Heading into the long Labor Day weekend, the Georgia Department of Education released state level data from the new Georgia Milestones Assessments administered for the first time this past spring. As expected, the results showed a much lower level of student proficiency on reading and math as measured by these tests than on the former tests known as the CRCTs. The reasons for this shift are primarily due to two factors: (1) the tests are obviously different than the prior tests, including different cut scores and (2) the tests are designed to assess student performance on the Common Core State Standards which draw upon more advanced skills than the old Georgia Performance Standards.
These results prompted a variety of people to comment, from state schools superintendent Richard Woods to the local press to national education writers. In much of the commentary, I saw one word come up repeatedly: honest. These results “give us an honest assessment of where we are”. The difference between results on the old tests and better national tests represented an “honesty gap” about what Georgia students were actually learning. And so on.
With all of this attention on honesty and the importance of getting accurate benchmarks of student performance, you would hope that state and national policymakers wouldn’t want to do anything to sully this meaningful data, thereby making it less useful for teachers in their work supporting student learning. But, I fear, that’s precisely where we will end up with the Milestones—the same place we were with the CRCT if the same old policies work to heighten the importance of these single test results which will begin to skew the outcomes and narrow teaching to them. For a review from my past couple of years of blog posts, data from standardized tests—especially good tests, as the Milestones strives to be—can be really useful for teachers and schools and students and parents, but only if:
- the tests are used sensibly
- the results are not the overwhelmingly main factor in teacher evaluations or the primary source of information feeding school accountability systems
In his op-ed on the Milestones, Superintendent Woods writes, “We must continue to have a truly honest discussion and open dialogue on assessment in Georgia and in our nation…I am fully committed to an assessment model that paints a clear and accurate picture of where our students are and how to get them where they need to be – an assessment system that provides purpose instead of just percentiles and data points.”
I’m encouraged by those words, and I hope he shows leadership in making sure the “purpose” of statewide assessments is simply to accurately measure student learning on a certain set of skills and knowledge and no more than that. If not, our students are no better off than they were with the CRCT.