Eliminated, or Replaced?

High-school seniors statewide were no doubt miffed if they heard the news out of Raleigh on Sept. 5: Gov. Roy Cooper signed a bill into law titled “AN ACT TO REDUCE TESTING ADMINISTERED TO STUDENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.” The bill’s first sentence stipulates that no tests will be eliminated until the 2020-21 school year, making members of the Class of 2020 ineligible for the legislature’s largesse.

We’re very much in favor of reducing the amount of time students spend taking tests, especially useless tests that are never used to target areas of weakness or make adjustments to an individual’s course of instruction.

However, the law contains another significant loophole regarding NC Final Exams. Its first section reads,

No later than March 15, 2020, the State Board of Education and the Department of Public Instruction shall submit to the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee a plan on how to use other means to accomplish the purposes for which data is collected by the NC Final Exam.

The ominous “other means” language is an attempt to fulfill the state’s “teacher effectiveness” requirements while still reducing the amount of classroom time that is spent administering tests. The “effectiveness” measurements for teachers differ from the state’s “accountability” measures that apply to schools and districts. To gauge their effectiveness, teachers are judged using a system that the state licenses from SAS in Cary, called Educator Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS). The main metric that’s derived from EVAAS is just known as “growth,” as in growth in test scores. An EVAAS growth measure is based on each student’s improved knowledge, supposedly as a result of a teacher’s job performance and skill.

NC Final Exams, taken by high-school students, are similar to state-developed End of Grade tests for elementary and middle-school students. They fill a gap in the state’s attempt to reward teachers for student achievement by providing standardized tests in subjects that are not covered by the mandatory tests in English Language Arts, Math, and Science. So, for example, teachers of German or Spanish are required to administer NCFEs in their subject each year, providing a fair method for NCDPI to track their students’ “growth” year by year.

The Growth Measure is based on student performance on multiple tests

Not every teacher loves the growth metric. It’s calculated using a set of statistical models that are both exceptionally complex and proprietary. Not only that, but because of the NCFEs, teachers of any subject that doesn’t fall under Common Core Standards–that is, any subject other than ELA or Math–have long been required to give tests to their students that they themselves did not develop. Such tests have dubious value. A teacher knows what was learned, what’s fair to include on a final exam, even what students of that particular subject need to know. But the standardized tests are required to track “growth” with some assumed amount of fairness and consistency

This loophole appears to provide plenty of wiggle-room for overweening lawmakers keen to save money on teachers’ salaries by reducing the amount of bonus pay that’s doled out to those with the highest growth scores. Let’s hope that we don’t see unintended consequences from the test-reduction initiative.