City Year is an American education nonprofit organization founded in 1988 and dedicated to helping students and schools succeed. The organization partners with public schools in 29 high-need communities across the U.S. and through international affiliates. The Center for Assessment has been partnering with City Year for several months to help increase the assessment knowledge and skills of City Year staff. We’ve had the privilege of working with Will Scarbrough, the head of Student Analytics for City Year, on this project.

According to Education Week, “as of March 23, 2020, 7:31 p.m. ET: 46 states have decided to close schools. Combined with district closures in other states, at least 123,000 U.S. public and private schools are closed, are scheduled to close, or were closed and later reopened, affecting at least 54.8 million students”.

Like many of you, I’m closely following the news of the growing threat associated with the COVID-19 virus. Obviously, it is a difficult time for many and my primary thoughts are with those whose health or welfare are directly affected.  

During this time, education leaders are grappling with tough decisions regarding whether to close schools or suspend activities. These decisions have many wide-ranging implications, and one such implication we’re focused on at the Center is the short- and long-term impact to assessment and accountability systems. 

Last fall, Senior Associate Juan D’Brot was elected to the executive committee of the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, formed in 1975 as a coalition of professional associations in the United States and Canada concerned with the quality of evaluation practice. 

How do schools improve? More importantly, how can school improvement be sustained over time and at scale? 

This is the second in a three-part series on the future of large-scale state assessment and accountability. Of course, it is impossible to know the future, but forecasts for educational assessment can be informed by examining what has shaped state assessment and accountability in the past.

Here at the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, we think a lot about the multiple factors involved in promoting student learning through more meaningful state assessment and accountability systems. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the current authorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), is the most significant influence on contemporary state assessment and accountability.  We believe a number of changes to ESEA could help promote innovation, restore balance, and improve outcomes.

Can we call “analysis” by another name and expect educators to teach students to analyze, and expect students to demonstrate analysis in a text-dependent analysis response? Is the word “analysis” interchangeable with other words, or does its meaning matter in defining expectations for student performance? 

In the famous line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says  “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  

Testing experts know a lot about how to conduct scoring of students’ written responses to assessment items. Raters are trained under strict protocols to follow scoring rules accurately and consistently. To verify that raters did their job well, we use a few basic score quality measures that center on how well two or more raters agree. These measures of agreement are called inter-rater reliability (IRR) statistics, and they are widely used, perhaps in part because they are easy to understand and apply. 

As 2019 drew to a close I had the chance to reflect on the conversations I've had with many of my colleagues throughout the year, and one topic of conversation that sticks out to me is frustration about the minimal value-add of work focused on large scale assessment and state-level accountability systems to the student experience. 

Developing a Better Understanding the Role of Assessment and Accountability in Improving Student Outcomes