A fantastic result of building an organizational culture of learning is that the direct service staff are very excited about program evaluation and data. Once they start learning about evaluation, they want to collect more and more and more data. While I love their enthusiasm, I do try to redirect them so that we’re focusing on useful data that can really improve programs, practices, and policies.
Even then, I still wonder whether we’re simply collecting too much data…
Although I’m an internal evaluator in a non-profit youth center, I love chatting with teachers because I think non-profits can learn a lot from school systems – like their successes in using data to really help students as well as their challenges and shortcomings during this process.
I have the pleasure of introducing a guest blogger, Maggie Thornton, to share her experiences using formative and summative assessments in her classroom.
Maggie is an English teacher at a public, comprehensive high school in Central Virginia. Before teaching, she attended the University of Virginia, served as an Americorps VISTA in West Virginia, and worked as a tutor with students who were learning English. She grew up all over the South, but mostly in Appalachia (say it right or she’ll throw an Apple-at-cha).
To learn more about Maggie’s experiences in the classroom, please check out her blog, Mountain Mama, or follow her on Twitter.
Enjoy, Ann
Cover of Letters to a Young Teacher
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“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that standardized examinations of a highly punitive and judgmental character have often been promoted most aggressively by those who also favor market competition in the educational arena, with the ultimate objective of establishing a universal voucher system in this nation.” – Jonathan Kozol, Letters to a Young Teacher
I recommend the PBS documentary School to anyone interested in how our education system has evolved since Jefferson first recommended three years of non-compulsory education for everyone provided by the state. Most germane to my students and I last week was the history of the standardized test.
In the beginning, these tests were used to sort students into academic tracks, according to the series. Then, they were used as a benchmark to give teachers and school leaders ideas about how students were progressing and where they might need help. Many readers may remember the Standford 9s that all ninth graders used to take here in Virginia.
Then came the “accountability” movement (quotations because I still haven’t figured out who is supposed to be accountable to whom and by what means). We started using the tests to evaluate whether or not students were prepared to graduate and then if schools ought to be accredited. Most recently, these tests make up various percentages of teacher evaluations.
I don’t have a problem with tests — standardized or otherwise. I give my students assessments on a near-daily basis. Assessments aligned to objectives can lead to a rich and responsive curriculum that creates the sort of critical thinkers our society sorely needs. I have not seen one shred of evidence to suggest that the standardized tests the president wants to make part of the way I’m evaluated as a professional have anything to do with what happens in the seven weeks I had with my students before they took the English 11 Writing SOL. It makes no sense to me to argue about whether these tests should be 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation as they were in the recently-released (and much maligned) NYC teacher evaluations or 40 percent as my governor has suggested. We are asking these tests to do something they were never designed to do.
More importantly, these tests seem really detrimental to students. I’m still amazed when students ask how a creative assignment will help them on the standardized tests or demand more explicit test prep because they know that the best way to increase test scores isn’t a rich content knowledge but having an arsenal of test-taking strategies. Furthermore, I don’t get their scores until very late in the semester. I can’t use these tests to respond to weaknesses students might have. They serve no immediate purpose in my classroom in the way data collected by a teacher at the beginning, middle, and end of a unit might inform instruction.
So, I can’t help but wonder why we spend all this time hemming and hawing about how and when and why to administer these tests. Why don’t we just make new ones correlated to real student outcomes and encouraging the critical thinking skills schools ought to foster rather than the test-taking strategies many seem to emphasize? We might also spend some time mulling over this reminder, often attributed to Albert Einstein, “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
– Maggie Thornton
1 Comment
“A fantastic result of building an organizational culture of learning is that the direct service staff are very excited about program evaluation and data. Once they start learning about evaluation, they want to collect more and more and more data. While I love their enthusiasm, I do try to redirect them so that we’re focusing on useful data that can really improve programs, practices, and policies.”
Ann, this is a very exciting experience, when direct service staff get that “aha” moment! Rather frequently I assist staff with understanding and reporting on their program data and the transformations I continue to see are phenomenal, but…
Resources=the 1st word that comes to mind
How much data is too much data?=the 1st question that comes to mind
#thejoysofinternalevaluation