Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater:  National Assessments and Standards

August 05, 2015

“Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater!”  Fears of What’s to Follow as States Receive Assessment Results

Remember the old adage, “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”  That adage is a good way to think of one of my current fears in the world of education.

Most states have adopted the Common Core State Standards (43 states as well as the District of Columbia, American Samoan Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, & Northern Mariana Islands).  This in turn has resulted in those States now transitioning their state assessments over to the Common Core new standards.  Unfortunately, what they are finding with the new assessments, as they are getting their results back, is that fewer students are proficient and more schools are failing than their previous assessments showed and would have predicted.  For example, Kentucky, one of the first states to offer a Common Core state assessment, set new benchmarks with the assessment and dropped proficiency rates down to 30% in addition to having several schools that were previously ranked in the top 20% fall out of that category. 

The blame game runs back uphill.  Bad test results?  Blame the test and then blame the standards on which the test was based.  Makes sense, right?  Not exactly.  It is important to remember that the assessments and the standards are two separate things.  The new assessments of the Common Core standards such as PARCC and Smarter Balance, while they do measure student proficiency on questions aligned with the Common Core, they do not measure the standards themselves. For example, let’s take the common core 7th grade math standard of being able to calculate the circumference of a circle.  An assessment based on this is administered to a 7th grader who in turn does terribly on the assessment.  An incorrect conclusion would be that the standard is not a good one.  You may be able to conclude that the standard was not taught well or that the assessment question itself was not reflective of the child’s knowledge of that standard, but in neither case does it objectively opine on the circumference of a circle standard itself. 

We’ve seen so far Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Utah
decide not to use the national Common Core assessments created by PARCC or Smarter Balance while Indiana, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin debate throwing away their support for both.  Every time this happens with yet another State I want to scream, “Please don’t throw out the standards with the assessments!” 

The Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards are some of the best sets of standards our states and schools have worked with to date.  They are also a huge leap forward in both their rigor and relevance and create national opportunities for collaboration for educators as well as students. Which is what I fear many people and states may confuse when they look at assessment results and bash standards.

Why I fear this confusion between the standards and the assessments stems from the fact that many parents I speak with across numerous states are already confused as to the difference between teaching methods and the Common Core standards.  I have spoken with numerous parents who think a teaching method such as Singapore Math is the Common Core.  Consequently, when parents get frustrated with how their student is being taught, they often misplace that frustration onto the Common Core standards because that is what they have heard publicized as being new to their child’s education.  The confusion that standards equate to teaching methods can then naturally lead to equating standards with the assessments. 

The obvious question then becomes if it isn’t a problem with the standards, why are the results so bad on various Common Core assessments across the country?  There are so many variables that come into play when answering that question it is hard to know which to start with.  We could ponder over such questions as:

• If it is the first or even second time the tests are widely given, have the questions and assessment formats been fully vetted for validity as a measurement of proficiency?
• Were questions asked in formats the students have never experienced and therefore caused confusion over the questions and not the content?
• Were the assessments longer than the tolerance of students and the motivating energy of teachers?
• Was the full rollout of Common Core assessments rushed or scaled too quickly?
• Since many states and districts switched from paper and pencil to on-line assessments, did technology skills or lack their of hinder the demonstration of content knowledge? 
• Is it simply because the standards are higher and more rigorous than the states previously had in place?
• When measuring growth and other target numbers were the state statistical measures accurate?  Were their regressions correctly run?

In the end, we know that we need a way to measure the growth of students and the progress of schools.  Arguably, the way we measure the growth of students and progress of schools should be fairly consistent and not vary across zip codes if we believe we are preparing these students for future lives and careers whose requirements will not change according to their originating zip code.

So, instead of throwing out the standards and the assessments it is my hope that as states get their baseline results back that they realize the assessments need to be improved, educators and students may need more time to catch up with the higher standards being asked of them, and that often with change and improvement there is another old adage they recall that says, “things often look worse before they look better.”  Throw out the bathwater of first year common core assessments being definitive ending points.  This is the first year of the assessments and so they are starting points of where students and schools need to progress towards.  Keep the baby of high national standards.  We do not want to be content with lower standards that prepare our children less but make them look better.

Dr. Amy Swann is Matchbook Learning's Chief Learning Officer.