Race To The Test

Last week brought news that the U.S. Department of Education had selected Maryland as one of ten finalists in the administration’s Race To The Top (RTTT) grant competition. This caught most observers by surprise. The common wisdom over the last 12 months has been that Maryland had little chance of winning. The machinations between the State Superintendent of Education, the leadership of the General Assembly, the Governor’s Office, and local boards of education have been more focused on trying not to get blamed if and when the state’s application fell short.

Now that Maryland actually will receive $250 million dollars in new federal education aid, it’s long past time for the public to understand what was proposed in the 600+ page Maryland Race To The Top Application.

To start with – fully 50% of the federal aid will never get out the door of the Maryland State Department of Education. The grant proposal – written by MSDE – only provides for 50% of the money to go directly to local school systems. For those taxpayers concerned about bureaucratic bloat in state and federal government – the RTTT grant is a massive increase in MSDE’s budget.

To fulfill the promises made in the Maryland RTTT application, the state government will have to implement a massive expansion of standardized testing in our schools. The State Superintendent’s plan to require that teacher evaluations be formulaically linked to student tests scores will – by necessity – mean new tests in all subjects and in all grade levels. It apparently will also mean a completely new set of assessments at the beginning of each year, in order to provide the baseline data needed to measure student growth in a value-added measurement system.

If you are concerned about the amount of school time spent on testing and on test prep; you ain’t seen nothing yet.

This may hit our youngest students first; as the state expands the required Maryland State Assessments (MSAs) down into second grade, first grade, and kindergarten: testing three to five year old children every year. But it will also mean new standardized tests in all subject areas in middle schools and high schools. And what about those art teachers? One can only imagine how the State Department of Education will develop a standardized, multiple choice test for that one. But in MSDE’s vision, all teachers – including the art teacher – have to have their performance evaluations formulaically linked to standardized tests in order to judge their effectiveness.

Say goodbye to creativity in the classroom. No time for that guest speaker, that field trip to the museum, that National History Day project, that student art show or concert performance, or that wonderful novel that’s not in the state curriculum. The focus in every subject and in every grade will be on memorizing the information that will be on the state multiple choice test.

One of the many ironies here is that not too long ago, Maryland had an earlier state testing system – the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) that actually required a degree of student writing. But it proved to be too expensive, and it took too long to read and score hundreds of thousands of essays and short answers, so Maryland (like most states) decided it was cheaper and quicker to just rely on multiple choice tests that can be graded by machines. And now we’re going to have more of them.

For all the attention that the Race To The Top has received from the media and educational pundits, little notice has been given to the $179 million Maryland received the week before as a result of the federal Education Jobs Bill. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 98% of that money is passed straight through to local schools, and is to be used to “save or create education jobs” at the local school level.

Montgomery County Public Schools will get $19 million from the Education Jobs bill. I’m proud to say that the National Education Association – MCEA’s national affiliate – was one of the prime movers behind passage of this bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will prevent the layoff of close to 160,000 classroom teachers nationwide. No new bureaucracies, no new mandated tests and curriculum. Just lower class sizes.

Unless the County Council tries to divert these funds to non-education programs, this money should minimize further cuts in next year’s MCPS budget.

The Montgomery County Board of Education and the Superintendent of Schools declined to sign on to Maryland's RTTT application. That was the right thing to do. The teacher evaluation system in Montgomery County has been profiled in numerous national publications. The Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) Program – like those it was modeled on in Toledo and Rochester – is increasingly held up as a model for reform of teacher evaulation systems. Several states have begun to either create incentives for peer evaluation systems or even mandate them.

Montgomery County simply wanted assurance that its locally developed, effective teacher evaluation system not be upended by new state mandates. MSDE refused.

But Montgomery County isn’t the only group questioning the state’s plans. The Frederick County Board of Education also refused to sign on. In fact, leading education researchers across the nation are criticizing the drive to link teacher evaluations to student test scores. The Washington Post’s education blogger – Valerie Strauss – had a recent column about a major new research report that questions the proposed linkage of teacher evaluations to student test scores as statistically inappropriate.

And - significant questions are being raised by the Maryland General Assembly.

Last winter, the General Assembly passed the Education Reform Act of 2010. This was seen as the state legislature’s move to look as if they supported the Race To The Top application, so they wouldn’t be blamed if and when it lost. The Act called for ‘significant portion’ of a teacher’s evaluation to be determined by student growth data. Yet the proposed MSDE regulations go way beyond that, calling for 50% of a teacher’s evaluation to be determined by this data. The General Assembly specifically rejected a proposal to specify that 50% of a teacher's evaluation should be linked to student test scores.

The Education Reform Act charged the State Board of Education to develop "general standards" for performance evaluations which specifically stating that county Boards of Education were charged with establishing the actual evaluation criteria. It's hard to see how MSDE's 50% number can be described as a "general" standard. It sure sounds pretty specific to me.

Whether the new General Assembly will approve the proposed MSDE regulations, and whether they will take further action to ensure that MSDE follows the intent of the 2010 law, are yet to be seen. When – and whether - the Governor will step in to provide his own leadership on education is also a question.

Let’s just hope that some sanity is restored before we turn our schools into even more obsessive testing factories and our students are subjected to even more tests which do not contribute to their learning.

Tom Israel, MCEA Executive Director