What’s a “Good” School?
Rethinking Test Data
presentation by Jack Dougherty
Trinity College, Hartford CT
updated February 2022
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Prior to 1985, Connecticut had no statewide test data
Each school district administered tests of its own choice
No uniform testing meant weak school accountability
CT Legislature created CT Mastery Test around 1985
When CMT began in late 1980s, districts often kept limited access to paper results in superintendent’s office
During early 1990s, prior to the Internet, CT test scores publicly appeared once each year in print newspaper.
And then came a combined explosion of the Internet and the school accountability movement. . . Dougherty et al 2009
School accountability movement:
Growth of publicity of public school test scores
Test scores appear once per year in local CT newspaper, 1999
School accountability movement:
Growth of publicity of public school test scores
Test scores appear continuously online in new websites, early 2000s onward
Today: The Digital Education Accountability Era
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, supported by both Republicans and Democrats, required more uniform testing, and disaggregated results by demographic groups
Today: Standardized Testing Controversy
Quick show of hands:
- Should we abolish standardized tests? Yes or No?
Today: Standardized Testing Controversy
Quick show of hands:
- Should we abolish standardized tests? Yes or No?
- Beware: if there are no standardized tests, civil rights lawyers and activists would have a more difficult time showing proof of inequalities between school systems.
Today: The Digital Education Accountability Era
“Achievement gap” already existed, but made more visible by the accountability movement and the Internet
Explore data visualization of CT achievement gap by demographic groups, relative to other states -- CT Mirror 2015
Today: The Digital Education Accountability Era
Is testing mistakenly trying to hold schools accountable for factors that teachers cannot control, such as student poverty?
NYTimes 2016 chart of district tests by family socioeconomic status (SES)
Class exercise with fictitious spreadsheet data
Which Schools Score Best? Three Ways to Measure
Login to Google Drive, File > Make a Copy of this sheet
Work with a partner and we’ll explore ideas together
Value-added assessment, according to D. Harris (2011)
"Cardinal rule of accountability:
Hold people accountable for what they can control." (p.4)
Value-added assessment is designed to estimate how much individual teachers contribute to student learning, when statistically removing other factors beyond the teacher’s control, such as student poverty and class size (p. 2-4)
Measuring student growth & added value (Harris 2011)
When carefully designed, testing can measure student growth and added value, while holding constant the socioeconomic factors that teachers do not control
Measuring individual student growth is better than cohort-to-cohort growth. Why? (p. 54-60)
Other chapters discuss logic of “value-added” measurement, which compares predicted outcomes (due to socioeconomic factors) versus actual outcomes