New Assessment Beliefs for a New School Mission

We have inherited an assessment legacy that has actually prevented us from tapping the full power of assessment for school improvement, Mr. Stiggins maintains. He offers a new vision of assessment that has the potential of bringing about remarkable gains in student achievement. IN RECENT years, we have achieved major breakthroughs in our understanding of the effective use of assessment to benefit -- not merely check for -- student learning. We have gained new insights into cognitive processes and have succeeded in connecting them to new assessment strategies that promise unprecedented achievement gains for students. Yet in districts, schools, and classrooms across the nation, educators still assess student learning the way their predecessors did 60 years ago because they have not been given the opportunity to learn about these new insights and practices. The time has come to take advantage of this new understanding of the potential of assessment and to fundamentally rethink the relationship between assessment practices and effective schools in the United States. For decades, beginning with districtwide testing in the 1960s and subsequently expanding to statewide, national, and international testing, we have believed that the path to school improvement is paved with more and better standardized tests. The mistake we have made at all levels is to believe that once-a-year standardized assessments alone can provide sufficient information and motivation to increase student learning. In fact, this belief in the power of standardized testing has blinded public officials and school leaders to a completely different application of assessment -- day-to-day classroom assessment -- that has been shown to trigger remarkable gains in student achievement. Before discussing the evidence of the power of classroom assessment, it is useful to examine the specific reasons why standardized tests are insufficient as the foundation for assessment's role in our school improvement efforts. A NaIve and Counterproductive Assessment Legacy Let me be clear about my mission here. The arguments I advance do not arise from a desire to end accountability-oriented standardized testing. Such tests do provide opportunities for educators to reflect on what is and is not being achieved. If educators don't take advantage of these opportunities, it is not the fault of the tests. I will suggest specific ways for users to take far greater advantage of standardized tests in the future. But for assessment to become truly useful, politicians, school leaders, and society in general must come to understand the gross insufficiency of these tests as a basis for assessment for school improvement. My argument is not with the idea of accountability per se. As public institutions under contract with their communities to help students learn, schools should be compelled to present evidence that they are doing their job. If standardized tests can provide part of that evidence, we should use them. Besides, the demand for accountability is helping educators clarify achievement expectations. This has already produced dividends in the form of focused standards -- a solid foundation for greater student success -- and the development of standards-referenced tests. When carefully developed, such tests provide educators with the assurance that good instruction will result in higher scores. My argument is with those who believe that standardized testing for public accountability harnesses the full power of assessment in the service of better schools. I can find little evidence that this is the case. My quest for research on the effects of high-stakes tests per se on student achievement has yielded just one study that directly addresses this question. Margaret Raymond and Eric Hanushek report tiny test score gains attributable to the presence of high-stakes tests.1 But at the same time, Audrey Amrein and David Berliner, among others, report that such tests are often accompanied by such negative outcomes as reduced achievement, increased dropout rates, and reduced graduation rates -- especially for minority students. …