And when I often met with teacher groups to explain and discuss their
statewide accountability test results, the teachers would always ask for the item analysis results.
Public schools receive additional resources for students labeled learning disabled, and they may be able to exempt learning disabled students
from accountability testing.
I would guess that these students will be taking the
same accountability tests and will therefore be influenced, at least to some degree, by the standards.
State
accountability testing shows suburban districts doing better than the rest of the state, which consists largely of big urban districts.
Is it possible to
build accountability tests that both supply accurate evidence of school quality and promote instructional improvement?
Schools and districts around the country are currently working hard on creating curricula for grit, and
even accountability tests to measure it.
Parents consider multiple types of assessments, including interim and formative assessments, helpful to their children's learning; however, they are skeptical that state
accountability tests improve the quality of teaching.
They aren't high - stakes, backward -
looking accountability tests; they're forward - looking sources of practical information and valuable insights.
Second, we have
accountability tests whose function is to determine whether educators have been successful in getting kids to learn the stuff identified in the content standards.
This increasing diversity of the school - aged population has occurred within the context of the standards - based education movement and its accompanying high -
stakes accountability testing.
When educators think about
state accountability testing, it is rarely in connected with the process of fostering reflective learners — but maybe it should be.
But today's educators are allowing their instructional success to be judged by students» scores
on accountability tests that are essentially incapable of distinguishing between effective and ineffective instruction.
At least 135,000 students in Texas public high schools drop out prior to graduation every year, a figure that has increased since 2001 because of the use
of accountability testing as required by the No Child Left Behind Act, concludes a study by researchers from Rice University's Center for Education, in Houston, and the University of Texas at Austin.
The poll also found that Americans are «ambivalent» about comparing test scores in their local schools with other districts, states and nations — part of the original intent of
accountability test scores under No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
In fact, no one was the least bit interested in what I taught until Texas instituted science
accountability testing for various grades.
In this forum, Joshua Starr, superintendent of schools in high - performing Montgomery County, Maryland, makes the case for a three - year hiatus from high - stakes
accountability testing while new standards and tests are implemented.
To avoid overwhelming teachers and students with daunting lists of curricular targets, an instructionally
supportive accountability test should measure students» mastery of only an intellectually manageable number of curricular aims, more like a half - dozen than the 50 or so a teacher may encounter today.
They honor the intent of the CCSS, within and across subject areas, instead of emphasizing only the content measured more narrowly on
external accountability tests.
Clearly the professional learning community is one of the reasons the high school's
Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) results consistently are among the highest high school results in the state.
More than ever these days, teachers need to buttress students» scores on large -
scale accountability tests with evidence of their own classroom competence.
The study's findings rest on an index developed by the authors called the «Global Report Card» (GRC), which builds on state
accountability test results for every district for which the American Institutes for Research (AIR) collected achievement data between 2004 and 2007.
While most schools allow IEP teams to determine classroom testing accommodations, there are typically strict guidelines for using accommodations during state -
level accountability testing.
The success of the current education reform movement hinges on the compliance of millions of children who sit for annual
accountability tests designed to rank their performance, and on the acquiescence of their schools and teachers to this vast public - policy experiment.
Finally, we evaluate the extent to which trends in performance on
accountability tests generalize to later outcomes, such as high school and college performance.We use several methods to analyze differential trends in performance.
Because it is essentially impossible to raise students» scores on instructionally insensitive tests, many teachers — in desperation — require seemingly endless practice with items similar to those on an
approaching accountability test.
Yet because NCLB has
made accountability tests the tail that wags the dog of the whole education system — threatening remediation and state takeover for schools that fall short — what's not tested often isn't taught.
Second, the addition of a high - stakes
accountability testing requirement to the voucher program in 2010 resulted in a solid increase in voucher student test scores, leaving the voucher students with significantly higher achievement gains in reading than their matched MPS peers.
Has the school resisted the current push to place standards -
based accountability testing toward the center of teaching and learning and evaluation of its teachers?
In a competency - based system, flexibly
timed accountability tests may provide better measures of progress than fixed, annual tests.
Such tools would be used in conjunction with larger -
grained accountability tests, which are administered less frequently and tend to have too long a turnaround time to be used to help teachers.
«It's why a dropped - in - from - the -
sky accountability test, no matter how well designed, can't give you everything you want to know about the competencies of students.»
Using the class time to explain the recently changed graduation requirements and state
accountability testing provides an excellent way to create ambassadors to explain this to others in the community.
This paper characterizes the extent to which gender achievement gaps on state
accountability tests across the United States are associated with those tests» item formats.
In recent years, I have been greatly dismayed by the fact that
many accountability tests are instructionally insensitive — even those accompanied by ample evidence that they assess students» mastery of a set of curricular aims (a first - step inference).