Adding Value; School evaluation process should be revisited
The Boston Herald
May 9, 2004
As a means of measuring actual educational results for individual students and school districts alike the curriculum-based MCAS tests are as accurate and objective a gauge as currently exists.
As a measure of how diligently and effectively a school district does its job, however, the standardized tests leave much to be desired.
To be sure, disastrously high failure rates in a given district are a clear signal that a district is truly "underperforming." That appears to have been the case with all of the districts labeled subpar by state education officials.
The problem with district and school average scores, though, is that they give no indication of the amount of time, effort and ingenuity the school had to expend to achieve the result.
In stable communities where children have the benefit of extensive educational enrichment at home and in the community, the schools may achieve impressive average scores while simply coasting along. Schools in communities with highly transient populations and comparatively few enrichment opportunities may do their job far more diligently without achieving a similar result.
Over the years, Worcester Superintendent of Schools James A. Caradonio and other school officials have been advocating for adoption of an evaluation system that is less reliant on an annual snapshot of school achievement, tracking individual students' improvement over time.
One such system, developed by the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy at Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, was proposed recently to the state Board of Education. S. Paul Reville, executive director of the Rennie Center, urged the state to adopt a more comprehensive "value-added analysis" system to measure student progress a policy proposal that has been endorsed by the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and the Boston Plan for Excellence.
Under the existing annual snapshot, the average score achieved by children in a given grade is compared with the average score of the children who were in that grade in previous years. Value-added analysis follows the progress of individual students from year to year. The result is an assessment of student growth that is, the amount of learning students in the school or district gained during the year.
To be sure, such a system would be far more complicated than a simple annual snapshot of achievement. It would be significantly more costly as well. Also needed would be annual grade-by-grade tests measuring the same subject matter, presumably adapted from the proven MCAS tests.
Finally, there would have to be an evaluation, partly political and partly pedagogical, of whether the cost in money and learning of such an elaborate testing system would be better spent elsewhere.
Nonetheless, for fairness' sake the Board of Education would be well-advised to integrate some form of value-added analysis into its district evaluation protocol.
