Our accountability system should be changed to measure how many students make progress | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Forget the "percent proficient"

    The NC House has passed HB 48 and it now sits in the Senate Education Committee. Essentially this bill, if it becomes law, would eliminate the end-of-course tests in US History, Civics & Economics, Algebra II and Physical Science. It should be defeated. It would be bad policy for North Carolina.

    North Carolina General Assembly building, where House Bill 48 was just passed.

    I have previously written that the state should eliminate End-of-Grade and End-of-Course testing immediately but that call did not suggest eliminating the tests without replacing them with something better. Here's what would be better.

    The state should replace the tests with nationally normed standardized tests. We would prefer the National Assessment of Education Progress tests simply because that gives us a frame of reference across state lines.

    But whatever test they use, the most important change that should be made in our accountability program is to shift the standard of measurement from "Percent Proficient" to "Gain Scores."

    Ever since the testing program began we have used the results to identify what percentage of students scored above Level II on four levels of scores. I'll bet you've never heard a superintendent talk about trends in the number or percent of students who scored in Level IV (the top group). And that tells you something.

    What has happened in reality is that the system has become focused on how to get as many students as possible up to simply the minimum level of performance and few, if any, would even argue that the bottom of Level III is sufficient for most students.

    What minimum proficiency should be replaced with is reporting the number, percent and variance of students who make the amount of gain that each of them should make. Here's how it is done.

    First, using previous scores in the same subject (and it can even be done across subject lines) you compute where a student is at the beginning of the year. Then at the end of the year you measure where the student ended up. That is the amount of "gain" that student made. You then compare the actual gain to the amount of gain the student could have been expected to make.

    The way you compute that expected gain is a bit complex to explain for this article but suffice it to say that it can be done. The technology already exists. And most good teachers already have a keen sense for how much each student should progress during a year's time.

    The important thing is to build the accountability system around these gain scores, and eliminate the focus on minimum performance.

    The other thing a shift to gain scores would produce is elimination of the "Fallacy of the Average." We not only report the wrong thing being measured (minimum performance) but we report that incorrectly. We use the average and seldom, if ever, report the amount of variance in that average.

    Eliminating the focus on the average would allow us to use the gain scores as a means of assessing teacher performance more fairly because it does not depend on the ability of students assigned to a given teacher or present in a specific school.

    Much of the debate we're seeing in Wake County right now related to their student assignment plan is based on this false premise that the mean or average score for a school is important. But it is not. In fact it is very detrimental to poorer students because that is by and large what is reflected in the mean scores for a given school. But that's a discussion for another day.

    The state has taken some steps to convert to gain scores but still bases its system on minimum performance. This is what should be scrapped.

    And even if the state drags its feet on the matter, the Beaufort County Schools could implement an accountability system based on individual gain scores. The technology is already there to do so. It would simply take the leadership of the system deciding to get-r-done.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.
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