ACSA’s Assessment and Accountability Task Force, appointed by President Chuck Weis, is developing a list of recommendations for improvements to the state’s accountability system.

Linda Kaminski, assistant superintendent with Upland USD and ACSA’s 2009 Curriculum and Instruction Administrator of the Year, is chairing the group. She spoke about the need for this task force.

“Education must be about excellence and equity,” Kaminski said. “Our students and our society will only thrive if we individually and collectively hold ourselves accountable for ensuring that student achievement rises to the highest levels and that achievement gaps are eliminated.

“We have seen numerous schools accomplish this by emphasizing critical thinking and reasoning across the disciplines, and actively engaging students to develop their ability to apply knowledge to solving complex, real-world problems. The challenges we face today and into the 21st century demand that our schools demonstrate continued progress in achieving this level of excellence and equity for all students.”

As educators well know, recent years have seen unprecedented accountability placed on schools for student success. California’s Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 and the federal re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, set ambitious goals and rigorous accountability timelines for academic achievement among all students. 

These systems have served to identify schools in need of improvement. However, ACSA believes the fundamental purpose of an accountability system must also be to stimulate, support and recognize high achievement, and to close achievement gaps among all students and student subgroups.

A design that simply serves an evaluative function misses the moral obligation to use all means available, including an accountability system, to foster higher achievement for all students.

As California’s accountability system will sunset in 2011, and the federal ESEA is being reauthorized under the Obama Administration, ACSA wants to lead the discussion on transforming the current state system into one that is smarter. The revamped accountability system should take into account not only identifying areas needing improvement, but also must support improved student success and help close the achievement gap for underrepresented groups of students.

ACSA President Weis, superintendent of Santa Clara COE, said with the coinciding sunset of California’s PSAA and STAR system along with the federal ESEA coming up for reauthorization, the time is right for ACSA to tap the knowledge of its members to craft an improved assessment and accountability system.

“As school leaders, we have implemented the myriad requirements of the PSAA and NCLB, and we know what has worked and what hasn’t,” Weis said. “We want to see California develop a world-class accountability system to match its highly rated content standards. But to do that we need the tools and resources that will help us focus on improving student learning. Rather than just pointing fingers at lower performing schools, we need a system that moves everyone forward.”

The AA Task Force has drafted a list of proposed guiding principles for such a system, and has forwarded them to ACSA councils and committees to get their feedback. These include the following:

 

Accountability

• Dual purpose: stimulate, support and recognize high achievement and close the achievement gap; identify schools and districts that have not made progress in raising student achievement and closing the gap.

• Performance expectations must be benchmarked against requirements for post-secondary education and viable careers.

• The system must recognize continuous growth in achievement at all levels and provide incentives for doing so.

• Targets should be based on individual student gains.

• The growth model should be multi-tiered with indicators at the student, school, district and state levels.

• The system must be fair and unbiased to all student groups, including English learners and students with disabilities, as well as understandable; credit should be given for all subgroup members, including those who have exited the program; subgroup accountability for English learners should be disaggregated by years in the program.

• Must include multiple indicators of college and career readiness.

• All schools receiving state and/or federal funding must participate.

• State and federal funding must fully support this system.

Standards

• Standards should include all academic areas, including the arts, English language proficiency and career technical education.

• Both content and performance standards must be emphasized.

• Standards must provide a balance among cognitive knowledge, problem solving and application of skills similar to the highest performing nations.

• Standards must be benchmarked against exemplary national and international standards.

• English language proficiency standards must be cross-referenced with academic standards.

Measures

• Performance measures must be aligned to essential and rigorous internationally benchmarked content for post-secondary education and viable careers.

• Performance measures must meet the highest standards of educational measurement; English learners must be assessed in a way that distinguishes content knowledge from English proficiency; assessments of students with disabilities must incorporate Individual Educational Plan requirements.

• Performance measures must balance students’ ability to reason, analyze and evaluate as well as solve challenging, real-world problems.

• Performance measures should focus in-depth on essential standards.

• Performance measures must include a variety of question types and align to high quality instruction.

• Performance measures must be meaningful, relevant and motivating to students.

• Assessment of career technical standards should require embedded demonstrations of the application of academic content standards.

• Assessment should vary by the intended purpose, with formative assessments for teachers and schools and matrix sampling to provide information about school, district and state performance.

• Design of performance standards should provide a model for effective teaching and learning of essential standards, critical thinking, reasoning and problem solving.

• Formative assessment results must be communicated in a timely manner.

• Summative assessment results should provide sufficient information to guide determination of school, district and state priorities to support implementation of rigorous, world-class essential standards.

Incentives and interventions

• The accountability system must distinguish among schools that demonstrate continuous growth and deserve recognition and schools that demonstrate a long-term pattern of failure to attain growth in student achievement.

• Incentives and intervention components must be solution-oriented and not punitive.

• The state must hold districts accountable for improving school-wide performance; intervention must be based on district and site strengths and needs.

• The need for intervention should be based on multiple years of performance data.

• Interventions must be evidence-based, sustained over multiple years, and free from political practices and priorities.

The task force includes representatives from various ACSA councils and committees, as well as ACSA members with a demonstrated expertise in the areas of curriculum and instruction, assessment and accountability. The group will submit its proposals to the ACSA Board of Directors for approval. The approved proposals will then go to ACSA’s Governmental Relations Department to inform its work in upcoming legislative sessions.