Washington Post: CMS did what?

It's not exactly the kind of national attention Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools celebrates,  but the district made Washington Post education reporter Valerie Strauss' year-end quiz.

"The year 2011 was monumental in education  --  monumentally good or monumentally bad, depending on your view,"  Strauss wrote.  Among her trivia questions was:


Why did the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District try out 52 standardized tests in the spring?
a. To detect cheaters.
b. To find the best test for a new accountability program.
c. To pick standardized tests in every subject so teachers can be evaluated by student scores.
d. It didn't because that would be preposterous.

The correct answer was c, although an even better one would be:
e. The number actually went higher than 52.  By the end of the school year even testing officials were having a hard time keeping track,  as they tried to keep up with all the high school electives.

Since then,  though,  Superintendent Peter Gorman has moved on and interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh has eased off on the rollout of new tests for teacher ratings.

Tests, tests and more tests

Even as N.C.  education officials are eliminating some state exams,  they decided last week to require all juniors to take the ACT in March to gauge college readiness.  The state will pay $5.5 million to provide that test and a lead-up test for sophomores,  the Raleigh News & Observer reports.  State officials hope to get federal permission to scrap the 10th-grade writing test and apply that money toward the ACT.

Meanwhile,  Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has completed another 125 tests to gauge the basic skills of kids from pre-K to grade 12.  Unlike the dozens of year-end exams that drew flak last year,  partly because of plans to use them for rating teachers,  these  "formative assessments"  are designed to be given during  the year to size up student needs.

Here's what Chief Information Officer Scott Muri reported to the school board:  "The assessments address the four major content areas of math,  language arts,  science and social studies for middle and high school.  Elementary schools chose to stagger the formative process by beginning the year with math and language arts.  Science and social studies will follow later in the year.  For young students  (pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first grade),  we developed five performance tasks that will be administered throughout the school year.  Schools will set the administration times to best meet student needs and school schedules."

I know this blog has been politics-heavy lately, but I hope some educators are reading and can weigh in on  how this is working.  Teacher comments have provided a reality check for all of us  --  reporters,  school board members,  parents and others  --  who are trying to make sense of this from a distance.

CMS testing ramping up early

Fresh off summer vacation, many students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools find themselves staring down another crop of district-wide tests. CMS calls the tests "formatives," which is to say they help formulate the rest of the semester's instruction by giving teachers an early read on students' aptitude. Some students took the tests on the very first day of classes, said Scott Muri, chief information officer for CMS.

The formatives, which are optional, aren't the same as the 50-plus mandatory new end-of-semester tests that sparked all the commotion last spring. Those are called "summatives," which aim to show what kids have learned at the end of a semester. Muri said the formatives were first used last year. (They included math and language arts tests in grades preK-8, as well as fifth and eighth grade science. In high schools: English I, Algebra I, biology, U.S. history and civics and economics).

CMS is expanding the number of formatives this year to fill in subject areas where no formatives were offered. Muri said CMS is adding science and social studies in grades preK-8, and high schools will add English II, III and IV, Algebra II, geometry, chemistry, world history and earth/environmental science. The existing tests were also updated, with input from teams of teachers who met over the summer. The obvious question: are the formatives expanding because of the controversial introduction of the summatives last spring? Muri said no -- at least not in a specific sense of one causing the other. The only connection, he said, lies in the general sense that CMS is expanding its overall testing program to give teachers more feedback on student performance. The goal of the tweaks with the formatives, he said, is "just to improve, to make sure what we're doing is as effective as it can be."

Summer reading assignments: Boon or burden?

Jeri Ramsey, a parent at Charlotte-Mecklenburg's Sharon Elementary, poses an interesting question:  Do schools have a right to make assignments over the summer?

Ramsey says no.  What set her off was a PTA notice saying next year's fifth-graders should read two novels related to the social studies curriculum, "A Long Way from Chicago" and "George Washington's Socks," and have two-paragraph summaries ready to hand in when school starts Aug. 25.  Students will take part in class discussion and be given a comprehension test the first week of school, the notice says.

In an email to Principal Cathy Phelan and copied to the Observer, Ramsey says she certainly doesn't object to kids reading, or even to schools recommending books.  But this crosses a line, she wrote.

"Summer is a time for the families.  It is not a time for schools to force specific assignments on children," Ramsey wrote.  "Feel free to give a reading list of suggested reading materials, feel free to give a list of writing activities, feel free to give a list of math activities.  Let families choose what they do or don't do.  You are over stepping your bounds when you start telling parents what students must do on their free time.  Do you want children to hate learning?  That is what you are instilling."


Phelan backed her teachers' assignment:  "I can assure you that the fifth grade team of highly qualified educators have stayed abreast of current professional development.  Therefore, they do not arbitrarily assign work to the students that will not enrich or improve their skills,"  she replied.  "They greatly care for the academic and social growth of all of the children.  They would not develop a summer assignment that would hurt the students.  Students that truly enjoy reading will continue to find the value in all of the novels that they read.  Students that normally are not interested in reading will acquire content from the book that will be useful to them during the school year.  This is the second year that the 5th grade team has implemented the summer assignment.  The assignment proved to be very beneficial this school year to all of the children."

But Ramsey suspects the assignments are a thinly-veiled form of mandatory test prep, tied to the new social studies exams CMS rolled out this spring in an effort to create data that will help kids and rate teachers.  She notes that CMS will add 45 minutes to the elementary school day in 2011-12 and suggests schools use that time for additional reading.

"So now it is the parents job to teach to the test?"  Ramsey wrote.  "Last year you started using Value Added measures with the established EOGs and you knew the Social Studies Summative would be this year.  That is when it was decided to begin this new summer assignment.  It is all a way to teach to the test, improve Social Studies vocabulary and knowledge.  It is not bad to strengthen Social Studies vocabulary and knowledge, just do it in the time designated by the state as instructional days."


Chief Academic Officer Ann Clark, who hadn't seen the exchange, said last week that summer reading assignments are common, and parent complaints rare.  "A lot of parents ask for it,"  she said. "We get requests for summer reading lists."

More on CMS testing

The testing frenzy in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is winding down, though state-ordered retests for those who fail state exams will drag things out.

CMS officials will soon be crunching results from the 52 new end-of-year exams the district created for everything from kindergarten science to high-school calculus. Each school will get a report on how its kids fared, says Chris Cobitz, the CMS official in charge of the tests. By identifying where kids soared and where they floundered, CMS hopes schools can refine teaching tactics to help students learn more.

Individual students will not get results, with one exception: The tests that CMS designed for Advanced Placement classes can be used in place of a teacher's final exam for grading, Cobitz says. The AP exams given by The College Board aren't used toward grades because the results aren't available in time.

Cobitz said CMS hasn't yet decided whether to report results for individual teachers. As you may recall, the push to generate "value-added" ratings of teacher effectiveness is driving development of the new tests. This year, Cobitz says, principals are under orders not to use the new exams to evaluate teachers.

We also talked about the test-security issues that are creating a buzz. Cobitz says the state and district codes of ethics specify that teachers can lose their jobs and licenses if they disclose "secure information" from tests. That definitely includes revealing a question, whether that's in an online post, an email or a conversation in the grocery store, Cobitz said.

When there's an allegation that someone has breached test security, CMS investigates and, if a state exam is involved, makes a report to state officials. Cobitz said he's done one investigation in connection with the new CMS exams and concluded there was no violation.

Cobitz says teachers who think questions are flawed should discuss their concerns with the school test coordinator, who can relay it to him. They're not supposed to put specifics into an email because emails may be subject to public disclosure. Once specific questions are public, they're no longer considered valid.

Some people have urged me to get a copy of "the test" and print it in the Observer. While Cobitz let me look at the early versions of the K-2 tests, he's not about to hand them over for publication, for the reason just cited. And if he did, publication wouldn't be practical; there's not one test but a mountain of them. The various versions of the K-2 test alone created a phone-book sized stack.

So, will CMS work out the kinks and create a testing system that makes sense to families and faculty? That remains to be seen.
p.s. I'm going on vacation next week. The timing coincides with the departure of some Observer employees (no reporters) because of our own "reduction in force," but it's just that -- a coincidence. Like it or not, I'll be back soon!