The Ongoing Debate of Assessment Practices in American Education

During our recent trip to DC a lot of our discussions centered around NCLB and High Stakes Standardized Testing. Cardre Mate, Brett Schneider, a vice principal of an alternate high school in New York brought up the point that the current administration does not respect many of the assessment methods that are more performance based as valid as the High Stakes testing associated with NCLB.

A good overview of the types of performance based assessments Schneider was referring to was done in an online video, entitled Assessment Overview: Beyond Standardized Testing.

Right after I returned from our trip I heard two stories on NPR The first story was called Seattle Teacher Rejects State's Standardized Tests, on NPR about a teacher who refused to give standardized tests to his students. The second story was called Teacher Opposed to Standardized Tests Reconsiders.

During our trip we met with Hanna Skandera, at the US Department of Ed. She brought up an interesting point. She talked about the fact that in the current American Educational system we have the freedom to both. I have been thinking a lot about this. While, we do have high stakes testing, we do have the freedom to develop our own local performance assessments. Many Districts only focus on "The Test", but actually teachers do have the authority to use formative assessments to help them inform their teaching. In order for Districts to embrace these types of assessments it takes strong leadership and professional development to make this happen.

A week later I was in a conference call with ISTE reviewing a policy document. It was interesting that the document was organized by National, State and Local Policy. I think the most powerful one of all was the reforms that can happen at the Local Level. For the first time instead of thinking about all of the things being imposed on education from the National and State Level I started to look at it differently in terms of all of the freedoms and powers we are lucky to have in education at the local level.