In this episode, we're taking on standardized testing—the impact of testing on students and educators, and the potential benefits and drawbacks of alternative forms of assessment with Jack Schneider, a historian, professor, and author of “Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality”.
Dr. Jack Schneider (00:02):
Grades should be over writeable. Okay, you couldn't do it then, but you can do it now. So let's change that. Let's update that. And there are lots of things that we can do like that to advance equity because right now we have a system that people have learned they can game and that other people don't have the same opportunity to game.
(00:25):
Now we don't want anybody gaming anything, but everybody should have an equal opportunity to thrive and succeed. And particularly if we're going to continue to use education as a gateway to opportunity, then everybody needs to have an opportunity to succeed.
Natieka (00:40):
Hello and welcome to School Me, the National Education Association's podcast dedicated to helping educators thrive at every stage of their careers. I'm your host, Natieka Samuels. In this episode, we're taking on standardized testing, the impact of testing on students and educators and the potential benefits and drawbacks of alternative forms of assessment.
(00:59):
We'll also explore how testing is connected to issues of equity and access in education, and consider practical solutions for improving assessment practices in our schools. To help us do that, we've invited an expert onto the show who has literally written the book on standardized testing. Jack Schneider is a historian, professor and author of Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jack.
Dr. Jack Schneider (01:23):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Natieka (01:25):
So let's start with a little bit about you. What are you currently working on and doing and what is your position and how did you get started in education?
Dr. Jack Schneider (01:34):
I am an associate Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. I am the co-founder of the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment. I'm the executive director of the Education Commonwealth Project. And then I've got a few other acronyms associated with me. But the two that I just mentioned, MCIEA and ECP, those are organizations that are working right now to change how we assess student learning and school quality.
(02:05):
And I got started in that work about 10 years ago because I think like a lot of listeners, I am bombarded by efforts to rate schools and to measure what students know and can do. And a lot of those offend my sensibilities. For instance, when The Boston Globe tells me that all of the good schools near me are in affluent white suburbs, I bristle at that. Right? When greatschools.org tells me, and this would change today because our neighborhood has gentrified quite a bit in the last decade.
(02:43):
But when at the time it was telling me that I couldn't in good conscience send my daughter to one of our neighborhood schools, which at least at the time were highly diverse racially and economically. And when that flew in the face of my own lived experience, watching my daughter come home happy, seeing her friend group, seeing the professionalism of the educators in the building. Right?
(03:09):
I bristled at the notion that somehow greatschools.org or the Boston Globe or Boston Magazine or even the State Department of Elementary and Secondary Education knew what was happening inside schools, knew how young people's lives were being changed merely by looking at the results of state standardized assessments.
(03:32):
And that's the primary way today that we try to assess what students know and can do and the primary way that we try to assess school quality. I think there are big problems there, both in terms of the things that we fail to measure. We fail to measure things like are kids happy? Do they feel safe? Are they engaged in their learning? Are their teachers engaging in culturally responsive pedagogy? Is it a diverse school?
(03:58):
All the things that matter to us as citizens, that matter to young people who are in schools, the things that matter to educators that got them into the business. Right? They want things like a broad and diverse curriculum for students. They want students to have access to creativity, to the opportunity to have a hand in shaping their own learning, the things that matter to those of us who are parents or who are guardians of young people.
(04:28):
We want them to have access to arts and music education. We want them to feel cared for by adults in the building. None of that stuff is presently measured by state assessment systems or any of these knockoffs like greatschools.org. And in addition to the problem of failing to assess some of the things we should, we assess things that we shouldn't be assessing, that are not actually a part of school quality.
(04:52):
And so listeners won't be surprised to know that proficiency rates on state standardized assessments tell us more about opportunity gaps outside of school than they do about what's actually happening inside schools. Right? What students are learning, and tell us far less about what the quality of the school is.
Natieka (05:12):
And before you gathered all of these acronyms into your life, you were a teacher, right? So could we talk a little bit about how you decided to become a teacher?
Dr. Jack Schneider (05:22):
Sure. I fell into it. I had a high quality liberal arts education that did not prepare me for any specific occupation. And I think like some educators, it was always something that I had considered but was not something that I had been encouraged to do because there's been systematic de-professionalization of teaching, because teaching is a gendered occupation, because teachers are systematically underpaid.
(05:56):
Right? All of these reasons that discourage people from getting into the profession were true of me. But I fell into it and I loved it. And one of the things that really disturbed me and that drove me to graduate school was I worked with two populations of students.
(06:14):
So I worked in a Quaker school during the day and then in the evenings and during the summers, I worked with Philadelphia public school students. And they came primarily from the quote unquote "Lower performing schools in Philadelphia." And seeing just the amazing similarities between students in terms of their cognitive abilities and then the amazing differences between students in terms of the opportunities that they had was what drove me to graduate school.
Natieka (06:45):
Let's get a bit into the meat of our topic today, which is standardized testing. So you wrote a book about standardized testing. So you're the perfect person to ask this question. Can you give us a brief history of standardized testing in the US and how it's evolved over time?
Dr. Jack Schneider (07:06):
So the first standardized test in the US was actually given not too far from where I live. The Boston Public Schools were the first school district to use standardized tests, and listeners may not be surprised to hear that they were created as an effort to pry open schools and to limit the autonomy of educators and school leaders, that leaders in Boston at the time, and that included famous common school advocate. Common schools as public schools were then known common school advocate, Horace Mann.
(07:42):
The idea was that leaders needed to have more control over what was happening inside schools and classrooms, and they believed that they could gain that control if they had student outcome data. And so they developed a standardized test that was used in the mid 19th century.
(08:03):
And over time, that became a standard tool for trying to figure out these things that actually are really difficult to figure out like what's happening inside the classroom, what is the impact that this educator is making with these young people, how effective is the school leader, how effective is the school in general. Right?
(08:25):
These are really hard questions to ask. And this was a valued tool, not because it did the thing that people wanted it to do in a perfect way, but because it was the first tool that they had available to them. And I think the really important thing to remember in this history is that once that became established, there's a kind of culture of assessment that evolves around that where generations of students move through schools being exposed to standardized tests. And then what happens?
(08:59):
They become grownups. Some of them become teachers, some of them become leaders in schools or districts or at the state level, who then by virtue of the fact that they experienced standardized tests, accept them as a kind of valid and natural way of trying to measure student learning and school quality.
(09:19):
One of the things that we see over time is the evolution of a culture there where people will say things like, "Well, we all hate tests, but tests are a fact of life." And another thing that's important to remember here is that it's not just a culture of assessment in terms of the things that we do, it's also the way we think of assessment as being valid or not. So there's a culture of quote unquote "Objectivity" that has emerged where we completely dismiss the things that young people know about their own experiences. That's quote unquote "Subjective."
(09:55):
We couldn't possibly ask them. Whether it be through interviews with them or something more systematic like student perception surveys, that is not viewed as a legitimate mechanism for understanding schools, nor is it considered to be a legitimate mechanism to survey educators, right? Or to have their voice be a part of the way we try to understand student learning and school quality.
(10:20):
But in addition to standardized tests emerging over time, we also have other quote unquote "Objective measures." Right? That align with this understanding of objectivity. So you couldn't ask teachers or students anything, but you could track things like the school's graduation rate. You could track things like the school's attendance rate.
(10:42):
And that's what explains where we are right now in terms of federal law, which requires under ESSA, which is the reauthorized version of No Child Left Behind, requires that states measure school performance using standardized test scores, primarily proficiency rates, graduation rates for high schools, progress towards English language proficiency for emerging multilingual students.
(11:09):
And then most states chose to under ESSA's flexibility to add on attendance rates. So we see a really constrained understanding of the tools that are available to us. And those tools are rooted in history, not just because particular tools get created and then are a part of the toolbox, but really also because this culture emerges that limits our understanding of what is possible.
Natieka (11:37):
So I think you've touched on this a bit, but can you outline some of the main criticisms of the standardized testing and the negative effects that we most likely associate with those tests on students and teachers and the entire school system?
Dr. Jack Schneider (11:56):
Well, one of them is that they don't really measure school quality. One of the criticisms of standardized tests, which I tend not to make, is that they don't measure student learning. Now, I think we can mount a really valid critique of them in terms of how narrowly they try to measure student learning.
(12:15):
But if a standardized test identifies a student as being in need of lots of support in order to become a fluent reader, for instance, I think that actually is telling us something important. But one of the things that we know from research is that that is really indicating a lot more about out of school opportunity gaps than it is about what's happening inside schools.
(12:40):
We know that roughly two thirds of students standardized test results are the result of out of school influences. And so one of the biggest problems with standardized tests, at least for the last two decades since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was reauthorized as No Child Left Behind and signed into law in 2002, one of the biggest problems has been the use of those standardized tests to quote unquote "Hold schools accountable."
(13:10):
That's a big problem because you are inherently going to be identifying schools serving low income students, racially marginalized students, racially minoritized students, emerging multilingual students. Right? Schools serving these groups as underperforming schools. And in many cases, they may be your highest performing schools in terms of what is being done for young people in a highly unequal society.
(13:36):
So that's where I'd start in terms of mounting a critique against standardized tests is using them to try to measure school quality and then hold schools accountable for things that are often way beyond the school's control. Then related to that, we can see all of these downstream consequences that are really associated with the stakes that are tied to these standardized tests.
(14:00):
So it is a natural and predictable consequence, even if it is unintended, that schools are going to narrow the curriculum, they're going to emphasize preparation for tests, they're going to use more practice tests, they're going to use more diagnostic tests. This is a form of gaming that is absolutely predictable, and we have seen it across sectors.
(14:22):
We've seen it in policing, we've seen it in healthcare, we've seen it now in education for a couple of decades. And policy leaders often will express surprise or dismay that schools do things like hold test prep rallies, or that some school districts eliminated recess in order to find more time to prepare young people for standardized tests.
(14:47):
Again, these are unintended consequences, but they're absolutely foreseeable if we think about the way that accountability systems are structured. So that's another big problem. And then we can add on all of these other problems related to the fact that a standardized test is almost always going to be multiple choice, machine scored, developed by an external provider.
(15:13):
So it often is not the result of a rich curriculum that has been developed in partnership with educators. It's almost never the case that we see, "Oh, and then the test was designed after that in order to try to reinforce that." So another problem is because of the nature of standardized tests, we see this distortion of the curriculum, even if you got rid of the stakes associated with those tests, right?
(15:39):
That educators, if they were trying to help their students do better on those tests, would be changing the nature of what they're doing inside classrooms. And it should really be the other way. The tests should come after the rich curriculum that is shaped again with the input and cooperation of educators.
(16:02):
Another problem there is related to language that standardized tests are primarily in English, even for subject areas that are not related to English language arts. So I live in Massachusetts and emerging bilingual students who are not yet fluent in English have to take the math MCAS, our state standardized tests in English.
(16:23):
Well, of course they are going to perform poorly on that because they don't understand the language that the questions have been written in yet. They will eventually, but they don't understand that language yet. And so another impact of standardized tests is that they will often send a misleading picture about what students know and can do, and that among the many audiences, students are a really important audience and they can be impacted by that, that it can impact their sense of themselves as learners or it can shape the perceptions of policy leaders.
(16:56):
It can shape the perceptions of families and community members. And that's the point I want to end on is coming back to the big picture. And one of the biggest impacts of standardized testing, particularly the way that we use test results today as measures of student learning and school quality, is that they can exacerbate segregation.
(17:19):
And the clearest example of this is if you go to one of these real estate websites, so and then search for your local community. And it'll be particularly powerful for folks like me who live in urban areas, and what they'll see is that they have the ability to sort or filter by greatschools.org rating.
(17:43):
And if you say, "Well, I only want to live where there are schools that have been scored as an eight or a nine or a 10." Right? I want quote unquote "Good schools." What you'll see is that all of the schools in your local area, if you live in an area like mine, will disappear, and that you will then be encouraged to look in affluent suburbs for a home. And so again, while there are these inherent problems with standardized tests, it's the use of the tests that is most deeply problematic there.
(18:16):
It's the use of the tests, not just for formally quote unquote "Holding schools accountable," but then also these informal uses like in real estate websites that will drive quality conscious parents and families to places in search of quote unquote "Good schools" when they may have good schools, right where they are, right where they want to be, and it's just they've got a rotten measure of them.
Natieka (18:41):
So taking all of that into account, how would you respond to the argument that we have to have something, testing is necessary for accountability and maintaining high standards in education. So we have to have some way of doing it. We can't just take people's word for it, that they're doing a good job and that they've learned what they need to learn. So what do we have to say against that argument?
Dr. Jack Schneider (19:08):
Well, I think a couple of things. First is that if we accept the logic of present assessment and accountability efforts, there are still ways to reduce the unintended consequences of those efforts that we can really lighten the footprint of testing by doing things like establishing zero stakes for tests. And that'll immediately reduce the incentive to game.
(19:35):
Another thing that we can do is that we can establish matrix sampling in the style of the NAEP, right? The so-called Nations report card, which only a small segment of students take every year, and as a result, there's just much less time spent on testing. But I don't think we should actually accept the logic of the present assessment accountability regime.
(19:59):
And so I think instead, what we ought to be doing, and this is a part of the work that I've been doing with MCIEA and ECP is trying to go back to square one. What are we actually trying to do here? That's where we need to start. What does a good school do? And it shouldn't just be policy elites who make that determination.
(20:20):
So in our work in the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, we actually did surveys and ran focus groups with educators and students themselves and family members and community members. We ran them in multiple different languages. We also talked with principals and district administrators, and we built a school quality framework for the consortium that reflects all of the things that people believe schools should be doing.
(20:48):
Now, student academic progress in core subject areas is part of that, absolutely, but so are nearly three dozen other dimensions of what schools do. So that's where we need to start, is to start at the beginning. What are we trying to accomplish here? And then what we need to do is figure out, well, how would we try to assess these things?
(21:12):
And we need to move beyond our really constrained notions of what are the instruments available to us? What are the technologies available to us? I happen to be a strong believer in the idea that people who spend 180 days inside a school know a thing or two about that school.
(21:32):
And so in our consortium work, one of the things we do is we have an educator perception survey and student perception survey. And those are constructed based on the school quality framework so that we can learn about those dimensions of school quality that again, everybody wants to know about. We include those data from surveys alongside school administrative data.
(21:58):
So another best practice here is to try to have multiple measures for anything that you're doing, right? No one measure is going to get the picture right. And then most importantly is being really thoughtful and really careful about how you're using these data.
(22:15):
So one of the things that we've done, we've developed a new data dashboard and we'd give it away for free through the Education Commonwealth Project. And if people are interested in that, the URL is just edcommonwealth.org. And that data dashboard is designed to combat a lot of the worst things that we've seen over the past couple decades with regard to assessment and accountability.
(22:37):
So you can't rank order schools. Why would that ever be something that we are trying to do? Well, I actually have the answer for that. It's because the theory of change is that educators are hiding their best lesson plans in their desks and everybody just kind of waiting around to be scared. And once they're sufficiently scared or maybe incentivized by the promise of bonuses, which of course entirely ignores why educators get into the work in the first place, then they'll apply themselves, then they'll do better.
(23:07):
Right? They just need the threat of being fired or having their school closed, or maybe the carrot of "Here's an extra thousand bucks." Again, this completely fails to understand what motivates educators, which is helping young people, being an important part of their lives and making communities better and stronger. And so we need a new theory of change there.
(23:29):
We shouldn't give A through F ratings to schools or one through five star ratings to schools. We shouldn't be rank ordering schools. What we need to do is show that every school has strengths and weaknesses, and then take that further. Okay. Well, the theory of change needs to be if everybody's already doing the best they can, then in order for schools to improve, we need to build capacity.
(23:52):
And so let's find those strengths and weaknesses. Let's build on those strengths and let's identify ways for states and districts to build school capacity where there are observed areas of growth. But that is where we need to be moving in terms of the next generation of assessment and accountability. And so that's where we should be headed in terms of assessing student learning.
Natieka (24:14):
Thanks for listening to School Me, and a quick thank you to all of the NEA members listening. If you're not an NEA member yet, visit nea.org/whyjoin to learn more about member benefits. I want to go back a little bit because we've again talked about a lot of acronyms.
(24:30):
And so one that we've talked about a lot is MCIEA or the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, and we've also talked about ECP or the Education Commonwealth Project. So can you give a little bit of background on both of those organizations and your involvement in them and what they are working on?
Dr. Jack Schneider (24:52):
So I co-founded MCIEA with Dan French, who at the time was at the Center for Collaborative Education, and they had been doing a lot of performance assessment work. So my work had really been around trying to assess school quality. And we knew that if we wanted to build a better way of assessing school quality, we also needed a better way of assessing what students know and can do and replacing standardized tests, at least in the long run.
(25:21):
And together we worked with state Senator Pat Jehlen to begin recruiting districts that might want to be a laboratory for these efforts. The consortium today has eight district members, Attleboro, Boston, Lowell, Milford, Revere, Somerville, Wareham and Winchester.
(25:46):
And together the superintendents of these eight districts, along with the teachers union presidents are a governing board, and they make decisions by consensus, which is a really important model here for a laboratory that is trying to do this ambitious work of re-conceptualizing how we assess student learning and school quality.
(26:08):
And they have been piloting performance assessments inside their schools and districts at different grade levels using them for different purposes. And one of the things we're pushing towards now is the idea of using performance assessments rather than the 10th grade MCAS, which is the state standardized test here as a signifier of readiness for graduation.
(26:33):
Because one of the things we've seen here in Massachusetts is that thousands of students have been denied diplomas because we are one of eight states that still has an exit exam. It's not framed as an exit exam, it's just the 10th grade MCAS. But if you don't pass it according to the state's cut scores, you cannot earn a diploma.
(26:55):
Even if educators in your school and leaders in the district have said that you did what you needed to do, you learned what you needed to learn, and you have achieved the appropriate levels of competency, well, let's get rid of the state standardized test for that use then. So that's one of the things we're working on in terms of performance assessment.
(27:13):
And then all eight districts are also using what we call our school quality measures data. So a much broader assessment of school quality there. And they're using our new data dashboard for things like school improvement planning or district goal setting. And one of the things that we really want to work towards is driving that down to the level of teacher teams so that educators can work together to identify, okay, what are we as the ELA teachers at this school going to try to accomplish this year?
(27:48):
Or what are our goals across all grade levels, across all subject areas as educators? Where do we really want to focus our efforts this year beyond the things that we do in our own classrooms? In addition to MCIEA, we have this related project, the Education Commonwealth Project, and that's really about taking the work that happens in the laboratory of MCIEA and then just giving it away for free.
(28:13):
So as a part of our mission, all of our tools and informal assistance are free and open source. So we can give our dashboard away, we can give our performance assessment tasks away, and then there are labor costs associated with more formal kinds of support. But we have had funding from the Massachusetts State Legislature in order to give that formal support away for free to Massachusetts public schools and districts. And it's our hope to raise funds so that we can do that for any school, any district, anywhere.
Natieka (28:51):
What are some of the alternative forms of assessment that could be used instead of standardized testing and what are some of the advantages of those things and maybe some of the things that need to be worked out still?
Dr. Jack Schneider (29:06):
Well, the thing that we have spent the most time working on is the model of the performance assessment. And so their research has shown that in terms of the predictive validity of the performance assessment results, so do the results on performance assessments predict the kinds of positive outcomes that we want for young people like graduating from college or succeeding in college, that it's very encouraging.
(29:34):
So I think that one of the things that we can do there is work towards the use of performance assessments across all 50 states as a part of assessment and accountability efforts, but that's going to require a lot. One of the things it's going to require is a slow transition. So figuring out are there particular grade levels where we could do this? So this would be whatever comes next after essa, could we say, well, "Let's move towards grade span assessment."
(30:03):
And maybe at one of those grade spans we can use performance assessments. Because one of the things we can't do is continue to ask schools and districts to have two systems. And that's what's happening right now in our consortium in MCIEA. And it's because leaders and educators in those districts are committed to doing right by their students, but they still have to take the state standardized test in grades three through eight as well as one year of high school because that's the law.
(30:32):
So one of the obstacles there is the law. Another obstacle is that it's going to require a lot of training, and that's got a cost associated with it. And I think the response to critics who might say, "Well, it's going to be too expensive then. Where are we going to get all this money to train educators to develop performance assessments and score them? And..." Well, I think the response is we spend an awful lot of money on standardized tests, and a lot of that money goes to shareholders of large corporations. I think we could probably channel some of those funds into this work.
Natieka (31:03):
You mentioned shareholders and big corporations. What this is making me think about is aside from the fact that most of us have grown up under this system and gotten to where we are under this system through one way or another, and it just seems normal to us, who is winning under the current system and has interest in maintaining the current system?
Dr. Jack Schneider (31:27):
I think it depends on what we mean by the system. When I step back, I think really broadly about this. So standardized tests are just one of the assessment technologies that we use in education. I've got a new book coming out in July with my co-author, Ethan L. Hutt called Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don't Have To). And we talk not just about tests there, but also about grades and transcripts.
(32:02):
These are the assessment technologies, as we call them, that really contort student learning. And to your point, they don't just contort student learning, they disadvantage students, they advantage some at the expense of others. So as long as we are relying on these gameable technologies that are not particularly useful for what they're trying to accomplish, well, we're going to enable the gaming by the privileged at the expense of the less advantaged.
(32:39):
So look at the way that privileged families will help their children assemble sort of gold trimmed college application packets. They'll assemble the perfect transcript, and they'll do that not just by getting the quote unquote "Right courses" on there, but also the right grades. And a part of getting those grades maybe involves learning, but it also involves a lot of other things, right?
(33:06):
Advocating for young people to do things like grade grub or to ask to retake an assignment. We know that the more resources that young people have at their disposal, the better able they are to assemble these kinds of transcripts. And the transcript is just one part of this, which is they then also can guild their portfolios with things like being the president of a made up club or playing on three different teams because they've got families to drive them all over the place.
(33:39):
But back to assessment technologies, I think that maybe the deepest inequity comes actually from grading. And that's the fact that if some students start ahead because they have all kinds of tailwinds at their backs and other students are facing all kinds of headwinds, then it is a deep injustice that one of the things that we sort of culturally ask schools to do is give students grades all along the line that pile up in the form of a permanent record.
(34:13):
And I think the best way of thinking about an alternative here is to think about the fact that at one point, none of us knew how to ride a bike. I didn't know how to ride a bike at some point, but if you asked me to go for a bike ride with you this afternoon, it wouldn't matter if I had learned how to ride a bike at age four or age eight or age 22, right?
(34:34):
That's irrelevant because I can do it right now. And so one of the things we talk about in our book is this idea that grades should be over writeable. Okay, you couldn't do it then, but you can do it now. So let's change that. Let's update that.
(34:47):
And there are lots of things that we can do like that to advance equity, because right now we have a system that people have learned they can game and that other people don't have the same opportunity to game. Now, we don't want anybody gaming anything, but everybody should have an equal opportunity to thrive and succeed, and particularly if we're going to continue to use education as a gateway to opportunity, then everybody needs to have an opportunity to succeed.
Natieka (35:18):
So we've heard the history of standardized testing. We've heard a couple of the examples, and there's a lot of options and opportunities to make these changes, but what are some of the practical steps that an educator who's listening here, or to go a little further, maybe even policymakers, to take into account, what are some of the steps that they can take to improve the assessment practices in their schools, in their districts? And just get the conversation started, if nothing else, about how to have these tests, these assessments, these ways of measuring student success be more meaningful and equitable.
Dr. Jack Schneider (35:56):
Yeah. I think that the place to start is by just mapping the terrain. What are all of the assessments of student learning and school quality that we currently are using? Some of those with regard to the school particularly are coming from the state. So our school gets measured by the accountability system. Students too get measured by state standardized tests, but students also get measured by grades given inside the classroom. And then they also often take the SAT or the ACT if they're in high school.
(36:35):
They will also, if they're in high school, often take AP exams. All of these are a part of an assessment landscape. And I think the thing to do is start by mapping that and then to move back and think about, okay, what are we actually trying to accomplish here? The goal is we want students to be motivated, we want students to be engaged, we want students to be developing at an appropriate pace. And with regard to our schools, we want our schools to be constantly improving.
(37:10):
Now let's look at the degree to which these present assessment technologies are aligned with these aims, and we're going to find lots of gaps there. We're going to find lots of places where there is non-alignment between the assessment technology and the goal for students or for schools. That's going to be 10 years worth of work right there.
(37:32):
So the next step then is to figure out what are the things that we can start doing now that are going to take several years and what are the things that we can start doing now that will make an immediate difference? Then of course, there are going to be the things that we're not going to start doing right now either because other things need to come first or because we just simply can't take on every single initiative at once.
(37:56):
So it's about starting in a smart place. And I think that there are a couple smart places to start. One is let's start inside classrooms with the way that educators are assessing students. Let's start by thinking about the grades that students get in school. These matter tremendously, and it's one of the things that Ethan and I talk about in our book is there are lots of things that we can do differently about grades.
(38:23):
For instance, just simply separating out the kind of permanent record piece of the grade from the communication piece of the grade. Because as long as students think that the grades that they're getting on particular assignments are accumulating and turning into the grade that lives on the transcript, it's not going to be an effective way of communicating with them. Because if you give a student a C and what you're trying to say is, "This isn't your best work.
(38:50):
I believe in you. I think you can do a lot better than this. You're midway of where I want you to be. I want you to climb a few more rungs on this ladder." That is not what the student is going to hear. The student is going to hear, "You are not going to succeed in this class. I stand between you and the future that you want for yourself.
(39:09):
You better watch out." And so one of the things that we need to do is we need to de-link those things, and we need to come up with better ways of producing that final grade that lives on the student transcript. And it can't be that every assignment that students are getting is just piling on the other assignments and all those grades add up to the final grade in the course because that's going to spoil the ability to communicate with students about how they're doing.
(39:38):
Right? That's what explains grade inflation. So start inside classrooms. You've got to start there, and then you've also got to start at the big picture. And I would say start by building a school quality framework for your school or for your district and meaningfully involving all stakeholders there. Not just the folks who usually volunteer for things, but families, students, educators, community members who don't have students in the school.
(40:05):
That's a part of the idea of public education. We fund it with our tax dollars because we all benefit from it. It's not a private good where students get to go for free and they accumulate human capital and they cash it in for a job at the end of the line. It's a public good that benefits all of us in a democratic society and a part of, I think the reason why we've seen the decline of the civic mission of schools is that we've shifted towards this thinking that schools are really just for getting a job.
(40:36):
Well, that's not what they're for. They're for a lot of things. And so community members who don't have kids in the school also need to be included in this conversation about what are we trying to accomplish in our community? What are the aims that we have for our schools? Now let's figure out how to assess that stuff.
(40:53):
I think you start macro and micro at the same time, and then you begin building a culture of this is what we do in our school or in our district. This is how we are trying to put learning back at the heart of what we're doing. This is how we're trying to restore the full mission of schools. And to just end on a positive note, I'll say there are communities that are doing this work.
(41:16):
There are communities that are working hard to say, "We really care about what happens in classrooms and we want to make it possible." Assessment is just one part of it, but it's a key part of it is by changing the way we are assessing students, by taking the handcuffs off of educators and allowing them to do work with young people that really reflects something meaningful and valuable there. And there are communities, and I've named a few in our consortium that are doing this work at the school level or the district level to try to restore the full mission of schools.
Natieka (41:50):
And having said all of that, what are you looking forward to in the future of standardized testing, of assessment, of schools, anything in that area? What are you really excited about right now?
Dr. Jack Schneider (42:01):
I think the thing that makes me most excited is when I read the conclusion of the new book that Ethan and I have coming out where we talk about kindergartens. And we talk about kindergartens as actually a model that we could strive for in all grade levels. Because when my daughter was in kindergarten, she loved school. It was really meaningful to her. It felt really valuable to her.
(42:31):
She felt loved in her kindergarten and known and seen, and she felt powerful, and like the world was becoming just a big friendly, welcoming place for her. And one of the reasons why that's the case is that we don't have a standardized testing regime in kindergartens, and we don't give grades in most kindergartens. We don't view that as appropriate. We try to meaningfully and authentically motivate young people.
(43:05):
We give them real tasks that feel important to them and that are aligned with their developmental abilities and the things that everybody in the community wants for them. We give them choices. We trust educators to be professionals there. Now, there are lots of other problems. It's like those kindergarten educators often have class sizes that are too large.
(43:29):
They don't get sufficient breaks. We could talk about all the other things that we need to be doing, but I think that we can use that as a hopeful vision for what can happen at every grade level to restore our faith in the process of education, which is not just a mechanistic process in which students sit down, we fill their minds with whatever is in the state standards documents.
(43:57):
We test them to make sure that that information stuck and then we move them on. Classrooms can be places of joy and discovery, of meaning making, and of places where young people feel valued and they feel like they are equal members of a democratic society. That's what schools are and should be. They're the seed-beds of our democracy. They should be our most democratic places.
Natieka (44:21):
Well, thank you, Jack. I learned a lot and I think that those are some great ideas that you've put out there, and I hope everybody listening is feeling motivated to make a change.
Dr. Jack Schneider (44:31):
Thank you for having me. It was great to talk.
Natieka (44:33):
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