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AUGUSTA — After
being encouraged in the 1990s to shun
standardized tests in measuring student
progress, Maine’s teachers now are feeling
overwhelmed by a new wave of state and federal
student testing requirements.
Maine’s
so-called “local assessment” approach to
measuring student progress has become so
burdensome that Governor John E. Baldacci, Maine
Commissioner of Education Susan Gendron and the
state’s teachers union have called for delaying
assessment-based high school graduation
requirements that were supposed to affect this
year’s freshmen class.
As changes to
those state requirements require legislative
action, the Education Committee is now reviewing
bills that would amend or further study Maine’s
Learning Results assessment system, which was
adopted in 1997. While there’s no rush to a
statewide, standardized test that would replace
labor-intensive local evaluations, many are now
calling for some combination of state testing
and local evaluation. (See related story.)
Further
complicating the issue are the federal
assessment requirements of the so-called No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) program. NCLB requires
public schools nationwide to demonstrate student
proficiency in English/language arts,
mathematics and science/technology.
To that list
Maine has added social studies, health and
physical education, career preparation, modern
and classical languages and visual and
performing arts.
Beyond any
state-mandated testing, NCLB requires each state
to measure every child’s progress in reading and
math in each of grades 3 through 8, beginning
with the upcoming 2005-06 school year, and at
least once during grades 10 through 12. By the
2007-08 school year, NCLB further requires
science/technology assessments at least once
during grades 3-5, grades 6-9 and grades 10-12.
A further
wrinkle is that NCLB focuses on the performance
of schools, not individual students. The intent
of the 2002 law is to identify “failing”
schools, not failing students.
NCLB generates
report cards for local school districts, not for
individual students. Under NCLB, parents of
students in failing schools will have a right to
enroll their children elsewhere. While that’s a
geographical impossibility in some parts of
Maine, NCLB failing grades stigmatize schools.
“It was
disheartening to educators to be so far along in
the work of Learning Results and development of
local assessments and then have the NCLB
initiatives come into play, making it a real
challenge to keep up with both,” said Katrina
Kane, curriculum director for Ellsworth’s five
public schools.
“While the local
assessment system requirements may not have been
perfect, we were at least working hard to
provide a system of accountability. When we add
the weight of the NCLB federal testing
requirements, that became a back-breaker.”
“Teachers are
frustrated,” said Trisha Rhodes, a reading and
literacy teacher/coach who serves Hancock and
Waldo counties from Bar Harbor. “They feel all
of their professional development time is spent
trying to fulfill all these mandate to give the
test and teach to the test. A huge amount of
time and energy has been spent for us to get the
local assessments that we need. Now it looks
like it may be changed.”
Hundreds of
pages have been written in explaining to
teachers how the state wants them to implement
the 1997 Learning Results program. That
legislative mandate outlined what proficiencies
students ought to be able to demonstrate in
English, math, science, social studies, health
and physical education, modern and classical
languages and the visual and performing arts.
Teachers were
asked to develop curricula that would teach what
students needed to know to meet the Learning
Results standards, with achievement measured by
a “combination” of local and state assessments.
The law morphed over time into emphasizing local
assessments over standardized state tests, which
were and are being criticized as “cookie cutter”
evaluations. The problem is that teachers had to
create the assessments at the same time they
were developing and learning to teach the
curriculum to be tested.
If the state
doesn’t change its rules, teachers would be
forced to teach students to pass the local
evaluations — which they are still in the
process of designing — in addition to the
federally mandated standardized tests, leaving
little time for anything else.
Deputy Education
Commissioner Patrick Phillips said the
department wants to scale back assessments and
will consider using standardized tests as part
of the evaluation process.
“We’re
overstretched,” he said. “We need to do less to
ensure we can do it well.”
“The whole
process got away from us and created a system
that’s not manageable,” said Rob Walker,
president of the Maine Education Association,
the state’s teachers union.
He said 60
percent of 3,200 teachers surveyed said they had
thought about getting out of the profession in
the last two years, and 44 percent said they’d
never get in, if they had it to do all over
again. A big reason, he said, was the local
assessment mandate.
“We’re driving
even the best teachers crazy,” said House
Majority Leader Glenn Cummings, (D-Portland),
who is co-sponsoring a bill with Assistant
Senate Minority Leader Carol Weston to encourage
the Department of Education to hire outside
contractors to help with assessment work.
“We tried to
please too many people,” said Weston (R-Waldo County), a substitute
teacher who has served on the Education
Committee, and is married to an elementary
school principal. “The state said: ‘We’re going
to have standards, but you design the
standards.’”
The state does,
in fact, use one standardized test — the Maine
Education Assessment (MEA) — in grades 4, 8 and
11 to test reading, writing, math and science
skills. It is handled by an outside firm. MEA
scores don’t count toward a student’s grade or
advancement to the next level, but they are
widely used in the court of public opinion. That
opinion has been harsh in many districts since
the test is difficult and scores aren’t very
good.
Last year’s MEA
scores show 48 percent of eleventh-graders
meeting or exceeding standards in reading, 36
percent in writing, 24 percent in math and 12
percent in science.
Those scores
could have dire consequences under NCLB, as the
federal government allows states to choose the
standardized tests they use to comply with the
law, and Maine uses the MEA right now.
Weston said she
couldn’t believe the commissioner of education
went to “fight for the right to use the MEA” as
the qualifying test under NCLB, “when she knew
75 percent of the kids were not meeting
standards.”
Sen. Karl Turner
(R-Cumberland
County) put it more directly.
“Why didn’t we
pick the Iowa (Test of Basic Skills) or
something, so we can blow by this?” he asked at
a recent Education Committee hearing.
Phillips said
the state’s education department is considering
changes to the MEA to make the test more
compatible with the “annual yearly progress”
goals of the NCLB.
Freshman Rep.
Connie Goldman (D-Cape Elizabeth), a former
superintendent of schools in Gorham and Cape Elizabeth, agrees with Weston’s
assessment that teachers are being asked to
create what professional testing companies spend
millions of dollars to develop.
“Maine has spent
millions on contracts to outside developers for
the MEA and continues to spend millions a year
to evaluate tests,” Goldman said. “Is it
reasonable to place our classroom teachers in
the position of having to meet the same or even
similar standards” as professional testing
companies? she asked.
Goldman has
submitted a bill to study the true costs of
local assessments. She would support a
combination of local evaluations and statewide
tests as a graduation requirement.
“I would look at
a combination that is respectful of teachers’
and students’ time,” she said. |
