In Example 1, the consequences of assessment are quite serious for individual students: If they fail to pass all subjects, they may not get a job because employers require a secondary school certificate; if they fail to do well on the examinations, they have no opportunity for attending a university. The stakes are high in Example 2, but not quite as high as in Example 1. Students can stay in school for several years, prepare for the tests, and retake the tests each year. In Example 3, there are high stakes for school administrators and teachers, but not for individual students. In fact, the tests may be low stakes for the students because there appear to be no consequences for their doing poorly on the tests.
Accountability Testing
Although the use of high-stakes testing in the United States can be traced back to Horace Mann in the 1850s, modern high-stakes testing in the United States grew out of school reform movements that developed during the 1980s. Educational reformers and state legislators wanted to ensure that virtually all students could meet educational standards set by the state and demanded by employers. Employers needed to increase productivity and to be competitive in world markets. They needed a better-educated workforce to handle the demands of rapidly increasing technology and greater intellectual skills needed in the workplace. State legislators considered testing to be one way of holding schools accountable for students learning the educational standards set by a state.
Assessment that is used to hold individual students or school officials responsible for ensuring that students meet state standards is called accountability testing. Usually accountability testing is accompanied by high-stakes consequences. A state’s accountability testing may take several forms, as is shown by the examples above. A state may require both individual and school accountability, too. Check your state’s education department website for its current regulations regarding individual and school accountability.
No Child Left Behind Act
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is important to our discussion of high-stakes assessment because it requires states to establish challenging content standards and performance standards (referred to as achievement standardsin the NCLB
literature) and to demonstrate by way of tests and other assessments how well students have attained high levels of achievement on these standards. A state’s failure to provide this demonstration results in loss of federal education funds that are authorized under NCLB. Assessment under NCLB is a school-level accountability tool.
Standards-Based Proficiency Requirements
Content standardsdescribe the subject-matter facts, concepts, principles, and so on that students are expected to learn. Performance standardsdescribe the things students can perform or do once the content standards are learned. (We discuss state standards and how to align your learning objectives to them in Chapter 2 .) When students are assessed on a state’s standards, they are classified into one of three categories for purposes of reporting to the federal government:
basic, proficient, and advanced. A state may have more than three categories, but all must be
aligned to these three. Under NCLB, the goal originally was for 100% of the students in each school to reach the proficient level or higher on the state’s content and performance standards by 2014. In addition, schools were to show adequate
yearly progress (AYP)toward this goal or have sanctions imposed.
High-Stakes Sanctions NCLB sanctions and corrective actions for schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress after 2 years were quite restrictive and entirely punitive; there were no official rewards for schools that did well. In addition, reaching 100% proficiency was a statistically unattainable goal, and, as 2014 approached, more and more schools failed to meet AYP goals. Beginning in 2011, the federal government allowed states to apply for waivers from some of the NCLB requirements—such as meeting original AYP goals—and sanctions. In order to qualify for a waiver, states had to address four principles ( U.S. Department of Education, 2012 ).
1. College- and career-ready expectations for all students. To qualify for a waiver of NCLB restrictions, states must demonstrate that they have college- and career-ready expectations for students, in at least reading/language arts and
mathematics, by adopting standards (a) that are common to a significant number of states or (b) that are approved by a state network of institutions of higher education. They also must develop and administer annual, statewide, aligned high-quality assessments and report student growth on these standards in at least Grades 3 through 8 and once in high school.
Most states will do this by signing on to the Common Core State Standards ( corestandards. org ) and participating in one of two consortia of states developing assessments to match them. The Common Core State Standards Initiative, coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), released standards in English/language arts and mathematics in June 2010. The two federally funded assessment consortia are the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC,
parcconline.org ) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium ( smarterbalanced. org ). Both consortia aim to have assessments ready for states’ implementation by the 2014–2015 school year.
2. State-developed differentiated recognition, accountability, and support. To qualify for a waiver of the original NCLB sanctions, which were couched in punitive language (e.g., “failing schools”) and could include staff replacement or a state takeover of the school, states must develop and implement a system to identify schools into different categories for
support. The state must set new, achievable, annual measurable objectives for all local education agencies (districts), schools, and subgroups. Using these, states will publicly recognize Title I schools making the most progress or having the highest performance as “reward schools”; publicly identify the lowest-performing schools as “priority schools,” implementing and evaluating intervention plans for those schools; and publicly identify Title I schools with the greatest
achievement gaps, or in which subgroups are furthest behind, as “focus schools,” also implementing and evaluating intervention plans for those schools.
3 . Supporting effective instruction and leadership. To qualify for a waiver of NCLB restrictions, states must develop evaluation systems for teachers and principals that use multiple sources of data, including measures of student growth
and measures of professional practice. The evaluation systems should be used for continuous improvement and provide clear and timely feedback to the teachers and principals.
4 . Reducing duplication and unnecessary burden. To qualify for a waiver of NCLB restrictions, states must remove school administrative reporting requirements that have little or no impact on student outcomes.
Disaggregation An important provision of the NCLB Act is that a state must report test summaries at the school level and must disaggregate the data. Disaggregation of test resultsmeans that the test results for the total population of students
are separated in order to report on individual subgroups of students—such as students who are poor, who are members of minority groups, who have limited English proficiency, and who have disabilities—in addition to reporting on the total
student population. The reason for this requirement is that the federal government wants to ensure that states are accountable for all students learning the challenging state standards, including those in these subgroups. In some instances in the past, states reported only on the whole population of their students, thus masking the fact that some subgroups of students were not receiving quality education and were failing to meet the standards.