20-fold increase in standardized testing coming with Gates Foundation's "Common Core":

[Igel]

4. Not sure how.

Tx has standardized testing, and has for decades. We're transiting from "TAKS" to "STAAR". They're keyed to the "TEKS", the standard state-wide curriculum, basically a bullet pointed list of topics and skills that students need to learn grade by grade and subject by subject.

BTW, from what little I've seen, the STAAR tests for high school are a lot harder. It's not every grade or subject, though. Math, English, Social Studies, and the sciences, once you're in high school. These tests are a week a year.

But the district likes knowing how teachers are doing and what they're doing. We have course assessments, mostly multiple choice, every 3 or 6 weeks. Some the district supplies; some the campuses supply, based on criteria determined by the district (which also has to approve the campus-produced tests). In some cases the district tests are benchmarks--they try to give a mock test in September so we know how to prep our kids. (Yes, "teach to the test." Since the test, the curriculum, the state standards are all the same--with the state standards recently revised to be a bit closer to national standards--teaching to the test is also teaching to the curriculum and teaching to the state standards. This was a problem when the test was the minimum skills. Now that the test will be harder, the problem's mostly gone. For now.)

As a result we get data. Lots of it. On line. Quickly. I gave an exam on Friday, scanned the results during my conference period, and knew that afternoon before I went home what I needed to reteach. I also knew which teachers did a good job teaching those points and emailed them. "So, Ms. Smith, how did you teach solubility so that your kids learned the material so well?"

The data comes sliced and diced. By SpEd and ESL level, there are racial and ethnic breakdowns, we can view data by student class/grade or by SES, male vs female. I know that one unit I taught had blacks score 15% higher than whites, and females 10% higher than males; on another unit, blacks did 8% worse than whites, but all males did 5% better than females (so black females did especially badly). On another test, my students did a pretty consistent 10% below average; on another, I was 4% above average for my school and 9% above average for the district. I got the results the day of the test. I didn't have to look back to what I taught months ago. I still had the 3 weeks' worth of materials sitting on my desk with my lesson plans and 3-week grade sheet. I could tell if my in-class grades and the test results were a good match or not and figure out why.

We learn which "TEKS" we need to reteach or failed to properly teach, we know to all stay on the same page and not to get more than a day or two behind (or to catch up). Bad teachers can be IDed and a support person will visit and model lesson and give feedback on how to improve teaching. We can compare teacher to teacher and campus to campus for each skill or topic taught and we can even compare across years.

We meet weekly to look over the data. After a course assessment there's a long meeting. Sometimes administrators visit our meetings, usually they don't. The IS is invariably there. At the end of the meeting we know what materials need to be revised and have some idea how to revise them. We know what to reteach as a team or we set aside a day for each teacher to reteach some particular chunk of content. Or we move on with a note to make sure that when the kids need the knowledge as the basis for future learning we reteach then.

The downside is the statewide tests. In some cases we're confident that the district and the state aren't on the same page. So one standard gets 1 week but we know it will be on the standardized test; another gets 3 weeks but might be on the test. We know a certain kind of problem will be on the test, and it's in the TEKS, but it's not on the scope and sequence or anywhere in district curriculum. The worst is the current TAKS, which lets mediocre students do well simply because it's easy. The goal is to get all the kids to pass it, meaning we keep classes completely mixed by ability group but then focus on the bottom 10% who will struggle and let the top 50%, who pass easily, coast. The STAAR has some mechanisms that'll make this harder to do. (But all standardized tests suffer from the same kind of problem. It's just a question of extent. In fact, all tests suffer from the same problem, because ultimately no school is going to let a teacher fail more than perhaps 10% of her students. With excellent documentation by the teacher, perhaps 15% could be allowed to fail.)