Revisiting Assessment
I thought I’d come back to a topic I spent a lot of time on in the last month, assessment.
First, the new secretary of education was chosen, Education Week: Obama: Duncan ‘Doesn’t Blink’ on Tough Decisions, but I hadn’t commented on it. I thought the “Doesn’t Blink” comment was a bit “tin-eared” after the Palin fiasco. Mr. Duncan seems more genial and cooperative than Spellings, or the other “top choices” that were not Linda Darling-Hammond, but he still loves bubble tests. Looks like there is little hope for portfolio-based assessment, ala Doug Christensen.
Then, I saw, Why Assess? at Chris Lehnamann’s Practical Theory where he shares this from Gary Stager, who is not afraid to be out on the ragged edge:
I’ll be outrageous and say that all assessment is an interruption to the learning process.
I’ve been thinking about assessment as I and my school practice it lately, not just the required “summative” assessments, which my prior posts indicate, I’m not as crazy about. We’re in a transition that I’ve experienced before. As the Reading First grant is winding down, we are not having to do as much of the required assessment (weekly assessments with the language arts text, a unit assessment from the County Office of Education). Both of those assessment are lousy the farther up in grade levels that you get, the worse it is. The weekly text assessment is not aligned well with either the standard or the difficulty level found on the state tests that they are ultimately given. The unit assessment attempts to fix that but it is a bastardized instrument.
Since these are no longer required, some teachers seem not to be doing any assessment. I went through some of the same in my last year teaching a self-contained class when our administrator decided to forgo Reading First money. The problem that I ran across is that you miss a lot in a class of 27-33 kids when you aren’t doing some form of assessment. Gary is right that assessment takes time, but in my opinion if you aren’t doing some assessment, you are operating in the dark, which is not where we want to be. Now, my site needs to figure out what assessment instruments will be useful. Much of it will likely be observational, but it can’t be nothing.