Rural Districts Present Test Ideas To Colorado School Board
DENVER (AP) - A dozen rural school districts from across Colorado are calling for relief from Common Core-linked testing and asked for a chance to take a local approach to measuring student success.
The 14-district Rural Innovation Alliance boosted its case in a presentation to the state school board Thursday with references to similar efforts elsewhere in America.
Colorado hasn't been alone this year in a contentious debate about testing, with campaigns to encourage parents to pull their children out of statewide assessments in part out of a sense the burden of exams in general has become too great, and in part because of skepticism about the Common Core. Tests linked to the Common Core, a nationwide initiative to improve students' math and English achievement, were rolled out for the first time this year.
Rural districts are concerned about the effect on their budgets of the technology for the tests, which are administered on computers. They also question whether it's fair to judge teachers on how students do when their sample sizes are so small, and worry that results from the new tests are scheduled to come too late to be of much use in designing new curricula or study plans for individual students.
Members of the Rural Innovation Alliance who addressed the state board Thursday also called for other factors, such as attendance rates or the results of surveys of emotional health, to be considered along with the statewide assessments in ranking schools and assessing teachers.
Colorado joined the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, a coalition of states, to develop Common Core tests that move away from the multiple choice assessments of old to try to get students to show a sophisticated grasp of reading, writing and math. The more ambitious tests required more preparation time, and grading them also is a lengthy process.
Brian Hanson, whose Mancos district serves about 400 students in southwestern Colorado, said such tests have value, but "my concern is three months of instruction lost because of PARCC and I don't get the results back for six months."
Mancos is among 14 districts that formed the Rural Innovation Alliance to try to design a testing regime that better suits their needs. The proposal Hanson and others described to board members Thursday is in its early stages and did not offer details, for example, on how far they wanted to back away from PARCC. But they noted New Hampshire recently received federal permission for a pilot that would allow it to replace Common Core-linked tests in some years with other assessments. The New Hampshire Department of Education said its pilot, the first of its kind in the country, could set the stage for allowing its districts to reduce standardized testing and introduce more locally managed assessments.
"We're hoping that we can do that as well," said Kathy Gebhardt, who addressed the board Thursday as an adviser to the rural alliance and is well known in Colorado for her work as advocate for education reform.
Board members were enthusiastic about the rural schools' presentation, but noted they could take few practical steps to support them. Later Thursday, Elliott Asp, who is a special assistant to the state education commissioner, noted many of the rural schools' concerns were widely shared. Education policy makers in Colorado, he said, had been talking with counterparts in California, Vermont, Tennessee, Kentucky and, most notably, New Hampshire about developing new testing systems.
Asp said Colorado hoped to approach the federal government this summer to request a chance to follow New Hampshire's lead with its own pilot tests.
Members of the rural alliance will be consulted on what that pilot might look like, Asp said in an interview, noting they had "already done a lot of thinking about what would work for them."
- By Donna Bryson, AP Writer
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