Standardized testing has become more frequent in the Oxford School District, and parents are asking why.
OSD Superintendent Brian Harvey said in an OSD Board of Trustees meeting Monday that the testing data is essential for Oxford schools to move forward.
Gray Edmondson, president of the school board, said parents want to know how much testing is district-mandated and how much is decided by the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE). Other questions have included how that data is being used, how many standardized tests are students taking throughout the school year and how is this testing being administered at each school within the district.
During the meeting, board members led a discussion to address several of these recent standardized testing concerns.
“We do have assessments that are mandated by the state,” said Candy Mize, director of elementary curriculum. “NWEA [Northwest Evaluation Association] is something that the district has elected to do on the side. We’ve been using NWEA assessments for four years, and it has taken some time to understand the reports.”
But now that OSD administrators have a better understanding of the assessment results after four years of implementing the program, the assessments have proven to be beneficial for determining performance in several areas.
“Our administrators are doing an excellent job with this data,” Mize said. “I have been in many districts, and [Oxford administrators] do a wonderful job with it… in their data meetings, with their teachers – they meet with them individually, and they look at the data. They look at students – the ones that are struggling, the ones that are advanced, the ones that are in the middle, a lot of our time is developed by that [data] to strengthen those skills.”
At an elementary level with NWEA assessments, Mize said the testing data is used to determine student progress or growth in the school. Appropriate questioning for the testing is determined by a student’s RIT score or range, which is an evaluation of that student’s instructional level.
“Once you get that RIT range, you have, at least, a 50 percent chance for that child to be able to be successful with that type of level questioning,” Mize said. “So we use [the testing data] to look at student growth, at teacher growth… That’s just another piece of data to be sure that we have that validity there, to make sure that it’s aligned with our grades, our classroom assessments, anything that we may be giving.”
Following Mize’s data-use explanation, Oxford Intermediate School Principal Steve Hurdle said while NWEA may not be state-mandated necessarily, MDE still requires school districts to use a universal screening program.
“We have to have that,” Hurdle said.
Hurdle said because NWEA assessments are MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports), the district is required to administer these tests three times throughout the school year.
Edmondson said the approximate two hours to take the test, even at three times within a year, is hardly enough to have a significant impact on time students spend testing.
“If we want to focus our efforts on reducing time and testing versus classroom [time], we need to start hitting up MDE,” Edmondson said with a laugh.
OSD Parent Kate Bishop, a literacy consultant, told the board that her concern is that teachers are spending a lot of time designing curriculums around computerized data.
“I know that sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but when you put a 7-year-old in a computer lab and ask them to read a passage and answer some questions, the data is not reliable… or you don’t know if it’s reliable,” Bishop said. “It’s much more effective to have kids reading text and have teachers sitting next to them asking them what they know.”
Board member Ray Hill asked what kind of data NWEA testing provides that isn’t already provided by state and federally mandated testing.
Superintendent Harvey was first to respond with “it’s a better testing assessment.”
“We collectively think there’s too much testing, even at the state level,” Harvey said. “Going back a number of years, I think we have state testing because there was no accountability for students progressing and growing. We do not use [NWEA] as a high-stakes test. We want kids to take the assessment, do the best they can and nothing more. It just allows us to develop a present level of performance.”
Oxford High School Principal Bradley Roberson further explained that it’s harder for administrators to help a student’s growth if they don’t know that student’s level of understanding until the end of the year, which is when state tests are typically administered.
“We don’t want to sit around and wait to get an assessment at the end of the year to work on growth for the next year,” Roberson said. “We want to start doing those things throughout the school year. You can lose a year’s worth of growth time if you’re waiting to get a state assessment.”
Edmondson added later in the discussion that NWEA assessments have been more reliable in Oxford schools than any other testing programs previously mandated.
SuzAnne Liddell, director of federal programs, said that while NWEA assessments are mostly used to determine student and teacher growth, the program data has been useful for her specific responsibilities.
“I use the NWEA results for our federal programs application because it requires benchmark indicators,” Liddell said. “We have to look at our year in increments, so it is highly reliable for that as well. It helps us determine which programs that we’re federally funding will be continued based on the progress of our students. If we don’t see progress, then we can’t move forward with spending our funds that way.”
Elementary-level testing in Oxford Schools has been more excessive this past year because both NWEA and STAR assessments were being implemented. But Harvey said that won’t be the case for the 2018-2019 school year, and parents can rest assured there will be fewer standardized tests. Since MDE no longer requires STAR assessments, Oxford won’t be using it.
“We can’t stop measuring growth,” Harvey said. “We have to measure growth, but we can do that differently than an end-of-the-year, high-stakes test. I think we can do that better than what currently is being done.”
For a current list of standardized testing implemented in the Oxford School District, click here.
By Randall Haley
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