Why Test Scores Can't Be the Only Score

Critics claim that the current way we judge school performance and hold educators accountable to basic skills test score results (like the ITAS) just doesn't work well enough. Here's why:

First, it's too easy to create the illusion of success. Schools all over America have learned to "teach to the test." Schools know enough about what will be on the standardized tests to narrow their curriculum to just what will be tested. Students miss out on important knowledge and skills.

Second, while it's true that some students do well on the multiple-choice format the standardized tests use, many others are not able to show how much they know on these timed, fragmented assessments of knowledge.

Third, in school districts like Long Beach, where students are expected to meet challenging academic standards, standardized tests don't always provide enough information for teachers to accurately guage what students know and where teaching needs to be improved.

Finally, the standardized basic skills tests don't tell teachers or parents much about how well students can apply their knowledge and skills. To find out whether students can use what they've learned to solve problems and succeed in college and work, schools must use more practical, real-life assessments.

"Accountability is needed to assure the public that students are learning," says LBUSD research chief Lynn Winters. "We need standardized tests, but we also need other assessments that help teachers and the community the progress students are making and why."

The Long Beach Unified School District uses several different kinds of testing and assessment to balance the demand for accountability and the need for in-depth information about individual student achievement.

ITAS (Individual Tests of Academic Skills) is a multiple choice test familiar to many adults who remember Spring test days. ITAS tests for skills in reading, mathematics, and writing and is designed to measure the performance of groups of LBUSD students against a representative national group. ITAS does not provide enough information for teachers to diagnose individual student problems. Students in grades one through 10 take ITAS.

CAS2 is the performance assessment part of the LBUSD testing system. Students must perform a three-day, reading-writing task and an open-ended mathematics task where they show the steps they used to get the answer. These tasks are more "authentic" in that they more accurately mirror the kinds of tasks people do in the real world. Winters says the CAS2 tasks "provide excellent samples" of what students can do and reveal weaknesses in students' ability to solve problems. But, since these tests take a lot of time to grade, they involve only a few samples of student work. Students in grades two through eight and 10 take the CAS2.

Classroom tests are the familiar, third element in LBUSD's testing system. Teachers have traditionally used quizzes, essays and projects - and more recently, portfolios - to assess and grade student performance, but such testing has rarely been viewed as an important part of a districtwide testing program. Winters wants to change that.

"The most important and high-stakes assessment is in the classroom," she says. While the district has analyzed ITAS and CAS2 and linked what they test to the district's new academic standards as much as possible, Winters says classroom assessments are the best measures of whether students are meeting standards.

"Classroom-based tests that are built on the concepts or standards we expect kids to learn can give teachers the immediate information they need to stay on top of teaching and learning," she says.

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