Making Sense Of Test Scores in the Trump Era - Without The Politics

Nov 18

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

Louis Freedberg: 0:19
Welcome to Education on the Line, a podcast series focused on the latest threats and challenges to public education and strategies for confronting them. I'm Louis Freedberg, host of the podcast. Today we'll try to make sense of a barrage of test scores that are often conflicting, and or at least they seem to conflict, and how they are too often becoming weapons in the political arena to invite to advance or roll back a range of policy agendas. We'll dig into what the tests tell us, why we even need them, and how test scores can or should inform what actually goes on in schools. To that end, I'm thrilled to have with us two people who are better situated than almost anyone in education to help make sense of this often confusing testing landscape. First, I am pleased to welcome Linda Darling -Hammond, who is the founding president and is now chief knowledge officer of the Learning Policy Institute. For many years, she was a professor of education at Stanford. She is a past president of the American Educational Research Association and was Executive Director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. She led the education policy transition teams for both President Obama and President and President Biden. And in 2022, she won the prestigious Yidan Prize for Education Research for her work shaping the most equitable and effective ways to teach and learn. And if that wasn't enough, she is also President of the State Board of Education in California. Welcome, Linda.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 2:04
Great to be here. Thank you.
Louis Freedberg: 2:06
Similarly, I'm pleased to welcome Pedro Noguera, that many of you know is the host of this podcast, and is joining us today as a guest. Pedro is Dean of the USC Rossier
Louis Freedberg: 2:18
School of Education. He's been a professor at UC Berkeley, where I first met him many years ago. And he also was a professor at Harvard, NYU, and UCLA. He has published over 250 research articles and 15 books, the most recent of which, with Rick Hess, is Common Schooling Conversations About the Tough Questions and Complex Issues Confronting K-12 Education in the United States. Welcome, Pedro.
Pedro Noguera : 2:52
Thanks, Lewis. Good to see you, Linda.
Louis Freedberg: 2:54
Well, let me j p in with you, Linda. Just a basic question, and we could spend the whole half hour talking about this. But are tests important? Do we need them?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 3:09
Some tests are important and useful. I think we need to be clear that we're testing what we should be testing in ways that are appropriate and useful. Um and when that is the case, those data can help us know where we are and what what is important for kids to be focusing on. Uh not all tests that we use, however, are actually useful. And so that's a whole nother part of the conversation.
Louis Freedberg: 3:36
Okay, we'll we'll we'll get to that. Pedro, your your quick thoughts. This is a contentious issue.
Pedro Noguera : 3:42
Yeah, I think for the public, a good thing to keep and a good analogy to make is testing when you go to the doctor's office. They almost always do a blood pressure test or other tests to see how you're doing. The test doesn't treat you, the test just gives you a gauge. This is where this person is. And similarly, in school, we need to know okay, is this where's this child in terms of reading and math? How do they compare to other kids at the same age? But by itself, the test does not address whatever that child's needs are. So is it yes, necessary? Yes, but it is only part of what we need to do to ensure kids are getting the education they need.
Louis Freedberg: 4:25
Well, Linda, I think we're all barrage by various test scores. And they're always the way it gets reported that they're going lower. You wonder how, you know, there'd be any score at all if they year after year after year go keep on going lower. So obviously that isn't exactly what's going on. But we have the NAT, the National Assessment of Education Progress. We have the California test scores, we have the PISA test scores, which is more of an international assessment. Um the general reporting was it was going down, the the CASP source, which is California, was going up. Where do we stand in terms of what you think these tests are telling us?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 5:11
Let me just sort of say that all three of those different tests that you've measured actually measure things in different ways. So you're going to get different outcomes partly from that. Um and the NAEP, when it comes to California, tests less than you know 0.2%, 0.2 of 1% of our population. So it's a very tiny sample. So you're getting different kids taking the city.
Louis Freedberg: 5:36
And the NAEP is the NAEP , the a National Assessment of Education Progress. They often call it the nation's scorecard, so it gets a lot of attention.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 5:44
It gets a lot of attention, but at any given state level, it's a very, very tiny proportion. They've had trouble getting schools to participate in NAEP over the recent years since the pandemic. So the composition of the sample has been changing in different states for that reason, too. So there's lots of things that go on that create noise around the test. But let me just say all three of those measures did show dips during the pandemic. Okay, so that is that piece of it is, you know, kind of a common thread. Uh, however, , I think the most reliable assessment for California purposes is the state test, which 95-96% of students take, , and which gives us some, you know, really continuous large sample. And there we see that in the last two years we're we're improving, that students are kind of we're kind of coming out of the pandemic. Um, the interesting thing also is that the United States has been doing better on PISA in the recent years, also, the international assessment. And there's a discourse in the United States that says the schools are failing, X percent of kids are below proficient. We should talk about proficient because it's a very high aspirational bar. It is not the same as grade level, as it's often misinterpreted to be. Uh, but on we also hear this conversation of there's a literacy crisis in the United States and that you know students can't read. But on the international tests, which are more intellectually rigorous in many ways than the tests in the United States, we're sixth in the world in reading, and we are twelfth in the world in science. Now we do very badly in math. We're below the international averages, so we should be having a conversation on that. Uh but you get very different perspectives when you look at the different assessments. In California, our test, which goes to you know all of our students basically every year, , we are making gains, and that test tests not only reading, but also writing, research, and listening. Uh and so it's a more robust measure of what kids can actually do.
Louis Freedberg: 7:58
And the point about the California test, but every state gives its own tests, and those tests are supposed to be help teachers and parents, and actually some of the old enough to understand the tests, how to improve. Whereas I've never heard the nape being used in that way. So is that is that also a consideration when looking at the tests? How are these tests, how can they be useful?
unknown: 8:25
Yeah.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 8:25
I mean, the NAEP is a like a national yardstick, and it's dipping a little bit into every state, but it's really saying how's the nation doing overall on an assessment that hasn't doesn't measure the same things as most state tests. So most state tests are rooted in the common core standards, which was something adopted by many, many states a decade ago. The NAEP is not. Um many state tests measure things differently than the NAEP. So it gives us some kind of a yardstick, but it is not comparable to the assessments that are being used across the country.
Louis Freedberg: 9:05
Well, let me ask you, , Pedro, whenever these tests scores come out, and this is particularly the case with the NAEP, it's it's then used as, okay, the schools are failing. And I think this has been particularly the case with the Tr p administration when the latest NAEP scores came out. More or less we're making this as an arg ent of why we've sort of wasted all this money spent on schools. This this is what you know, this is what Secretary Linda McMahon said. The lesson is the lesson is clear. Success isn't about how much money we we spend, but who controls the money and where that money is invested. And more or less saying that the federal government spent $190 million billion in funds, , yet the education system continues to fail students. Uh I mean, to what extent are you concerned that these test scores then get politicized?
Pedro Noguera : 10:00
Well, I think that's been an issue for a while, the the ways in which the scores can be politicized and used to either blame teachers, blame kids, or blame schools. I think what we're seeing with the Tr p administration is just a total absence of leadership. Prior to this administration, previous administrations have laid out their goals, had policies that they were trying to achieve to move the nation forward. And one of the ironies, I think, of this administration, not only have they not set out goals and begun to dismantle the Department of Education,, which is ostensibly there to help schools, but they've also eliminated the National Center for Education Statistics, which monitors the data, , and then failed entirely to lay out goals and strategies for moving the nation forward. So Make America Great Again does not include a strategy for improving academic performance in key subjects. And that I think is something that is we should all be concerned about.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 11:07
I'd love to add just one piece about how NAEP scores are being used right now. I think that Pedro's exactly right about that. One of the things that gets misinterpreted a lot is what percent of students score at what they call the proficient level, which as I have noted often is misinterpreted as grade level, like the kids are below grade level. That score is an aspirational score that was set well above what you would consider the median grade level, deliberately as an aspirational thing. Checker Finn, who was very involved with getting NAEP going and the state NAEP and so on, recently wrote an op-ed about how the percent proficient is not what grade level means. So there the weaponization is to say, oh, most kids aren't scoring, you know, at grade level, which is just inaccurate. The other thing that causes the scores to fluctuate is who's taking the test. And it's important to recognize that over the last few years, we have in this country a growing number of students who are low income, who are experiencing homelessness, a growing n ber who are experiencing disabilities, more English learners. All of that transforms the average test scores because each of those needs is associated with greater resource needs than affluent students. Our population becomes much more disparate in terms of resources and income and wealth. We have a growing n ber of students who are low income, experiencing homelessness, , experiencing disabilities, who are also new English learners. All of that then affects the average test score, which is not something that can be attributed entirely to the schools, but to the social supports that are or are not present for the population.
Louis Freedberg: 13:14
Pedro, well, and Linda also, you guys are both super distinguished and veteran researchers. Isn't there a problem that when you announce these test scores, or even within school districts, the average test scores, but it disguises the fact that there are many students who are doing very well and many students who are doing worse than those averages? And then it also disguises the differences amongst schools, amongst diff amongst districts, you know, and so we need some measure. And I guess we've settled on the average, but really how useful is that? And do you have concerns that it really can obscure where students are succeeding? Because in every school district, there are kids who are succeeding. Not every kid is failing.
Pedro Noguera : 14:07
For education leaders, for superintendents and principals, they have to break the data down and really look at the patterns at the level of the school, at the level of the student, even in the classroom, in order to know where are the challenges present and what do we need to do to address the challenges? Um Linda just spoke to is that one of the big challenges is poverty. And we know that where poor kids are concentrated and they tend to be often concentrated in certain schools, the needs will be greater. And so I think a leader will have to ask: what more support would these kids need? Do they need after-school support? Do they need better preschool? Do they need stronger teachers? Um, those are the kinds of questions we should be asking because the scores by themselves don't provide an adequate explanation of what might be going on. Again, to use the health analogy, if you have high blood pressure, the the doctor can't just say, yeah, you you're at risk of a stroke, they need to say what we're going to need to do to bring that pressure down. Um, and that's what a smart leader does. They fit ask the next question what does this data tell us we should do to address the learning needs of students?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 15:15
That's one of the things that's happened in California as our low-income student population has increased from about 58% to about 65% just in the last five or so years. We've also put in place community schools, which provide wraparound supports and expanded learning time and a variety of things that support students who have greater needs. And we've just gotten data that show that community schools have much more significantly lowered chronic absenteeism and suspension rates, and significantly increased math and reading and English language arts scores compared to similar schools who did not get that initial community school money. So we know that some of what we're doing to support the students who need supports is actually working and has something to do with the fact that California's own scores are increasing. Particularly, we found in this last year for black students, for Latinx students. Uh, we've seen the same thing trends for students who are low income. So part of this is to figure out what do you need to do and then to do it so that you're supporting kids.
Louis Freedberg: 16:32
Linda, to that point. We know that there are some school districts that are doing better than others. In fact, Los Angeles Unified just came out that they actually are doing better than before the pandemic. The larger school district with huge n bers of low-income kids. Uh Pedro, you and I, we interviewed the superintendent from Compton. Compton is beating the odds, as they say. What do we know about what schools, and there's no magic bullet, we understand that, but what are some of the things that schools that that we've learned that can help nudge up these test scores or radically improve them, which is what we would all like?
Pedro Noguera : 17:21
It's usually the basic things. Um strong instruction, strong support for teachers, , strong support for kids in need so that they're getting the supplemental interventions that help them to improve. Um sometimes it's more time that they need for particular courses. Um a shift in the curricul . Uh we've seen many schools adopt a morphonics-based reading curricul , and it's produced improvement in in a n ber of places. So, you know, it's not surprising. But what's what what I think the state can do, though, is to shine the light on these places for the other districts that are not showing that same degree of progress and say, well, look, look at Compton, look at LA. Um, because you know we have other places that aren't showing the same kinds of improvement. And that's where I think more attention needs to be paid so that we can see kids of all kinds in all places showing progress.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 18:23
Just to add to Pedro's point about that, one of the things that both of those districts did initially was to really invest in the quality of the teacher and leader workforce. Uh I don't know if you remember when in Los Angeles, , as teacher shorters were growing, they did a major increase in teacher salaries and were able to start the school year with all of their positions filled rather than you know searching for folks, you know. And the same thing in Compton, and they've had continuity where you reduce the amount of attrition, you keep people in the profession, you provide a lot of professional learning opportunities so that their practice improves. Uh, all of those things then provide the foundation on which you can put curricul improvements and other pieces of the puzzle that really support students. And in Compton, they've really leaned in on project-based learning, on science and technology and robotics and a lot of other things that are not part of what people have thought of as the sort of the basics, like strip it down to just drill and kill. They've really created a very, very engaging, robust curricul , and they use the interim assessments of the state test to you know track how kids are doing during the year and to continue to ensure that they get those supports.
Louis Freedberg: 19:45
Well, one of the things that I've observed, and I know this is one of the goals every educator is to get kids excited about school, excited to come to school. And I know in California, for example, there's this expanded learning opportunities program where they have these s mer programs that are sort of combine academics with kind of, you know, fun activities and so on, but fun science, fun math, and so on. But it does get kids excited about learning. How important is that in terms of this whole notion of improving test scores? To me, it seems fundamental.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 20:24
Well, yeah, I mean, having more learning time and then using that time in ways that are engaging and productive, of course, matters a lot. There's been a lot written about s mer learning loss, when you know more affluent kids kind of continue to gain in learning and achievement because they're in, you know, various kinds of camps and s mer programs and so on. And until we put in place summer learning for low-income students, , you would often see a loss of achievement during the summer months when there wasn't that kind of support. So California is the largest expanded learning program in the country by a long shot. Uh, and it was grown even greater during the pandemic, and it's making part of the difference for sure. And Los Angeles was one of the first places that made that available to all students, as they were also making tutoring available to all students. So they've done things at a very large scale to ensure that those opportunities are available.
Pedro Noguera : 21:26
But Louis, your your question also raises, I think, an important issue, which is I think we have to pay more attention to learning itself. How do we get kids engaged? How do we get them motivated? How do we tap into their curiosity so they'll want to read on their own time? That's those are the, I think, the critical questions for schools and for parents to think about. Because especially now with artificial intelligence being so widely available, we have to make sure that kids aren't being shortchanged, that they are in fact acquiring the kind of skills they're going to need to be critical thinkers who can adapt to change in society and end up able to lead productive lives. So more focus on learning itself and how to make school appealing, how to make the learning appealing, so kids want to be in school and want to be challenged.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 22:18
One of the benefits we have in California is something called linked learning that started about a decade ago, and we now have more than 600, you know, industry-themed pathways in high schools across the country that are small academies where kids are well known and they're studying health professions and you know, law and social justice or you know, whatever the theme is for their school. But what we saw during the pandemic was that these schools had kids still coming to school and teachers still coming to school because they were engaged, they were doing project-based learning, they were doing community-connected learning, , that was inspiring and motivating to them. It was applied and it was meaningful. And so that's just one example. But we do, and we are expanding those programs with the Golden State Pathways program. Uh, when you make school something not just to get through, but something that has meaning for your life and for the lives of members of your community, , it makes a huge difference in both the engagement and the outcomes that students experience.
Louis Freedberg: 23:25
We are going to to say goodbye to Pedro shortly, but then just continue with Linda for a few minutes. Cell phones, cell phone usage. I believe there is some research now that suggests that this does make a real difference and that's schools that have successfully gotten cell phones out of the classroom that kids are doing better. How important do you think that is? It's something every every school is dealing with probably in the world.
Pedro Noguera : 24:01
I think it's very important. There's no questioning kids are not only distracted, but it's actually adding to anxiety, some of the mental health challenges we're seeing when kids are concerned about how they're being interacting with their peers on social media, how many likes their images have received. Uh it's it's just not only a distraction, but it it is really troubling. And and so I think it's a good thing that schools have either eliminated cell phones entirely or limited use while kids are in school. And I would encourage parents to think about doing the same at home. We we need to spend more time in each other's presence and less time on the phones. But thanks for having me, Linda. It's great to see you. And Pedra, Pedro Naguerra.
Louis Freedberg: 24:45
So Linda.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 24:47
Great to see you too.
Louis Freedberg: 24:50
Linda, what your your view on the cell phones. Is that really an important issue?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 24:57
The social media pressures, the cyber bullying, , all of those things, , as well as just sort of the addiction to, you know, the cell phone games and everything, have been a distraction. Um the research is kind of both on the one hand showing that you know eliminating that distraction during class can be helpful, and that that's not going to be enough to solve the problems kids are experiencing because they can get back on their phones as soon as they leave school and you know, catch up with all of the cyberbullying that might have been going on or whatever else was problematic. So we also have to start to build that into a way of raising children in school and out of school that is connected to social and emotional learning, that is connected to building community and taking responsibility for the welfare of one another. Uh, there are a lot of schools that are really working on that and not just saying, you know, leave that to chance. And those things are equally important in terms of really giving kids the tools that they need to lead a healthy life, to be in healthy communion with one another, to know how to respond to all of the things that are coming at them from outside of school.
Louis Freedberg: 26:19
No magic bullet on that score either. I think every parent and grapples with that, and certainly teachers as well. But they're getting help in California. Is it now schools are required to take cell phones out of the classroom, or is that still optional?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 26:38
Every district has to have a cell phone policy that restricts the use of cell phones during instructional time. Some allow kids to use them at other times of the day. There are other issues. You know, some parents need to contact their kids around whether they're going to get picked up or not. There are, you know, other concerns, also including the concerns of what happens if we get a school shooter. So there's a set of issues around how do you create the right policy, but every school has to have a policy that does restrict use during instructional time.
Louis Freedberg: 27:11
I do have to ask you that in California, you were a key player in getting this in place, the California School Dashboard. There really was a big push to get away from evaluating school success and student success based on this one measure. The California School Dashboard includes other measures of dropout rates, attendance rates, school participation rates, parent participation rates, and so on. Uh trying to get away from a one-dimensional view of what constitutes success or failure. How are we doing on that front? Uh is it working? Is it because maybe it's innate to want to rank things in a simplistic way, overly simplistic way?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 28:00
I think that the amount of information given on the dashboard is really helpful. So, for example, when we used to just get scores and then to rank the schools on the scores, you didn't have much information about what was driving the scores, what you should do to improve the outcomes for students. So it's good that we're paying attention to outcomes in addition to the test scores, like college and career readiness, are kids getting the kind of curricul , who's getting access to the right kind of curricul to be able to connect to careers in college. That's the ultimate goal. That's their it's really helpful to have information about other outcomes, whether kids are prepared for college, for careers, whether they're becoming civically engaged, all of those are things that we look at on the dashboard. Also, by knowing whether students are attending school, whether their suspension rates are going down, we know something about what to do to improve the other outcomes because all of those things are in fact predictors of whether achievement's going to go up. So we have more information for schools to work with to say what's going on and what is it that we need to work on. We see that, for example, when schools lean in and deal with chronic absenteeism, they find students who need additional supports to get to school, their achievement goes up. So all the things are related ultimately, and it's really benefiting us to be able to have that information.
Louis Freedberg: 29:34
But what California is trying to do is in some ways mirrored by what was going on nationally, maybe not to the same extent in terms of what happened nationally, but the nation didn't move away from the no child left behind regimen, which was very test oriented, to reauthorization, the Every Student Succeeds Act that places much less emphasis on testing, although it's still. Still there. It's still a debate. There's some people who feel there should be more pressure on school district. There should be more accountability. Others who feel just the opposite, maybe it should be less. Do you think we're kind of where we should be right now?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 30:15
The Every Student Succeeds Act that replaced No Child Left Behind did allow states to look at more measures and to include those as they try to determine what's working and what's not working in their schools. Accountability should be about improving our understanding of what's working and not working, increasing the prevalence of good practices and reducing the prevalence of bad practices. That may not happen if you're measuring the wrong things . Just firing teachers or blowing up the schools is not going to improve the outcomes. And we learned that during No Child Left Behind, that the strategy didn't actually lead to improvement. In fact, on those international tests, we went down in the No Child Left Behind years on every subject area significantly. So it wasn't driving us, even though we were taking more tests than any other country in the world, it was not driving us to have higher achievement. So it's partly how do you provide people the information they need and then the incentive to improve the schools. And I think that we have seen great gains in California since 2011 when we both introduced local control funding formula, we put more money in the schools, and we put this new dashboard together. And it's been , with the exception of a dip during the pandemic, which we're coming out of, it has been a steady, strong improvement in the quality of our schools and the ways in which they measure on these outcomes. The other thing, however, that we have to think about with testing is what are we testing? People treat the tests like a black box. Back in the 1990s, we had a system of assessment under the previous law that allowed for kids to be doing really intellectually deep work, where they were engaging in science investigations, they were engaging in writing essays, doing research, all of those were part of the assessment system as they are in most high-achieving countries in the world. And we went back to sort of multiple choice tests of low-level basic skills during the No Child Left Behind era. Uh and that actually drove the curricul away from the kind of higher order thinking and problem solving that we need our students to have. Uh, college folks talk about this all the time: that kids are coming in without the analytic skills, the writing skills, , particularly during that era. Our assessments try to bring some of that back to attention in California, but many other states don't. And we could do more. We're just now creating a set of performance tasks in science that kids will get to experience in the classroom, and that will be part of the assessment to see if they can actually, you know, design and conduct an experiment and and draw conclusions from data rather than just bubbling in one answer out of five. So we have to care about what's on the test, not just what the scores are.
Louis Freedberg: 33:29
I imagine that they're it might be discouraging to a lot of people, particularly those in the schools, teachers, superintendents, other school board members who are really struggling to b p up these test scores and they are not going up to the extent that most people would like. What do you say to those people who are in the trenches who may feel discouraged?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 33:54
First of all, you have to understand that test scores are not the be all and end all of education. Um, you know, we've we've got a society that is much more focused on testing than any other country in the world. No other country in the world tests the kids every year in all the ways that we do multiple times a year and tries to drive education that way. Uh and so tests are limited. They tell you some things. They don't tell you everything. In fact, there are many things they don't tell you about how kids can think and perform and what they can actually do in the real world. So, number one, we just have to put tests in their place, but also try to improve them because I think American tests are much lower quality than assessments in many other parts of the world. And we need to be worried about that so that what we're measuring is what we care about. Uh, and that's a whole nother basket of work. Teachers, principals, others who are working with kids, , obviously we should pay attention to both using good measures of how they're learning that are productive in helping us know how to help them learn more. Those are not usually the end-of-the-year state tests. There are other things that one has to do. Uh, and then also to be thinking about the whole child and how they engage with school, whether they want to be in school, how they're motivated, because those things are going to drive their long-term engagement, , whether they want to read for pleasure, as Pedro was saying, whether they want to continue to inquire and learn, is what's going to drive their long-term success. So we need to keep assessments in their place, make them as good as they possibly can be in measuring the things that really matter, use useful information to continue to drive learning and make sure that the kids are feeling engaged, supported, safe, , and enabled in school. Uh, because the bigger threat to public education right now is that as we saw during the pandemic, our schools were not designed for supportive relationships, particularly in the middle and high schools. Many people are leaving the public education system for pods and micro schools and homeschooling to get that more supportive relationship and support system for their children. We need to be transforming public education so that it is focused on meaningful learning, , both in our assessments and our curriculum , that kids can see matters to them and to their communities, and that supports them in ways that will allow them to grow into adults who are responsible and caring and compassionate and part of a community. Uh, and those things need to be front of mind as they are for most agents.
Louis Freedberg: 36:57
Let me just ask, you've been at this a long time at every level. You were started off as a teacher, and you've you've probably had more impact than well, almost anybody who's involved with education in the United States. Do you get discouraged at times that maybe we're not as far along as we would like and you would like?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 37:17
It feels quite often like we have these pendul swings because education is so politicized in the United States. And we take two steps forward and we get a more equitable system or you know, resources for schools, we get, you know, useful programs that are really enabling students to achieve, and then those get cut, get cut down and shut down when the politics changes. So that's very discouraging, I think, to educators, myself among them. Um but every time we make progress, we make a little more progress. So it's sort of like two steps forward and maybe one step back. And if you think about where we are now vis-a-vis where we were, say, 50 years ago, , both in terms of civil rights and access to education as well as the ways in which we understand how to teach and how students learn, we are much further ahead from where we were at that point in time. So I think we have to have the long view that civil rights is tightly tied to educational progress and that we have to continue to put one foot in front of the other, knowing that as we plant good practice, good ideas, that we're growing the adults who later will carry us even further advanced.
Louis Freedberg: 38:36
Just to bring it back to the testing thing or the testing challenge, what encourages you?
Linda Darling-Hammond: 38:45
I am encouraged, first of all, that we are seeing tremendous gains in who is in school and staying in school. Over these few decades, we've seen that graduation rates have gone way up. Uh kids who would have been pushed out of school are now staying in school, that there has been closing of achievement gaps. Much of that did happen most prominently during the 60s and 70s, when we had a social set of policies that were helping reduce poverty and improve schools all at the same time, but we've continued to see progress in those ways. On the tests themselves, I'm encouraged that we have more attention now, for example, in the advanced placement tests, to authentic work that students do. They design a computer app in the computer science course, they undertake investigations in the research seminar that we're really returning to deep thinking and performance that is meaningful in some of our assessment systems, and that that may eventually carry over to the rest of our system. But bubbling in one answer out of five and doing the multiple choice approach that is so prevalent in the United States is not going to help us help our kids know how to think and perform in the economy and the society that we have. So the progress we're gradually making in allowing assessment to be less artificial and more authentic, and the progress we're making in giving access to more authentic curricul to students keeps me a little bit hopeful.
Louis Freedberg: 40:28
On that note, we have to bring this episode of education on the line to a close. Uh I want to thank our guests, Linda Darling-Hammond, Chief Knowledge Officer at the Learning Policy Institute, and Pedro Naguera, Dean of the USC Rossia School of Education, for joining us today. Thank thank you, Linda.
Linda Darling-Hammond: 41:30
Great to be here again today.
Louis Freedberg: 41:32
Our producer Coby McDonald, and our advisor as well as occasional guest is Pedro Noguera , Dean of the Rossier School of Education at USC. Also, thanks to our sponsors, the Hewlett Foundation and School Services of California. We'd love to hear your thoughts about how your schools are responding to the contentious testing landscape. You can reach us through our website, educationontheline.com. That's educationontheline.com. And please subscribe to Education on the Line wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Louis Freedberg. Thanks for joining us.

Educators are barraged with a range of test scores from K-12 schools that are often confusing and seem to conflict with each other. Some show students improving. Others show the opposite.

Listen to Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera, two of the nation's premier education scholars and advocates, make the case for why we need tests --- not as weapons to label and stigmatize students and schools, but as tools to improve learning.

Darling-Hammond, founder and Chief Knowledge Officer of the Learning Policy Institute, and chair of the California State Board of Education, points to latest test results showing improvements in California, as well as in districts who are beating the odds like Los Angeles and Compton Unified. An overemphasis on tests, she says, has meant less emphasis on higher-level thinking in our schools. Noguera, Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, argues that we should pay more attention to learning itself and how to get kids engaged and motivated.

Key Topics Covered:

0:00 Beyond Confusion: What Tests Tell Us
3:05 Do Tests Matter And Why?
5:20 NAEP, State Exams, And PISA Explained
10:20 Why "Proficiency" On Tests Is Not the Same As "Grade Level"
14:10 Beyond Averages: Using Tests to Inform Teaching
18:30 Districts In Low Income Communities Show Improvements Are Possible
23:20 Engagement, Extended Learning, And Pathways
28:00 Does Smart Phone Use in Schools Affect Test Scores?
32:40 Broadening Definition of Success Beyond Test Scores
37:20 Accountability That Improves Practice
41:30 What’s On The Test Matters

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Guest:

Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University and the founding president of the Learning Policy Institute.
Pedro Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education, Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean, Executive Director of Inclusive Practices and Support Services at the Sacramento County Office of Education. She was previously Director of Special Education for the state of California.