A dozen grants totaling $2 million may not sound important but the Assessment for Learning Project is an important signpost on the path forward for
American education. The grants provide critical R&D funding and advice to innovative grantee districts and networks. This work signals the beginning of the end of
week long standardized tests and, with related developments, will shape measurement and progress reporting in the coming decade.
Backstory
In the first few months of the last decade I was providing support to innovative schools including New Tech High and High Tech High while advocating for
the reauthorization of federal education policy that became known as No Child Left Behind. Now appearing antithetical, these activities were united in the
goal of spreading access to quality learning experiences for low-income students.
It is now clear that NCLB resulted in unintended consequences including narrowed scripted curricula and weeks of test prep. The well-intentioned and
bipartisan law was never updated in ways that would have made the school accountability framework useful rather than crippling. Add the impact of federal
recovery spending and it’s hard to overstate how dominant the federal/national standards-based reform framework was to the
last twenty years of American education.
With the reauthorization of federal education policy and shifts in the political landscape it’s fair to say that pendulum has swung back to state policy as
the dominant framework. What’s new is better tools, expanded access to informal learning, and the innovation economy. Interest in personalized learning
appears to be the dominant meme in American education--a new frame influenced by advocacy, investment, and innovative models. This spine for this new
framework is a rich assessment system--one that is still under construction.
Inventing the future
The Assessment for Learning Project (ALP) is a partnership between Center for Innovation in Education and Next Generation Learning Challenges.
The partners reviewed 148 proposals submitted by schools, districts, networks, state agencies, and nonprofits from across the country.
Twelve grants totaling $2 million were awarded. Big themes where broader aims, educator capacity, and new systems of assessment. (See an interactive map of grantees and themes.)
Broader aims. A group of Virginia districts
will encourage students to set goals and measure progress toward a broader set of graduate attributes. Student-led learning will be marked by Exhibitions
of Learning and recorded in a student-curated portfolio system.
Georgia’s Henry County Schools will promote student agency through new feedback protocols designed to promote
deeper learning, more ownership, and 21st century skills.
Summit Public Schools
, a leader in promoting habits of success, will improve its comprehensive curriculum and assessment system that addresses each component of college and
career readiness (see Summit’s social emotional rubric
).
A network of Hawaiian schools will testi cultural responsiveness assessments.
Teacher capacity. A multistate consortium will deploy a
common set of performance assessments. A group of Rhode Island schools will develop and
pilot a Performance Assessment for Learning Micro-Credential system which will build the capacity of teachers to design, field test, score, and refine high
quality performance tasks.
New systems. Four elementary schools
in New Hampshire are piloting methods for combining competency-based learning and performance assessments in multi-age learning settings. The purpose is to
develop a new model of personalization that allows a more flexible and effective educational pathway through the development and use of PreK-Grade 5
learning progressions. The result is deeper, more authentic learning opportunities leading to greater student success.
A group of Colorado districts are deploying
common performance assessments and developing new learning progressions to empower student ownership and agency.
With the shift to digital, most learning experiences have embedded or associated assessments. Students are benefiting from more feedback and teachers are
benefiting from more data. These projects will add high quality performance assessments (like writing assignments and challenging problems) and will
develop methods of better combining all of this formative data.
When student progress (i.e., growth and achievement) is clearly and reliably communicated to stakeholders it will no longer be necessary to impose big end
of year tests.
For more see: