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Common Core State Standards Assessments and Charter Schools

New assessments are being developed to test the performance of elementary and secondary public school students according to the Common Core State Standards, which have been adopted by 44 states and the District of Columbia. These assessments are expected to be ready by the 2014-15 school year and are to replace the standardized accountability tests now required by the states. This month's newsletter of the National Charter School Resource Center (Resource Center) includes a brief review of the assessment development work, including special education assessment work, views from some charter school group leaders, an account of one charter school's assessment preparations, and resources and links to further pursue the subject.

The Common Core State Standards define the knowledge and the skills in English/language arts and mathematics that students should master in elementary and secondary school to be successful in college and work, according to the initiative's coordinators, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). The standards provide "clear goals for student learning" but will not keep "local teachers from deciding what or how to teach." The stated goal is to replace what have been diverse standards of varying quality among the individual states with common standards. How translation of the Common Core State Standards into the assessments that will be used for accountability will affect charter schools is not yet entirely clear. Charter school states Texas, Alaska, and Virginia have not adopted the Common Core State Standards, and charter school state Minnesota has adopted only the standards for English/language arts.

Federally Funded Consortia Lead Common Core State Standards Assessments Development

Two consortia of states, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), are developing assessment designs that are to be aligned with the Common Core State Standards. The U.S. Department of Education announced in September 2010 that as part of Race to the Top, where states compete for federal money to reform education along the lines of federal priorities, the two assessment consortia would roughly equally share $330 million to develop these assessments. The assessments will cover from third grade to high school.

Along with the standards and assessments work, tools are being developed to help teachers better understand the instructional implications of the standards. The assessment developers are considering the need for interim assessments over the course of the school year, rapidly available results, measuring students' academic growth, educator effectiveness, and school accountability. PARCC and SBAC have formed a variety of advisory committees and have been releasing drafts of aspects of assessment designs and specifications to seek comments. The consortia websites offer a variety of materials that address their approaches as well as development updates.

While there are similarities in their work, there also are differences in the approaches of the two consortia. For example, both consortia anticipate students will take the assessments via computer. But unlike PARCC, SBAC has a focus on computer-adaptive assessments, an approach that involves the computer presenting harder questions after students give correct answers and easier questions after wrong answers. Some states have joined PARCC. Some states have joined SBAC. Some states have joined both.

Other organizations also are working to develop assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards. South Carolina, for example, is part of both consortia, but according to Elizabeth Jones, Director of the South Carolina Department of Education Office of Assessments, the state has not yet determined its assessment course. "We have not made a decision in South Carolina about whether we're going to administer SMARTER Balanced or PARCC or continue with our own assessment development here in the state," she said. "We're just going through a process before we make a decision."

Two other state-led, federally funded assessment consortia are working on Common Core State Standards assessments and resources that are focused on the students with the most significant disabilities. Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM), which is led by the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation, is a $22 million project in which 13 states are participating. The National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC), which is hosted by the National Center on Educational Outcomes in the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota, is a $45 million project in which 19 states are participating.

PARCC and SBAC are developing assessments that will include about 90 percent of the students with disabilities, and DLM and NCSC are developing assessments focused on students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, generally about 10 percent of the students with disabilities or 1 percent of the total population of students, according to Rachel Quenemoen, NCSC Project Director.

Views of Common Core State Standards Assessments Vary Among Charter School Groups

Niomi Plotkin, Director of New Schools at the New York City Charter School Center, said that it was too early for her to comment specifically about Common Core State Standards assessments because they are still in development. But Plotkin said in an interview with the Resource Center that she hoped that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. "We want to be utilizing these assessments in a way that is moving public education forward," Plotkin said.

Plotkin said that the New York City Charter School Center is moving ahead with programs related to the Common Core State Standards. "Common Core is something that many charter schools are looking at, especially those that are coming into the application phase," Plotkin said. Applications for 2012-13 will need to be aligned to the new standards. "We'll start on the front end, saying those things are in consideration with our authorizers, and that's important as people design their schools," Plotkin said. Applications have always had to show alignment with state standards. Plotkin said the Common Core State Standards are "deconstructed and simplified in a way" that makes alignment easier. "We have an atmosphere within the city itself that is taking on, looking at, and implementing the Common Core State Standards," Plotkin said. "Charter schools and district schools are now beginning to have more of a dialogue around those types of things through the district-charter compact," Plotkin said, referring to the charter and district schools collaboration initiative developed with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Common Core State Standards are being worked into New York City Charter School Center programs, such as programs for leaders and new school applicants. "We're doing a whole series on Common Core within the application program so that people have a heads up," Plotkin said.

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a charter school network with schools in 20 states, has not taken an official position about the Common Core State Standards, Steve Mancini, Director of Public Affairs for KIPP, said in an interview with the Resource Center. But Mancini pointed out that KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and David Levin wrote in a January 2009 opinion article published in the Washington Post that "perhaps the single greatest lever for raising expectations and achievement for all children in America would be the creation of national learning standards and assessments." KIPP already requires all of its schools to take a standardized test that compares the performance of students to a national norm, an evaluation that is in addition to standardized tests required by the states. KIPP has been requiring the additional test for the past 7 years and posts its schools' results on the Annual Report Card section of its website. KIPP schools can choose whether they give the SAT 10 or the MAP test, according to Mancini. "We want to have some sense of how our students are doing across 20 states," Mancini said. "We have a national bar that we're looking at, and we're not waiting for the Common Core Standards." Mancini said the evaluation helps KIPP determine which schools are "hitting it out of the park and who needs help." It also aids accountability to the public and gives parents the ability to go to the website and compare student performance using a common measure.

Assessments Development Spurs Complex Questions for Charter Schools

In Washington, D.C., Naomi DeVeaux, Deputy Executive Director and Director of School Quality for the charter school support organization Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), noted concerns about the assessment regimen. The District of Columbia is part of PARCC. DeVeaux said PARCC had originally planned four mandatory assessments spread over the course of the year that would cover different aspects of the Common Core State Standards. She said that PARCC now plans two mandatory assessments toward the end of the year, with other voluntary interim tests available at other times. "FOCUS worked hard to push back on PARCC and say this really is not feasible and not a good idea," DeVeaux said of the earlier plan. For example, at-risk students, who make up a high percentage of charter school students in the District of Columbia, might not be ready for a standardized test at the beginning of the year but might be ready by the end of the year.

The Common Core State Standards do not prescribe instructional methods or a specific curriculum. But Ildiko Laczko-Kerr, Vice President of Academics at the Arizona Charter Schools Association and who previously worked in test development, said the content of that assessment "inherently dictates the curriculum and instruction that you would be teaching." Some charter schools might have to stop their students' advance and go back and review for a certain assessment, while others might have to jump ahead, depending on the testing schedule and content. "We have a significant number of schools that feel they go well beyond the minimum state requirements and address a much more rigorous standard of instruction," she said. She said that English/language arts standards allow more flexibility than mathematics standards. For example, if you are teaching plot, it does not need to be done with a particular novel. "Whereas, if you are teaching the Pythagorean theorem, you have to teach the Pythagorean theorem," she said.

DeVeaux noted that expeditionary learning programs, where teachers develop a program that integrates various subjects and then take the classroom into the real world to apply skills, might face disruption from a new standardized testing regimen. "They would have impact on all of the more interesting elements or more free elements that charters are allowed to do with curriculum," DeVeaux said.

Meanwhile, the timeline for developing the new assessments is getting tight if 2014 remains the implementation year. Arizona is part of PARCC. "Before a test gets to be a test, the individual items that are going to be on that test need to be field-tested with the population of students who are going to take it," Laczko-Kerr said. "We've not seen necessarily a detailed schedule of when those items are going to come in and what the process is going to look like yet," Laczko-Kerr said, adding that it takes about two years to create an assessment. "They really need to start field testing in the 2011-12 school year to create enough items to be able to use," Laczko-Kerr said. She said she expects to see those items field-tested as part of state assessments in the spring. She said one of the goals is to assess higher-order thinking skills that will require students to apply their knowledge to a given scenario and generate their own answers rather than selecting an answer from a multiple-choice display.

Arizona's concerns may not be those of other states. For example, how will the new test items impact the state's large population of students who are English language learners? Those items "perform very differently" for English-speaking students and students who are learning English, Laczko-Kerr said, adding that will matter when it comes to comparing performance by jurisdictions.

The PARCC and SBAC assessments will have to be aligned with the Common Core State Standards and with each other to allow for comparisons among states, DeVeaux said. "I don't know how it's going to work," DeVeaux said. "We'll see."

Implementing the assessment via computer poses challenges in terms of presentation. Laczko-Kerr said that "the way that they can present information to students will look much different than what it would look like on a paper-and-pencil type test." Rolling out a new assessment system will require substantial communication efforts so that people understand what is involved. She noted that many meetings are occurring within the state. Frameworks will help orient people. "Anytime you create an assessment, a blueprint or framework has to be created and communicated so that the field understands--of all of these standards, here are the proportions or percentages of these standards that will be assessed--where the focus is," Laczko-Kerr said.

Logistical concerns exist about whether all the technology and computer lab time that is needed will be available to assess students in what will be a short period of time, partly because of test security issues, according to Laczko-Kerr. "Will there be another paper-and-pencil option?"

DeVeaux also noted concerns about the future of the role of computers, noting talk of using artificial intelligence in the grading of students' writing samples. "That's very controversial. What is that saying about a teacher's ability to grade students' writing or people's ability?" The standards and assessments initiatives are worthy topics of conversation in the charter school community. "It's really great to get people to think about it now," DeVeaux said. "These are really important things for charter leaders to know and start working toward because it's going to hit them hard."

Utah Charter School Prepares Common Core State Standards and Assessments

Julie Adamic, Director of the John Hancock Charter School in Pleasant Grove, Utah, said staff at the K-8 school of 180 students have been preparing for the Common Core State Standards. The school also has participated in an online adaptive assessment pilot project by the state for the past three years. The assessments have been given three times each year. They include grade-level assessments, adaptive elements that are open-ended in terms of the progression of difficulty of the questions, and items aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

For the first two years of the pilot, students also took the state's standardized assessment, the Criterion-Referenced Test (CRT), which is used to determine adequate yearly progress under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. "Our poor students were double tested for two years," she said. Last year, the state received a federal waiver that allowed the schools in the pilot program to forgo the CRT.

All the needed resources are not in place for the Common Core State Standards. For example, the publisher has not updated the mathematics textbooks that the school has been using. "But we've already implemented supplements to fill those gaps," she said. "Our teachers had to sit down and go through the Common Core, go through these textbooks, and figure out exactly where there were holes," Adamic said, noting that teachers in some cases are coming up with lesson plans themselves to plug gaps. The school has a teaching staff of 20, which includes one teacher for each grade and a mix of assistants and specialists.

Adamic said the school is adapting its approach to teaching spelling as a result of the new standards. For example, the school has worked through a set list of words that "basically starts in kindergarten and goes through the grades." The new approach involves integrating words from the core content across subjects, meaning that mathematics, science, and social studies words are included. The new standards do not necessarily determine how high the bar goes for student achievement. "As a school, we're pushing everyone to go just a little bit further with our math," she said. "We're pushing to have the majority, if not all of our students, ready for geometry in the ninth grade," she said, as a way to put them on track for calculus as seniors.

She said providing professional development for teachers is important to alleviate concerns about readiness for the new standards. Teachers from the school participated in Common Core State Standards training provided by the state's department of education and tailored for specific grade levels. One of the school's teachers is a trainer for the state and handles professional development for the school's staff. Adamic said that the Utah Charter Network, a charter school association in the state, held a conference in August for charter teachers on the Common Core State Standards. "We kind of saw the writing on the wall," she said of her school. "It's a program that our teachers have been preparing for. So we feel real confident that we're ready to implement the program."

News

Bill Passed by U.S. House Would Provide $300 Million per Year for Charter Schools Support

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would provide $300 million for 2012 and each of the five succeeding years to aid the development and the expansion of successful charter schools, including facility support, evaluating school impact, sharing best practices, outreach to special populations of students, and improved school transparency and performance management through stronger authorization.

The Empowering Parents Through Quality Charter Schools Act was passed on September 13, 2011, by a vote of 365 to 54 and now goes to the U.S. Senate for action. The website of the Education and the Workforce Committee, through which the legislation was developed, provides further information.

Events

October 24-27: The National Association of Charter School Authorizers will host its 2011 Leadership Conference on Amelia Island, near Jacksonville, Florida.

February 27-29, 2012: The Second Annual Green Schools National Conference will be in Denver, Colorado.

Resources

Coming Together to Raise Achievement: New Assessments for the Common Core State Standards. This July 2011 report from the Center for K-12 Assessment & Performance Management at ETS provides an update about the development of assessment designs for the Common Core State Standards and explains a range of elements of the project.

Reaching the Goal: The Applicability and Importance of the Common Core State Standards to College and Career Readiness. This 2011 report from the Educational Policy Improvement Center covers how applicable the knowledge and the skills contained in the Common Core State Standards are for postsecondary readiness. The study is based on a survey of college instructors and includes data from 1,815 instructors at 944 institutions.

Connecting High-Quality Expanded Learning Opportunities and the Common Core State Standards to Advance Student Success. This 2011 brief from CCSSO discusses ways to strengthen the connection between expanded learning opportunities and the Common Core State Standards. The brief covers policies and practices and gives program examples from New York, New Hampshire, and Georgia.

Computer-Adaptive Testing: A Methodology Whose Time Has Come. This report by John Michael Linacre from the MESA Psychometric Laboratory at the University of Chicago provides an overview of computer-adaptive testing. It includes a brief history, a description of how it works, information about test item or question development, and a discussion of associated advantages and cautions.

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales: Variation and Change in State Standards for Reading and Mathematics, 2005-2009. This August 2011 study from the National Center for Educational Statistics found that the standards the states use to determine whether students in Grades 4 and 8 are proficient in reading and mathematics vary widely, and most are set at levels that are equivalent to basic or below basic skills under the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scale, which is used for what is commonly called "the nation's report card." The report, written by American Institutes for Research experts, compares state standards to the NAEP scale, using 2005, 2007, and 2009 assessments.