ACSA’s Assessment and Accountability Task Force has completed its challenging job of examining the state’s current system and developing recommendations on where to go from here. The task force has issued a report titled "Prepared for the Future: Accountability for Excellence and Equity," which the ACSA Board of Directors has endorsed.

The task force consisted of representatives from various ACSA councils and committees, as well as ACSA members with a demonstrated expertise in the areas of curriculum, instruction, assessment and accountability.

The formation of the task force was proposed by ACSA President Chuck Weis, superintendent of Santa Clara COE, and was chaired by Linda Kaminski, assistant superintendent in Upland USD and ACSA’s 2009 Curriculum and Instruction Administrator of the Year.

Kaminski said she thinks the report developed useful recommendations for meaningful reform.

"It’s essential that we offer a system of assessment and accountability that gives our students the best opportunity for success," Kaminski said. "It’s especially imperative that our system works to close the achievement gap so all students can successfully move on to college or career. I believe the recommendations in our task force report will help us get to that kind of system."

With the sunset of the Public Schools Accountability Act in 2013, as well as the reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the development of Common Core Standards and accompanying assessments, the task force’s report will provide key input to policymakers as they work within the areas of assessment and accountability.

This issue area is very complex, thus the task force’s work was challenging. But Weis said every member rose to the challenge.

"I am very pleased with the report of the AA Task Force," he said. "Each member accepted my challenge of creating a vision for a truly 21st century, world-class assessment and accountability system for California.

"Educational leaders have learned from the implementation of a decade of the existing standards, assessment and accountability systems. Through this report, we have spoken with a collective voice about improvements that must be made."

The task force worked on four primary focus areas in developing the report:

•To stimulate, support and recognize college and career readiness as the goal.

•To close achievement gaps between and among demographically identified groups of students.

•To incentivize and exemplify high quality standards, teaching, assessment, incentives and intervention.

•To impact system-wide practices at the state, district and school levels.

The report included guiding principles for accountability, standards, performance measures, and incentives and interventions, including:

Accountability

•The accountability system should be designed to stimulate, support and recognize schools that demonstrate significant progress and identify schools that have not demonstrated improvement in closing the achievement gap.

•Expectations should be benchmarked against the expectations of internationally competitive nations as well as both college and career readiness.

•Continuous growth in achievement must be recognized; accountability targets should be based on individual annual student gains in performance.

•Targets should be multi-tiered with indicators at the state, district and school levels.

•The system must be unbiased and fair to all student groups.

Standards

•Both content and performance standards should be developed for all subject areas including the arts.

•Essential standards should be emphasized.

•There must be a balance among cognitive knowledge, problem solving, and real world application/demonstration of skills.

•English language proficiency standards should be integrated into all academic standards.

Performance measures

•Assessments should meet the highest standards of educational measurement.

•Assessments must include measures of students’ ability to reason, analyze and evaluate.

•Assessments should be meaningful, relevant and motivating to students.

•Both formative and summative measures should be supported.

•There should be substantial professional development around assessments for both teachers and administrators in order to maximize their impact on student learning. Such professional development should include models of effective teaching and learning.

Incentives and interventions

•There must be thoughtful ways to distinguish between improving schools and schools with long-term failures.

•Interventions should be solution-oriented and evidence-based.

•There are different levels of incentives and interventions for the state, for districts and for schools.

The report concluded that principles for accountability, standards, performance measures, and incentives and interventions can and should be applied to support the learning of everyone in the system – from students to teachers to schools to districts, as well as state agencies.

"It is my hope that this document will serve as a beacon for policymakers to follow to bring us out of the dark era of too much useless testing and misidentification of schools in need of support and intervention," Weis said.

Click here to access the entire AATF report.