Neil Sappington is an assistant professor of educational administration at Illinois State University in Normal and a former superintendent at Galesburg CUSD 205.

Graduate students in my classes lament over Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT) and Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE) test scores. Often, these discussions focus on students not scoring well in certain content areas.

The dialogue among my students who, as school administrators, work in high-poverty schools also includes concerns about meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as required by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. With the sanctions imposed on schools by NCLB, it is understandable why schools, under tremendous pressure to show improvement, will look for "the one" program that will raise test scores and as a result fall into the "ISAT trap" — "teaching to the test."

A cottage industry of companies producing test-preparation material has sprouted since the advent of NCLB. Such programs relegate teachers and students to mindless drills on practice items in content areas that are tested and literally transform schools into "test factories."

In Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools, Sharon Nichols and David Berliner warn us about the negative impact of high-stakes testing, which can narrow the curriculum, reduce instruction to drill and kill, demoralize both teachers and students, and teach learning skills that are at the low end of Bloom's Taxonomy, which ranks skills from the simplest to the most complex. They argue that "… the continued use of high-stakes testing as a mechanism for driving school change is fundamentally flawed and that serious damage is being inflicted on schools and children."

A better way is one in which schools develop a rich curriculum that supports higher-level thinking for all students — skills that our students will need as they enter a competitive information-based society. Such a cohesive instructional program identifies what is taught, effective instructional strategies and a formative assessment system that informs teachers of student learning. Timely, formative assessment data allows teachers to modify instruction to meet the needs of students. This comprehensive instructional program must be supported by a continuous and cumulative professional development program.

During the 17 years I worked as a central office administrator in Galesburg CUSD 205, my colleagues and I strived to take an alternative path to teaching to the test. In essence our goal was to improve learning — not to improve ISAT scores. This was a formidable challenge considering that the seven elementary schools served a student population with low-income percentages that ranged from 44 to 83 percent.

Identifying what students should know and be able to do

As the assistant superintendent for instruction in Galesburg, I was fortunate to be involved in some of the most significant school improvement work of my career. From 1997 to 2001, I worked with administrators and content-area consultants to align the K-5 language arts and mathematics curriculum with the Illinois Learning Standards. We used the Illinois Learning Benchmarks as a focal point.

"Academic Expectations" was coined as the name of the project, because it defined what teachers and administrators expected students to know and be able to do in the areas of language arts and mathematics. In addition to the paper document, instructional units and assessments were developed in the process. Adopted as the district curriculum by the board of education, it constituted what education author Robert Marzano refers to as a "guaranteed and viable curriculum."

Specifically, Marzano argues that students must be given the "opportunity to learn" as opposed to being assessed on information, skills or concepts they have not had the opportunity to learn. In What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action, he identifies this school-level factor as having "the most impact on student achievement."

This tightly aligned instructional program, combined with a standards-based report card, had a long-term impact on daily classroom instruction and constituted what Philip Schlechty, founder of the Center for Leadership in School Reform, defines as a "disruptive innovation." It changed the daily instructional interaction between teachers and their students.

Academic expectations

Teachers, administrators and content-area consultants in Galesburg devoted their summers to developing a local curriculum in language arts and mathematics. More than 90 percent of the teachers (regular division, Title I and special education) and administrators participated in the project. This high level of participation created a common understanding of the core curriculum and reduced resistance to implementation.

Starting with first-grade teachers in 1997, the collaborative learning teams wrestled with shrinking the Early Elementary Benchmarks of the Illinois Learning Standards to what made sense for first-grade students to know and be able to do. Marzano emphasizes that one of the shortfalls of the standards movement is the enormous amount of content contained in the multitude of standards that teachers are asked to address. Our goal was to identify what was expected of students and communicate these expectations among our colleagues as well as with parents.

This effort evolved into professional learning for all involved as participants discussed and debated what the Illinois Learning Standards demanded and what was appropriate for students in their classrooms. Once the "Academic Expectations" were written, the educators worked to develop instructional units to facilitate teaching and to embed formative assessments to measure student progress. Professional development needs were identified in the process. At the end of the summer, the Galesburg educators proudly presented the new curriculum to the board of education for adoption. The process was replicated in the summers of 1998 and 1999 for the remaining grades at the elementary level.

Embedded formative assessments

As teachers, administrators and consultants worked at each grade level, formative assessments were developed to measure student progress. These assessments were criterion-based and provided individual teachers with timely and meaningful data. They were designed to monitor student achievement relative to the core curriculum that teachers, administrators and consultants mutually understood. Such data were essential to modifying instruction to meet students' needs.

In a Phi Delta Kappan article, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam emphasized the need for timely feedback: "Teachers need to know about their students' progress and difficulties with learning so that they can adapt their own work to meet pupil needs — needs that are often unpredictable and that vary from one pupil to another."

Marzano agrees stating: "The message is clear. Unless a school employs assessments that are specific to the curriculum actually taught, it cannot accurately determine how well students are learning."

These assessments were embedded in our classroom instruction and became meaningful work for teachers and students. Often the students did not even realize they were being assessed.

With this information, teachers were able to decide content and pacing, rather than relying on the material contained in a textbook series. As Marzano also cites, the over reliance on textbooks is a weakness in classroom curriculum.

Data from the assessments allowed teachers to match students with materials that were at the appropriate instructional level, thus meeting the needs of the diverse student population. Instructional aides assisted teachers with administration and scoring of these assessments for each classroom, kindergarten through third grade. These instructional partners proved to be a valuable part of the classroom learning process.

Assessments at the school and district level

While embedded formative assessments provided teachers with valuable data for individual students, it became apparent that group data also would be helpful. At that time, the district was administering the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) and the Cognitive Abilities Test (Cogat) to students in grades 3, 6 and 8. These norm-referenced tests were not aligned with district curriculum and as a result provided little useful information for teachers and administrators.

Discussions began to evolve with third-grade teachers while they were developing their curriculum about the possibility of replacing these norm-referenced assessments with a criterion-referenced assessment aligned with "Academic Expectations." Thought was given to developing assessments, but the complexity of that task quickly led teachers and administrators to search for a published assessment containing the necessary statistical components.

Their research led to the Integrated Theme Test, published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. These assessments contained six themed assessments for each grade level. The assessments measured student performance in the areas of reading and writing, providing subtest scores in comprehension, reading strategies and a variety of other areas. Each student received a summary score that placed them in one of four categories describing their progress: "Excellent," "Good," "Satisfactory" or "Unsatisfactory."

Teachers, administrators and the consultants selected three of the six assessments for each grade level in grades 3-5. The assessments were aligned with the curriculum and a schedule of three assessments per year was generated. The schedule called for the assessment to be administered in fall, winter and spring "windows," each consisting of a two-week period. Following this work, teachers were trained to administer and score the assessment. Funds previously used to pay for scoring the norm-referenced assessments were now used to pay teachers to score assessments that had meaning to their classroom curriculum and instruction.

Frustrations associated with ISAT and PSAE often come from the lack of timely results. But teachers and administrators did not experience this frustration when using data from the Integrated Theme Tests. In fact, the district made a commitment to have the assessment results analyzed and returned to teachers within two weeks of the test.

Once the assessments were scored by the classroom teacher, the results were sent to the district's curriculum office. The data was entered into a sophisticated statistical software program. Students were identified by school, grade, teacher, race/ethnicity and socio-economic status. Data could then be analyzed by:

• grade level for the district;
• grade level for each of the seven elementary schools; and
• by each teacher in each school.

This analysis also allowed each school and the district to monitor the progress of subgroups. At the district level, student achievement could be analyzed, relative to the locally developed curriculum, three times each year.

For the first time, teachers, administrators and members of the school board in Galesburg had information pertaining to student achievement in language arts that was independent of ISAT. Educators were able to benchmark third-grade, fourth- grade and fifth-grade student achievement in the fall and discuss necessary interventions and support. In The Truth About Testing: An Educator's Call to Action, author W. James Popham cites this as a strength saying: "If properly built and sensibly used, educational tests can help teachers deliver effective instruction." He describes these as "instructionally illuminating assessments" that help teachers make instructional decisions.

At the building level, teachers and administrators now had group data to supplement the information they gathered from the embedded formative assessments. Principals were required to discuss the data from each one of the testing windows with their entire faculty. This allowed the faculty to see where each grade level scored and helped remove the mindset of an assessment just for grades 3, 4 and 5. Principals met with teachers at each grade level to discuss the strengths, weaknesses and possible instructional interventions for each group of students.

Teachers each received a summary for their particular class, showing the number of students in each of the four categories (Excellent, Good, Satisfactory and Unsatisfactory) and a profile showing the strengths and weaknesses of the class by subtest. Special attention was given to the discussion of the performance of each teacher's class to ensure that they did not feel threatened by conversations.

As the project progressed, administrators and teachers became more collaborative and creative as they analyzed the data, finding more ways to improve student achievement based on the data now available. The focus was the assessment of the local curriculum — modifying instruction based on data that were analyzed and used on a regular basis. ISAT was not part of data under review or the year-long discussions about student learning.

The results have been remarkable for one high-poverty elementary school and outstanding in four others. Cooke Elementary School, with 83 percent low-income students, raised its "meets or exceeds" level from 36 percent of students to 93 percent over a six-year period, 2002-2007. Other schools saw increases from 10 to 15 percentage points, putting them now in the low 80s to low 90s range for "meets and exceeds," up from the low to mid-70s.

In this environment of high-stakes testing and the sanctions that accompany school accountability under NCLB, it is easy for districts and schools to fall into the "ISAT trap" — teaching to the standardized test and turning schools into little more than test factories.

The result of teaching to the standardized test is shallow learning with short-term results. A better alternative is to focus on a tightly aligned instructional program supported with meaningful professional development. This approach can overcome the obstacles that high-poverty schools (and all schools) face in today's high-stakes testing environment. It can generate learning at high levels for students — skills that our children will be required to have in the informational-based economy of the present and the future.

References

Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, "Inside the black box. Raising standards through classroom assessment," Phi Delta Kappan, 1998

Illinois State Board of Education, Illinois Interactive Report Card, retrieved December 7, 2007, from http://www.iirc.niu.educ

Robert J. Marzano, What works in schools: Translating research into action, Alexandria, Virginia, ASCD, 2003

Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner, Collateral damage: How high-stakes testing corrupts America's schools, Harvard Education Press, 2007

W. James Popham, The Truth About Testing: An Educator's Call to Action, ASCD, 2001

Phillip C. Schlechty, Creating Great Schools: Six Systems at the Heart of Educational Innovation, Jossey-Bass Education, 2005

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