Are annual assessments old hat?
By Dale Chu The state assessments happening now in 2022 closely mirror students’ testing experience back in 2002 at the advent of NCLB: they are largely multiple-choice and they are designed to gauge student progress towards a basic level of achievement. In some respects this is understandable. Twenty years ago, policymakers were constrained by the […]
Comprehensive or convoluted? Testing in 2021 painted a cloudy picture
By Dale Chu State testing is now underway. With luck and hopefully some leadership (more on that later in this series), the disruptions of the past two years will be put behind us. It’s likely we’ll see the bottom drop even more, but in too many states we won’t know because of shoddy data resulting […]
Where’s the (assessment) data?
By Dale Chu With testing season right around the corner and uncertainty brewing around how state exams will be administered this spring, it felt timely to kick off this series on the present and future of statewide annual academic assessments. Coinciding with this effort is a refresh of the AssessmentHQ platform after a months-long scouring […]
Will complacency be assessment’s coup de grâce?
By Dale Chu During The Hill’s The Future of Education summit held last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that he’s more worried about complacency than he is about the pandemic. He has good reason to be: after two awful years of Covid-constrained learning, students have fallen further behind and the gaps between […]
An honest check on state and district recovery practices
By Dale Chu Last week, the Collaborative for Student Success—in concert with the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Edunomics Lab—launched EduRecoveryHub, a one-stop online resource spotlighting promising practices for pandemic recovery. From accelerating learning to using data to drive decision-making, the new platform calls attention to innovative and noteworthy practices from states and school […]
California lays a not-so-golden egg on state testing
By Dale Chu Last Friday’s news dump by the California Department of Education was as disappointing as it was woefully overdue. Student tests scores in the state plummeted, as did the number of students who took the assessments at all. Indeed, less than a quarter of California students in grades 3-8 and 11 took the […]
As the assessment world turns
By Dale Chu With school accountability drawing some attention at the top of this new year, the elephant in the room continues to be what Uncle Sam has in store for its red headed stepchild, spring testing. There’s a growing sense that the feds plan on taking a hands-off approach once again, by issuing matter-of-fact […]
Curriculum and Assessment: The Peanut Butter Cup of Education
By Dale Chu and Jocelyn Pickford As part of the recent launch of AssessmentHQ’s new sister site, CurriculumHQ, Dale Chu sat down with his Curriculum A-B-C counterpart, Jocelyn Pickford, to talk about the important links between curriculum and assessment. Both former teachers, Jocelyn and Dale had a lot to say on the synergy between the […]
Will assessment history repeat itself?
By Dale Chu As conversations about the opportunity to rethink standardized testing gain steam following two years of pandemic-related interruptions, it’s worth remembering what happened the last time we got roped into an assessment rodeo of sorts. I’m referring, of course, to Race to the Top and the $330 million award that was made to […]
Lots and lots and lots of assessment activity
By Dale Chu At first glance, a new report from KnowledgeWorks on emerging trends in K-12 assessment innovation is impressive. Indeed, it paints one of the rosiest pictures I’ve seen on the current state of play on this important yet precariously fraught topic. To wit, the report’s authors characterize what’s been happening in states (more […]