Maine’s teachers, encouraged in the 1990s to shun using standardized tests to show student progress, are being overwhelmed by a process that calls on them to develop local and more hands-on measurements of how their kids are doing.

The so-called “local assessment” approach to measuring progress has gotten so burdensome, in fact, that Gov. John Baldacci, his commissioner of education and the state’s teachers union last week called for delaying graduation requirements that were supposed to be in effect for this year’s freshmen class.

Any change to those requirements would have to be approved by the Legislature. The Education Committee is reviewing a dozen or more bills that propose changes or studies of the assessment system.

While no one is calling for a high-stakes standardized test to replace the labor intensive local evaluations, many are now calling for some combination of state test and teacher evaluation.

“We’re overstretched,” said Deputy Education Commissioner Patrick Phillips. “We need to do less to ensure we can do it well.”

The department wants to scale back the assessments and will consider using standardized tests as part of the evaluation process. “Do you need to have a math local assessment?” he asked, if schools are testing every year in math under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act.

That federal law will mandate annual standardized tests be given in reading and math next year in grades 3,4,5,6,7 and 8. Science testing will be added the following year.

If the state doesn’t change its rules, teachers would be forced to teach kids to pass the local evaluations, which they are still in the process of designing, and the federally mandated standardized tests, leaving little time for anything else.

“Teachers are frustrated,” said Trisha Rhodes, a reading and literacy teacher and coach out of Bar Harbor, who serves Hancock and Waldo County. “They feel all of their professional development time is spent trying to fulfill all these mandates…to give the test, teach to the test.”

At the same time, the state has asked them to develop non-standardized local evaluations. “A huge amount of time and energy has been spent for us to get the local assessments that we need,” Rhodes said. “Now it looks like it may be changed.”

No simple test

Hundreds of pages have been written to try and explain to teachers what the state wants them to do.

The easiest place to start is with the 1997 Learning Results mandate from the Legislature that outlined what students ought to know and be able to do in English language arts, math, science, social studies, health and physical education, modern and classical languages and the visual and performing arts.

Teachers were asked to develop curriculum that would teach what students needed to know to meet the Learning Results standards. The law said achievement would be measured by a “combination” of local and state assessments.

The law morphed over time into emphasizing local assessments versus standardized state tests, which were and are being criticized as “cookie cutter” evaluations. The problem is the teachers had to create the assessments at the same time they were helping develop and learning to teach the curriculum to be tested.

“The whole process got away from us and created a system that’s not manageable,” said Rob Walker, president of the Maine Education Association, the state’s teachers union.

He said 60 percent of the 3,200 teachers surveyed said they had thought about getting out of the profession in the last two years, and 44 percent said they’d never get in, if they had it to do all over again. A big reason, he said, was the local assessment mandate.

“We’re driving even the best teachers crazy,” said House Majority Leader Glenn Cummings, D-Portland, who is co-sponsoring a bill with Assistant Minority Leader Sen. Carol Weston to encourage the Department of Education to hire outside contractors to help with assessment work.

Lack of direction

“We tried to please too many people,” said Sen. Weston, R-Waldo, who has served on the Education Committee and as a substitute teacher, and whose husband is an elementary school principal.

“The state said, ‘we’re going to have standards, but you design the standards,'” she said. Teachers were asked to create local evaluations and “take on the task that companies do.”

The state, in fact, does use one standardized test – the Maine Education Assessment – in grades 4, 8 and 11 to test reading, writing, math and science skills. It is handled by an outside firm.

The scores don’t count toward a student’s grade or advancement to the next level, but they are widely used in the court of public opinion. And, that opinion has been harsh in many districts since the test is hard and scores aren’t very good.

The latest MEA scores from tests given last year show 48 percent of 11th-graders meeting or exceeding standards in reading; 36 percent in writing; 24 percent in math; and, 12 percent in science.

They could have more dire consequences under NCLB, because the federal government allows states to pick the standardized test they use to comply with the law, and Maine uses the MEA right now. Parents with students in failing schools under NCLB will have a right to send their kids elsewhere. While that’s a geographical impossibility in some parts of Maine, the failing grade will at the very least stigmatize schools.

Weston said she couldn’t believe the commissioner of education went to “fight for the right to use the MEA,” as the qualifying test under NCLB, “when she knew 75 percent of the kids were not meeting standards.”

Sen. Karl Turner, R-Cumberland, put it more directly.

“Why didn’t we pick the Iowa or something, so we can blow by this?” he asked at a recent Education Committee hearing.

Phillips said the department is considering changes to the MEA to make the test more compatible with the “annual yearly progress” goals of the NCLB.

Graduation requirement

Freshman Rep. Connie Goldman, D-Cape Elizabeth, a former superintendent of schools in Gorham and Cape Elizabeth, agreed with Weston’s assessment that teachers are being asked to create what professional testing companies spend millions on to develop.

“Maine has spent millions on contracts to outside developers for the MEA and continues to spend millions a year to evaluate tests,” Goldman said. “Is it reasonable to place our classroom teachers in the position of having to meet the same or even similar standards?” as professional testing companies, she asked.

“If a diploma is denied and parents were to litigate,” Goldman questioned whether the process would hold up in court if it was based solely on local assessments.

At issue are two key requirements in the law that say assessments have to be reliable – meaning a student would get a similar score under different testing conditions – and valid in terms of measuring what they intended to measure. In Maine’s case, that’s the Learning Results.

“The technical requirements of validity and reliability exceed any normal teacher expectation,” she said.

Goldman, who has put a bill in to study the true costs of local assessments, said she would support a combination of local evaluations and statewide tests as a graduation requirement.

“I would look at a combination that is respectful of teachers’ and students’ time,” she said.

Walker of the teachers union is not ready to call for use of a statewide standardized test as a graduation requirement. “No, not at this point,” he said.

He does believe, however, whatever tests we give students “ought to mean something,” unlike the MEAs.

“We make all these kids take it but it doesn’t affect their grades,” Walker said.

“They’d invest in it,” he said, if it affected grades or graduation. “Pick a different test that counts.”

Copy the Story Link