By Dale Chu
It’s the trend that’s sweeping the nation: the “portrait of a graduate.” The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s President Tim Knowles says, “They’re everywhere.” To wit, at least seventeen states have adopted (or are in the process of developing) one with the goal of establishing an agreed-upon sets of skills and attributes students should leave high school with. New York’s portrait, for example, describes a successful graduate as one who is “a critical thinker, culturally competent, an effective communicator, a global citizen, an innovative problem solver, literate across content areas, and socially-emotionally competent.”
Seems encouraging, if a bit grandiose, but what’s this got to do with assessment? To be clear, I’m a fan of the portrait of a graduate as a vision-setting exercise. My worry, as Knowles has keenly observed, is that these portraits haven’t really made a big difference thus far, and we have no valid or reliable way of measuring the things in them. But if you blink, you might miss what Knowles and others are working on to measure academic skills differently. By my lights, what’s interesting about this effort is that unlike the baggage saddling the current assessment regime—and today’s nebulous call for more assessment innovation—the pursuit of tests that can accurately measure these portraits is attempting to sidestep the politics and vitriol altogether.
There are two broad considerations here: (1) the inclination of states interested in using the portrait of a graduate in lieu of current accountability systems and (2) the question of whether it’s even possible to design an assessment that credibly measures the things described in them. These are two separate issues worth examining, but I’m going to focus more on the latter and the desire to build measurement systems that can get at what these portraits are aspiring to.
Take any of the attributes New York is considering and one might imagine a series of performance tasks that goes beyond the multiple choice items familiar to all of us. How would these tasks look like at the elementary level versus high school? How long would it take for a student to complete these tasks? How would these items be scored and results reported? What types of skills would be measured? The Empire State’s portrait goes beyond the three R’s (e.g., global citizenship) and includes a number of transferable, cross-disciplinary skills. What would professional development around these assessments look like? How much will all of this cost?
Knowles isn’t alone in his distaste for the standardized testing battlefield. Last month, I spoke with another assessment outfit that has similar designs on cracking the code on how to measure these portraits, with one representative telling me they are in the process of “creating a baseline” by diving deep with one state’s approved portrait. Back to Knowles, he says that going after these portraits is an assessment “opportunity worth plumbing.” To put a finer point on this, author Michael Horn says the aim is “not trying to do what we recommend you never do in disruptive innovation, which is to try to leapfrog the incumbents with a better assessment or a better this widget whatever, but instead go to the areas of non-consumption where the alternative is nothing.”
Will it be possible to do an end run around today’s assessment politics? Can an assessment accurately measure whether students embody these portraits, and, presumably, also track back to foundational academic competencies such as a kid’s ability to read and compute proficiently? Color me somewhat skeptical, but this nascent effort gained serious heft this month, so it will be very much worth watching.