Acting D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson wants to scale back the “hard-core testing environment” in the city’s public schools, saying it has made students and school staff “stressed-out and crazy.” “I think we’ve swung the pendulum from one extreme to the other, right — from absolutely no accountability to uber-accountability that has people stressed-out and crazy and whatnot,” Henderson said. “I think we’re now finding our way — or we have to find our way — back to some happy medium.”
The city’s inspector general is investigating allegations that cheating — whether it be at the hands of students, teachers or principals — occurred on the 2009 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, the District’s standardized reading and math exams.
Henderson commissioned the investigation on Tuesday after a USA Today article reignited public suspicion over dramatic performance gains on the tests. Many of the spikes corresponded with unusual erasure patterns, in which a high volume of incorrect answers were erased and corrected. Former school employees told the newspaper that pressure to raise scores created an environment ripe for cheating.
Henderson has maintained that the investigation will clear the school system’s name. DCPS previously hired a testing security firm in 2009 to probe the flagged schools, which found no evidence of cheating. Caveon, a testing security firm, is also reviewing the 2010 results.
At a panel discussion at Bell Multicultural High School this week, students, teachers and community members discussed the enormous role testing has played in the District’s education reform.
Henderson reaffirmed that DCPS must hold teachers and students accountable and accurately measure student performance, “but we shouldn’t define our children by their test scores … and I think there is a way to incentivize people to do both.”
D.C. school board member Monica Warren-Jones, who represents Ward 6, said that beyond reading and math, she wants to know if a child is a good critical thinker and can work well with others.
“I don’t want to discount how testing speaks to some accountability, but I do think there’s so much focus on the testing that it is to the detriment of a full and balanced curriculum,” she said.
DCPS plans to adopt national standards this summer from the National Governors Association, which has emphasized that assessment has to be more diverse than standardized testing, Henderson said.
“Over the next two years, I think you’ll see a significant departure from the hard-core testing environment that we currently have in place.”
