For Immediate Release: January 11, 2016
Contact: Renée Rybak Lang, renee.lang@nasbe.org, 703-740-4841
New Issue of NASBE’s State Education Standard Helps State Leaders Recalibrate State Assessments and Accountability Systems for an ESSA World
Alexandria, VA – The National Association of State Boards of Education today released the new issue of its journal, The State Education Standard, which focuses on designing successful systems of assessment—one state at a time.
This issue of the Standard comes at an opportune time. The new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives state policy leaders greater responsibility for determining the role of their assessments in state accountability systems. While searching for the right assessments, states must measure what matters. Standard authors argue for states to take a fresh, vigorous look at how all the pieces fit together; they provide guidance and resources to help maximize assessment quality and outcomes and share examples from states that have succeeded in developing coherent assessment systems.
As needs evolve in the job market, states and schools have begun to reimagine assessments as tools that augment the classroom experience and ensure students receive a balanced education. Scott Marion, executive director at the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, and Rajendra Chattergoon, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder, describe the components of a well-balanced assessment system. They argue that coherence, theory of action, and efficiency are key elements of successful assessment reform.
Robert Rothman of the Alliance for Excellent Education shares how states can use data dashboards to keep track of the right achievement indicators. Malbert Smith III and Gary L. Williamson of MetaMetrics show how assessments can be used to track students’ progression toward career readiness, and Jim Pellegrino of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Learning Sciences Research Institute explores what states should look for in assessments that are aligned to science standards.
Assessments are not only useful in measuring student progress. Ben Fenton, co-founder and chief strategy officer of New Leaders, invites states to consider using assessments for more than measuring student progress. He writes that assessments have great potential to measure principal performance as well and help states and districts guarantee that all schools have strong leaders.
State examples abound in this issue, and authors Anne Marie Fenton, director of assessment at the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, Pamela Wetherington, edTPA coordinator at Georgia’s Columbus State University, and Paul Leather, New Hampshire’s deputy commissioner of education, share pertinent examples of assessment strategies in their states. Fenton and Wetherington focus on new-teacher performance assessments in Georgia, while Leather shares strategies used in New Hampshire as the state overhauls its system for school accountability.
Finally, NASBE interviews Stanford University professor and researcher Linda Darling-Hammond. Darling-Hammond shares insight on how performance assessments can help all students achieve, regardless of their backgrounds, and can contribute to a school environment conducive to student success.
Read the full January 2016 issue of The State Education Standard. Individual articles are available for download here.
The National Association of State Boards of Education represents America’s state and territorial boards of education. Our principal objectives are to strengthen state leadership in education policymaking, advocate equality of access to educational opportunity, promote excellence in the education of all students, and ensure responsible lay governance of education. Learn more at www.nasbe.org.
###