Too Much? Students given 401 tests 6570 times in 1 School Year

The Council of the Great City Schools has just released their analysis of testing of students in k-12 in large urban schools districts, titled "Student Testing in America’s Great City Schools: An Inventory and Preliminary Analysis". The results of this in-depth analysis have already caused shocked waves in the education policy world, leading to the US department of Education to issue its recent mea culpa.

The reports top line highlights are unsurprising to anyone who has followed the issue of over-testing closely, or has spent any time in a classroom in recent years

• In the 2014-15 school year, 401 unique tests were administered across subjects in the 66 Great City School systems.
• Students in the 66 districts were required to take an average of 112.3 tests between pre-K and grade 12. (This number does not include optional tests, diagnostic tests for students with disabilities or English learners, school-developed or required tests, or teacher designed or developed tests.)
• The average student in these districts will typically take about eight standardized tests per year, e.g., two NCLB tests (reading and math), and three formative exams in two subjects per year.
• In the 2014-15 school year, students in the 66 urban school districts sat for tests more than 6,570 times. Some of these tests are administered to fulfill federal requirements under No Child Left Behind, NCLB waivers, or Race to the Top (RTT), while many others originate at the state and local levels. Others were optional.

These headline statistics, as the report notes are understated and do not capture the full picture or extent of over-testing

Moreover, tests that are purchased, acquired, developed, or used at the individual school level— including those by individual teachers—are not counted in the statistics we present in this report. There are a large number of these tests below the federal, state, and district levels, but there is no way to know how many or how extensively they are used without doing a survey of individual schools. At some point, this kind of analysis should be done.

Also, we have not attempted to quantify the amount of time that is devoted either to giving or administering the tests or to preparing for them (i.e., test prep). Test administration can be particularly time-consuming when the tests are given to one student at a time. These activities can be time-consuming, but we could not gauge how much existed in this study. Again, this should be the subject of future studies.

The report should also cast some doubt on the US Department of Educations recommendation that testing time not exceed 2% of school time. According to this analysis, 2% is already at the top end of over-testing - the report finds that the average amount of testing time devoted to mandated tests [...] was approximately 2.34 percent of school time. Clearly scaling back testing by 0.34% is not going to be adequate.

The report also finds that not only are students over-tested for the purposed of data collection, but that the results can be poor, too late, contradictory and lack context

tests are not always very good at doing what we need them to do, they don’t tell us everything that is important about a child, and they don’t tell us what to do when results are low. This occurs for a variety of reasons: Data come too late to inform immediate instructional needs; teachers aren’t provided the professional development they need on how to read, interpret, and make use of the results in their classrooms; teachers and administrators don’t trust the results, believe the tests are of low quality, or think the results are misaligned with the standards they are trying to teach; or the multiple tests provide results that are contradictory or yield too much data to make sense of. The result is that the data from all this testing aren’t always used to inform classroom practice.

Furthermore, it is noted that students fail to see the multitude of tests as important or relevant, and they do not always put forward their best efforts to do well on them. Something most classroom teachers have observed, and been alarmed about given the increased use of these tests to make high stakes employment decisions.

But at the end of the day, perhaps the most important finding is to be found at the end of this analysis.

Seventh, the fact that there is no correlation between testing time and student fourth and eighth grade results in reading and math on NAEP does not mean that testing is irrelevant, but it does throw into question the assumption that putting more tests into place will help boost overall student outcomes. In fact, there were notable examples where districts with relatively large amounts of testing time had very weak or stagnant student performance. To be sure, student

scores on a high-level test like NAEP are affected by many more factors than the amount of time students devote to test taking. But the lack of any meaningful correlation should give administrators pause.

All this testing isn't helping students, indeed, it may actually be harmful.

Here's the full report

Student Testing in America’s Great City Schools: An Inventory and Preliminary Analysis

US Dept of Ed Admits Fault in Over-Testing

The US Department of Education, led by the soon to be resigning Arne Duncan, has finally admitted that over a decade of high stakes testing requirements it has promoted has been a big mistake. You can view their mea culpa below in full - but here's the admission

In too many schools, there is unnecessary testing and not enough clarity of purpose applied to the task of assessing students, consuming too much instructional time and creating undue stress for educators and students. The Administration bears some of the responsibility for this, and we are committed to being part of the solution.

They have some advice regarding testing for states, much of which has just been implemented in Ohio:
Principles for Fewer and Smarter Assessments
Assessments must be: 

1) Worth Taking
2) High Quality
3) Time-limited
4) Fair – and Supportive of Fairness – in Equity in Educational Opportunity
5) Fully Transparent to Students and Parents
6) Just One of Multiple Measures
7) Tied to Improved Learning

How we ever got so far off track from these common sense principles is baffling, but what isn't baffling is the need to stop listening to the corporate education reformers who promoted the high stakes over testing of our students and schools.

Education Department Assessment Fact Sheet

Ohio's Traditional Schools Out Innovating Charters

One of the big promises of Ohio's charters schools, free from regulation and oversight, was to be their capacity to innovate. However, that lack of regulation and oversight has led to constant reports of failure and fraud. But what of the original promise of innovation?

A new report, published by The Learning Accelerator and the Clayton Christensen Institute, casts doubt even on this. The study aims to analyze the current state of blended learning on Ohio, and looked at both traditional schools and charters. This is how the writers describe blended learning

Blended learning entails the fundamental redesign of learning models. Educators around the world are adopting it to help all students be successful in realizing their full potential in college, careers, and life thanks to its ability to enable personalized learning and mastery and its potential to increase access and equity and control costs. Educators want to create a student-centered learning system for all students, and blended learning is the most promising way to do so at scale. Schools are using it to rethink how teaching and learning occurs and to redesign schooling structures, schedules, staffing, and budgets.

With such a bold description you would think Ohio's charter schools, whose mission it is to innovate, would be all over blended learning and leading the way.

Not so much. The study finds that it is traditional public schools that are out front, and by a significant margin, with two-thirds (66%) of school districts using blending, but less than half (42%) of charter schools.

Looking deeper into the study data, the disparity becomes more revealing, and alarming. It appears that charter schools and traditional schools are implementing different blended learning solutions. Traditional schools are using it to expand opportunities and offerings for students, whereas charters appear to be offering a model to reduce teaching costs.

Charters can be seen to heavily rely upon a flex model of blended learning. In the Flex model, online learning is the major aspect of the students path. Students primarily learn online, while being seated in a brick-and-mortar structure. The teacher or aide is available for face-to-face support/structure and facilitates offline activities and group/whole-class discussion on a discretionary or need-be basis.

Whereas, traditional schools using a la carte models allow students to take one or more specific online courses while also taking traditional offline courses. For instance, a student may take an online math course while also taking science, language arts, and P.E. in a traditional offline setting.

The only true innovation Ohio's charter schools have perfected is profit taking, along every other dimension of measure they are being out-schools by traditional public schools.

The Status and Direction of Blended learning in Ohio

HB2 legalizes Tipping Scales In Favor of Awful e-Schools

HB2, the charter school reform bill recently passed by the Ohio General Assembly, legalizes the scale tipping activities of ODE.

The "Chartergate" scandal, reported widely, had the school choice director for the Ohio Department of Education resigning after throwing failing grades for online schools out of charter school evaluations. Without the grades from the pitifully performing e-schools, authorizers could look like they were doing a decent job.

The discovery of this scheme however has forced ODE to include those e-schools in their sponsor ratings.

In order to prevent this causing the inevitable ineffective grade, ECOT proposed changing the way their grade would be calculated. Instead of being weighted by the number of students they taught, they would simply be weighted as a single school, equal to a school with only a handful of students.

Needless to say, that got a lot of pushback too. That is, until last minute changes were introduced into HB2.

Part of why the e-schools were left out is that their large enrollments would dominate the ratings, if they were weighted by the number of students.

The compromise gives e-schools part of what they want -- to be counted just as a school, not weighted by enrollment -- but not exactly. Schools will now be counted both ways.

The new rules call for the academic rating of sponsors to be partly done by counting each school as a single unit and partly by weighting the rating by enrollments of each school.

Colleen Grady, the main education advisor for the House and a key player in the adjustments to the bill, said the bill does not spell out the percentages that each way will count, leaving that up to ODE.

That makes how the department decides to calculate the ratings a key issue in the coming weeks.

ODE has already signaled a willingness to fix the sponsors grades, what's the betting that their weightings will now legally benefit terrible e-schools? We won't have long to wait to find out.

Expect Mass Teacher Exodus At Ohio Charter Schools

One of the reasons Ohio's charter schools perform so poorly is because they suffer from a large amount of annual teacher turnover. Classrooms are overpopulated with rookies learning on the job with few veterans to mentor them. This happens because underpaid quality educators get snapped up by traditional school districts, while charter operators like to churn their staff in order to keep payroll low. Everyone but the bottom line is a loser.

HB 2, the recently passed charter school reform bill, will make matter worse.

A last-minute addition to the state's charter school reform bill would block some teachers - those teaching at charters run by for-profit companies - from being part of the state pension system.

The change, which would apply only to new teachers at those schools and not to any current teachers, was a surprise amendment to House Bill 2 on Tuesday and drew angry complaints from some legislators and the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

Details about the change, how it came about and exactly who it would affect were difficult to verify last night as teachers unions and legislators made a flurry of phone calls to sort it out.

It's not complicated to understand why this was snuck into the bill at the last minute. Pushing charter school teachers out of the State Teachers Retirement System, and into social security will save a charter school operator about 8% on their payroll. Employers typically pay 14% into STRS on behalf of their employees, but only 6.2% into Social Security.

Because it will only apply to new employees charter operators will now be incentivized to fire existing staff, who have no union protections, and replace them with staff that are 8% cheaper. Further more, the closing of the door to STRS only makes becoming a teacher in a charter school even less appealing - further damaging the teaching quality.

Don't Expect Charter Quality Improvement Any Time Soon

With the passage of HB2, the charter reform law, many might be tempted to think we'll quickly see the horrendous quality of Ohio's charter schools to rapidly improve. That won't be the case.

HB2 is written to mostly address the sponsors of the schools, and not the schools themselves. But where the law does address sponsor quality that might impact actually schools, the law is laborious in how it deals with low performers

.

The law required the Ohio Department of Education to develop, then annually rate charter school sponsors. But as we have seen, this is the first giant loophole the poor quality truck can drive through. ODE is already under intense pressure after it was proven it had manipulated the rating system to give sponsors much higher ratings than they deserve. Without a fair and honest accounting of a sponsors performance, the law cannot operate as many would hope - by revoking poor performing sponsors authority to manage charters.

If, and we contend it will be a big if so long as ODE is packed with charter school cronies and ideologues, we eventually get to a fair, transparent and honest rating system for charter sponsors, the law is still tilted against action. For example, the law:

Revokes the sponsorship authority of a sponsor that receives an overall rating of "ineffective" for three consecutive years, subject to an appeals hearing that is conducted by an officer appointed by the Superintendent of Public Instruction and decided by the State Board under specified deadlines. (R.C. 3314.016(B)(7)(b)(ii).)

A sponsor needs to perform poorly for 3 consecutive years, almost an entire school career for a high school student, before any meangingful action can be taken. Even at that point, ideologues at ODE can hear an appeal.

The law also has another brake applied to acting quickly. The law authorizes ODE, for the 2015-2016 school year only, to choose to not assign an overall rating to a sponsor that meets a broad range of conditions. This means that the absolute worst sponsors are likely to avoid any direct consequences until the end of the 2018-2019 school year, and even then have an avenue to appeal to potentially sympathetic ears.

You will note that it requires 3 consecutive poor ratings. Should a sponsor game the system to achieve a satisfactory rating for just one year, the whole clock will resets, and another generation of students will be harmed.

HB2 is a welcome step to improving Ohio's charter schools, and we expect the financial management of the schools to improve, but sadly and most importantly we do not expect the quality of the schools themselves to improve - though the game is now on to make it look like they are - a game ODE has already begun to play.