(Vol. 4, No. 1 - Spring 2000)
Standards-Based Assessment:
LBUSD's Assessment System
Begins to Drive School Reform
One hears a strong message from central office staff in Long
Beach Unified. Ultimately, all students should be assessed on the same standards,
and reach the same level of skills and knowledge.
By Anne C. Lewis
SAT-9. Performance assessments. Portfolios. Common scoring guides. End-of-course
exams. Standards-based report cards.
The different ways Long Beach Unified measures what and how well students
learn can seem overwhelming to those who have not been part of the flow
of things for the past few years. Even many inside the system see the waves
without seeing the pattern of the tide.
Lynn Winters, LBUSD's chief of testing and research, makes few apologies
for the district's experimental approach to assessment over the last five
years -- although she would agree with critics that the district hasn't
always kept teachers well-informed about the purpose behind all the experimentation.
"We've learned a lot," she says. "And I think right now we're
at the point that we know where we need to start. We have figured out the
approach that will really move us toward the goal of having teachers make
fairly consistent assessments about what kids across classrooms know and
can do."
Long Beach is one of the very few large urban districts with an assessment
plan that goes beyond standardized tests and state-mandated accountability
measures. The plan supports the district's standards-based reforms. The
goal, says Superintendent Carl Cohn, is not to demoralize teachers but "to
get the best and brightest teachers excited about teaching."
Cohn, Winters and other district leaders believe the district's emerging
assessment system, built on a foundation of end-of-course testing in every
course and at every grade, will be sturdy enough to weather the unpredictable
winds kicked up by on-going battles over school accountability in Sacramento.
The search for stability
Cohn lured Winters, a national expert on assessments, away from research
at UCLA's Center for Research on Assessment, Standards, and Student Testing.
With other central office staff, she has worked for five years to put together
an assessment system that is "bare-boned at the district level and
that shifts assessment to the classroom level."
Its development has not always been smooth. For example, the district was
forced to slow down the pace of change two years ago when teachers complained
about the extra work required to compile student assessment portfolios.
The decision was made to complete math portfolios first, fine-tune the process,
and then move forward.
Nor have state policies helped. To be fair and rational, state accountability
measures ought to align with state academic standards, but California adopted
an "off-the-shelf" test for accountability -- the SAT-9 -- before
adopting its standards. As a result, many of the assessment efforts in Long
Beach have proceeded in spite of, rather than aided by, state efforts.
Nonetheless, the assessments in Long Beach, while seemingly complex, follow
well-established principles for a good assessment system:
- One test cannot do it all. The SAT-9 reports progress to the public
based on a national sample of student performance. But it provides very
little detail about the academic strengths and weaknesses of individual
students. To find out how well students are doing on standards adopted by
the district, other measures must be used.
- Assessments must be aligned with standards and the curriculum.
- Assessment results must be clear, consistent, provided in a timely
manner, and used to help improve student and teacher performance.
- A good assessment program must help teachers become skilled at using
challenging assessments, linked to standards, as a regular part of their
teaching.
- Important decisions about students, such as promotion, must depend
on multiple factors, never a single test.
Ultimately, when the system is working right, says Assistant Superintendent
Dorothy Harper, "a kid at Rogers Middle School and a kid at Lindbergh
who are both judged 'proficient' truly will be at the same level of skills
and knowledge."
Getting to equity
In pursuing this goal of equity, the district uses many strategies, often
beginning with math because its step-by-step curriculum is easier to build
an assessment system around. Math portfolios are now two years old. They
were developed from conversations among math department chairs at summer
seminars three years ago.
Middle grades students collect tests, sample papers, and other work in their
portfolio items in four areas -- numbers, algebra, geometry, and measurement.
Students also analyze their own portfolios and determine their level of
proficiency using a scoring guide.
This process gives students ownership for their learning, says math curriculum
leader Dixie Dawson. "They have to look at all their work, and if they're
only at 50 percent, they mark 'I'm not proficient.' Doing that gets them
away from the attitude that no matter what I do, they'll pass me on."
Over the next several years, LBUSD will implement the portfolio process
in other subjects.
End-of-course exams developed in much the same way as portfolios. High school
math teachers, attending a meeting of the LBUSD-college partnership, began
talking about the need for a common assessment for each math course, and
Dawson says they "eagerly pulled other teachers together" to create
end-of-course tests. LBUSD has now created these tests for every math course
in grades K-12, and work has begun on creating similar tests for all subjects
and grades.
Dawson and Winters say that the end-of-course tests will become the bedrock
of the district's assessment system. Dawson says data from the math end-of-course
tests has already been "incredibly helpful" in making decisions
about curriculum and instruction. When teachers sit down with the end-of-course
results and analyze them together, she says, "some powerful questions
and issues come up" about why large groups of students miss certain
problems, leading to discussions about different ways to present material.
Dawson also linked the test scores to students' report card grades, pointing
out to math department chairs that some students getting A's performed poorly
on the end-of-course exam. "Are teachers in those classrooms grading
too easy or teaching the wrong things?" she asked them.
Dawson also pointed out that parents of students who sail through middle-grades
math and then fail the high school exit exam (half of which is middle-grades
math) will be looking for someone to blame.
The end-of-course exams are expected to stimulate teachers' use of on-going
assessments in their instruction, drawn from a bank of assessment items
that are tied to standards and the end-of-course test itself. Ultimately,
teachers will be grading work similarly. This goal is being further enforced
by regular meetings of teachers to examine student work and discuss common
standards for scoring.
In truth, Long Beach is building a data-driven instructional system. Dawson's
analyses in math, for example, "allow math departments to see exactly
where the weaknesses are. Often they will look at questions on the test
and say, 'Students need to be able to do that. We need to teach that concept
better.'"
Standards-based report cards
Long Beach Unified is now developing a way to explain all of these assessment
results to parents: the "standards-based report card." The new
report has been discussed for several years, but "it needed to wait
until we had a solid system for determining if a student is proficient in
a certain standard," says Linda Bueno-Alahwal, middle school reform
coordinator.
That system is emerging rapidly, and committees of teachers are working
to create a "weighted" report card with different values assigned
to tests, projects, and homework. Dawson says the new report "will
show that, if I'm an A student, this is what I can do." It will also
include traditional letter grades. "Parents need that," says social
studies curriculum leader Linda Mehlbrech. The district expects to have
a "talking document" illustrating standards-based report cards
in circulation during the coming school year.
Just about everyone in the district agrees that explaining the new report
card to parents will be a challenge, requiring many messages and mediums.
Because of the current preoccupation with SAT-9, says Lynn Winters, another
priority message for both educators and parents will be that if Long Beach
students can do well on the standards-based end-of-course tests, they will
do well on the state's accountability tests. "We've already seen that
in math." she says.
Winters hopes that more experience will show teachers how useful the emerging
district assessment system can be in raising student achievement and improving
their own instruction. "That's the process piece," she says. "How
to get teachers to use these tools. How to reach the point where these are
things they want and find useful and, in fact, can't live without."
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