbers took the ACT exam during March. Once used only as a college entrance exam, it now serves accountability purposes as well. And ninth-and 10th-graders will take a test called ACT Aspire between April 25 and May 27 as their state tests.

Like or hate tests (I bet the needle points overall toward the latter among students and educators), schools have been through these routines for more years than any current student can remember.

Somewhere down the road (in the fall, state Department of Public Instruction leaders hope), the overall scores for each school and district will be released publicly. Student results will be given one of four labels — advanced, proficient, basic or minimal. The most widespread measure of how a school is doing will be based on the combined percentage of students who are advanced or proficient.

It’s no profound prediction that the results won’t look much different from in any recent year. Overall, students in well-to-do communities will do pretty well. Students from low-income communities will not do well.

Why do we go through this? For one thing, no one I know of has come up with a largescale plan for a better way to get a picture of how schools are doing. Far more important, the United States Congress seems to feel the same way. After a lot of debate, when it passed a new federal education law a few months ago, it renewed the requirement for kids nationwide to take standardized tests, mostly in reading and math.

All of this makes up the “not so much has changed” part of the picture. What makes up the “much has changed” part? Let’s focus on the third- through eighthgrade tests.

The Wisconsin Forward Exam succeeds the Badger Test, launched last year. Years in preparation, the Badger Test ended up carrying a lot of unhappy baggage — it was linked to the Common Core academic standards and to a nationwide consortium intended to allow consistent testing across many states.

It was killed after one round. The legislature decided we needed a test that was by and for Wisconsinites. At what is ramming speed when it comes to test development, a company named Data Recognition Corp. won the Wisconsin contract.

People may not want to say it loudly, but the test is still pegged to the Common Core standards. And is it a Wisconsin-based test? DPI describes Data Recognition Corp. as “a Midwestern company with offices in Wisconsin.” Which is to say, it’s based in Minnesota. But in the future, questions on the test are likely to be shaped by input from Wisconsin educators.

The new tests have been described as shorter than the Badger Tests. That’s not so clear. There is no fixed time limit on taking the Forward Exam. But DPI estimated how much time students will spend on each section. For third, fifth, sixth and seventh grades, the total is four hours or a bit more, which is generally about a half-hour less than last year.

For fourth- and eighthgraders, who have to add science and social studies tests to their load, the estimates actually are longer than for the Badger Test — about seven hours, compared to six to six-and-a-half. (Not all at once; testing is generally spread out over a few days.)

I’m sure the amount of time for testing is a big concern for many educators. I heard from one last week, John Humphries, president of the Wisconsin School Psychologists Association, who works for the Dodgeville school district. Speaking for himself only, he said, “It’s hard to disrupt learning over the course of many days to fit in seven hours of assessment. . . . The testing time is going to be a big issue for a lot of people.”

As ill-fated as it was, the Badger Test broke major ground on one front: With exceptions for specific circumstances, students took it on computers, not paper. That is also true for the Forward Exam.

The end of the No Child Left Behind federal education law means the complex and almost entirely futile set of sanctions for schools with low test scores is gone. Decisions on what to do about such schools now lie at the state or local level.

Troy Couillard, director of student assessment for the DPI, said test results shed light on larger patterns of how schools are doing and who is succeeding and can guide decisions aimed at improving results.

By the way, test scores can be a factor in evaluating teachers, but they have not emerged as a big factor. And the momentum behind connecting scores to ratings of teachers seems to have waned nationwide. ( Why? Because it doesn’t really work.)

With the new scores, the “report card” for each school in the state will be relaunched, after a year off. This time, private schools with publicly-funded voucher students are slated to get report cards. Don’t expect the same level of data for voucher schools as public schools. Maybe that will take a few years to build up.

In the end, even as it is the third set of tests used in three years in Wisconsin, the Forward Test is pretty consistent with its predecessors. And, now on computers, the giant enterprise of testing our kids to get some broad handle on how they’re doing is on the move again.

Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu