From the Editor
Take the EdNET Survey
Anne Wujcik — Friday, September 03, 2010
I'm asking for your help this week. Last year in my portion of EdNET's "View from the Catbird Seat" presentation, I was able to share information gathered from the EdNET community on the state of their businesses and their expectations around Stimulus funding and the economy. I hope to update that data this year and am once again asking for your input. Click here to take a short survey and record your experiences and I'll share the results at EdNET and afterwards with the wider community.
The survey technology allows your responses to be completely anonymous, so you don't have to worry about confidentiality concerns. There are 15 questions, mostly multiple choice, where all you have to do is click on your answer, so the entire survey shouldn't take you much more than five to seven minutes. There are also a few open-ended questions where you're free to share thoughts about the forces shaping the education market and the trends and challenges we're likely to face in the future.
With the announcement Thursday of the two awards in the Race to the Top Assessment program (see today's Featured News section), the focus shifts away from planning and proposals to implementation. And there's a lot of work to get done. The various ARRA competitions - Race to the top, i3, the assessment awards and the School Improvement grants - certainly stirred the pot, which is what the Department of Education wanted. States lifted charter school caps, some designed new teacher evaluation systems, many adopted the Common Core Standards and joined one or both of the assessment consortia and significant shakeup are underway as schools opt for one of the four approved turnaround models.
There wasn't a lot of suspense around the RTT assessment awards, since there were only three applicants. The Department awarded $170 million to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, which is managed by Achieve and $160 million to SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium. No award was made in the High School Course Assessment Programs segment of the competition, leaving the Department with $20 million of uncommitted funds.
Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester, will chair PARCC's governing board. PARCC proposes developing a computer-based system that will measure student progress at key times during the school year, rather than on one test at the end. Nearly 200 higher education systems and institutions in all PARCC states will help develop the new high school-level tests. SMARTER will develop online computer adaptive summative assessments and optional interim and formative assessments designed to help teachers identify the specific needs of each student.
The charge is to have functional assessments systems in place for the 2014-15 school year. The consortia are also requited to develop assessment items and produce student data in a manner that is consistent with standards for interoperability. The assessment content developed by both groups will be freely available to all States, technology platform providers, or others that request it for purposes of further developing, extending, and incorporating the content into assessment products intended for State use.
The issues around developing a working assessments system are many and they are closely tied to the implementation of the Common Core Standards. Both have significant implications for teaching education programs and ongoing professional development. Assessment systems have to be connected to schools data systems and drive the differentiation of instruction designed to address learning gaps. It's a big knot to think about and sort out. There's no shortage of opinion on how it all should work, but informed insight is a bit harder to come by.
That's one reason, I'm especially happy about the people joining us as presenters at EdNET this year who will be able to share informed insights on the issues and challenges ahead. Gov. Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, is delivering the Monday keynote, helping us sort out the factors that have to be taken into consideration as the schools move into implementing their reform plans, including the political landscape. Sue Gendron, former Commissioner of Education for the state of Maine and now Policy Coordinator for the SMARTER Balance Assessment Consortium will reflect on the tasks facing the assessment consortia and Dane Lin will reflect on the next steps in the implementing the Common Core State Standards. Warren Simmons directs the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University brings long experience in school reform and expertise in urban education. Mitchell Chester, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will bring the practical perspective of how a state moves forward on all these fronts. I'll do my best to synthesize all this and share it with you after EdNET.
